Interested in helping with Africa Hub? Thanks! I hope that working on and with this site will be beneficial for you.
Africa Hub, which is at http://africahub.blogspot.com, is primarily a news and web resource for people who are interested in Africa. You can probably clearly see that it isn't much now, but it can be whatever the collective of people who work on it have time to make it. In other words, jump right in, make it what you want, and we'll all be better off.
I think that your knowing my vision will help, but it's not necessarily limited to my vision. In other words, I envision a time when whoever is working on it together, make decisions about which direction it may go, and this may not necessarily be what I envisioned or intended. But that's ok, that's what collectives are.
First, I see it as a news resource on Africa, and a web resource on all things about Africa: its languages, its music, its politics, its environment, etc. There is no reason an extensive weblog system or blog system can't be connected to literally everything we want it to. I envision it connecting to African languages, African music, African programs and businesses, and virtually everything African. I am undecided on such things as Western views of Africa, Africans living abroad, etc.; I think limiting our scope may become an issue.
I think Africa Hub could go on a private web system (its own URL, its own web space) but it doesn't have to yet. I feel that it could and should move to its own web domain as soon as possible, but I'm starting it here because I'm more comfortable with this free web environment. When a group of us decide to move it to a better spot, I'm all for it. I also think we should stick to green, red and yellow (traditional colors of Africa) for reasons of simple identification by others. This doesn't have to be written in stone, though.
Second, I see it as a collective of web designers. Use THIS blog to say things like: "I've found a good way to use green, red and yellow together, and make a link resource here." Use THIS blog to say: let's move into music or politics in a separate section. This blog, the collective's blog, is for designers to discuss what we're doing. When you make something new, tell us. If it looks good, we'll copy it.
That brings up another issue: you contribute here; if you have good design ideas, you are primarily giving them away. That's because we can all see them, and we presume that we can use them also. Feel free to develop a beautiful section of Africahub, on blog or private africahub domain, then use it to get a job by saying, look at all this beautiful stuff I made. But we, meanwhile, can copy it and use it too. We need the designers among us to help so that we all get skills in the process. As a collective we are each individually contributing to the whole.
Politically, I would like to see Africahub as primarily apolitical, though this may be impossible, with one exception: whenever there is a dispute over access to information, we will fall on the side of open free access. In other words, we will take no official stand on Gaddafi vs. the new government of Libya (not get involved), but if one of them tries to limit access to information among its people, we will work to let anyone have access to the information on our site. We are a media site which strives to be objective in the western sense, at the same time knowing that may not be entirely possible, but at least not limiting people from reading opposing opinions. Editorials on either side of any dispute will be welcomed and linked to but clearly identified as opinions. Is that fair? If the collective agrees to change its direction, I am willing to consider other options.
With that I launch this site, in hopes it will help us all understand Africa and help Africa and the west reach better mutual understanding. I hope you, the young media entrepreneur, will put your heart into it and make it better in your own way; believe me, there are a million ways you can choose to make it better. I hope you, the young person seeking to make a better world, can help use this site to at least make us in the other continents a better-informed world. Do you feel that you don't really know the difference between countries that many people have never heard of? Join the crowd, but that shouldn't prevent you from learning about them. We're all here to do that, and starting out slowly in this respect is not a crime.
Good luck!
