I think you should focus more on your project (http://lotaar.com/) and stop worrying about "startup" cliquey antics. Some people can afford to dabble in BS, we Africans can't. You have so much to do my friend, get to it!
Ideas for you.
1) Write a health-care record management system for Nigerians. A free service that allows doctors to store medical records and notes about patient history and prescriptions. Since most people don't have government IDs, device a way to uniquely identify each person (parents name, place of birth, first name, gender, approximate year of birth, last place where a doctor has accessed the medical record, etc.)
I want to do something like that for Somalia, my home country, but don't have the safety to go back there and deploy it. Might go to the refugee camps in Kenya. Shot an email to Save The Children, no reply yet. I want to make a $100 Android tablet that photographs handwritten prescriptions and stores in a central location. The camera can also function as a way to capture visible problems for remote diagnosis.
If you can just pry data health data from the hands of government and NGOs and put it "out there", you wont be short of help.
2) Start a website where people can submit study materials suitable for cheap printing. Exercises and practice games that can be succinctly printed into a few, multicolumn pages. Get the feds to give you a printing service and churn out study materials, send on donkey backs to villages.
You can advance education tremendously by teaching teachers new games and teaching practices, that are fun for both them and students. Tap into new research on learning, and do the simplest stuff first.
3) Chronicle and catalog a verbal recording of the myriad of languges and dialects in nigeria. Send a voice recorder with several hours and let the elders speak about everything. Transcribe that into IPA and save it for the kids. The cities are growing and languages are dying. Also, provide corpora of your languages free online to linguists and programmers can develop NLP tools. As long as African languages remain oral we wont have a mention in computing.
4) Create an online talent website. Reward people for discovering street musicians, painters, folk artists and inventors. The talent gets a mention, and whoever discovered them gets a prop. Put in some game mechanics to encourage the more affluent people with the technical means to go out of their way to interact with, the often poor, local talents. Ignore government aid and other BS. You can bootstrap this with funds from local businesses and transnationals that want to feel-good aspect of this local involvement.
You tell the poor fellow to focus on his project, and then give him four ways to distract himself! Nevertheless...
Regarding #3 :
This is an excellent but intractable idea. The sheer number of languages in that region is too staggering to capture even a majority percentage in such a manner; and it would be of little use to any but the academics in linguistics or cultural anthropology.
Better would be a tool that completely encapsulates the vocabulary and grammar of the main languages in that region, so that they may be learned online. There are no sufficient tools that do so at present, either online or in bookstores - and the children of the diaspora, and their children and so forth, could/would make great use of such a thing.
I added that mostly for variety, my two personal interests are medical records for the ID-less (specially pediatric medical records.) And vigilante education reform with games, song and dance. I can talk about those two all day.
The principle behind my idea for language documentation is that logging diversity, in one Nigeria-wide record, also underscores the equality of the Nigerian people as a whole, across religious, linguistic and clan divides. Right now most people identify with one of few macro-clans, something that aborted our own Somali state.
Documenting dialects and noting the nuanced differences between people makes an amusement, a public spectacle if you will, of what could otherwise have been a matter of tribal pride and differentiation to feel superior over others. I didn't become a "Somali" until I saw the British records, and how identical we were to them.
Empower the minority sub-cultures, and the large clusters come apart. Give voice to individuality, and local culture at the micro-level, and, paradoxically, the larger group identity becomes stronger. Could you imagine how better off Africa would be if people didn't vote along clan lines?
[Edit:
I gotta get ready for a flight, but I really wanna keep this conversation going, hopefully with Oo's involvement.]
Ah - I see where you were going and totally agree with your sentiments. In my opinion, tribalism is simultaneously Africa's (nay, the World's) greatest potential catalyst to overcome its tremendous problems, and also its most devastating weakness. That said, the extent language plays in such tribalism is that part of the world is debatable, as English is Nigeria's national language and the natives communicate extensively in pidgin dialects.
But you provoke interesting questions; Is it possible to mitigate or eliminate tribalism on any level, anywhere in the world? And if so, can software be integral to the process, or in any way accelerate it?
My reading of history tells me that favorable outcomes are possible in regards to both questions, however the form of such software is at the moment beyond my conception.
Ideas for you.
1) Write a health-care record management system for Nigerians. A free service that allows doctors to store medical records and notes about patient history and prescriptions. Since most people don't have government IDs, device a way to uniquely identify each person (parents name, place of birth, first name, gender, approximate year of birth, last place where a doctor has accessed the medical record, etc.)
I want to do something like that for Somalia, my home country, but don't have the safety to go back there and deploy it. Might go to the refugee camps in Kenya. Shot an email to Save The Children, no reply yet. I want to make a $100 Android tablet that photographs handwritten prescriptions and stores in a central location. The camera can also function as a way to capture visible problems for remote diagnosis.
If you can just pry data health data from the hands of government and NGOs and put it "out there", you wont be short of help.
2) Start a website where people can submit study materials suitable for cheap printing. Exercises and practice games that can be succinctly printed into a few, multicolumn pages. Get the feds to give you a printing service and churn out study materials, send on donkey backs to villages.
You can advance education tremendously by teaching teachers new games and teaching practices, that are fun for both them and students. Tap into new research on learning, and do the simplest stuff first.
3) Chronicle and catalog a verbal recording of the myriad of languges and dialects in nigeria. Send a voice recorder with several hours and let the elders speak about everything. Transcribe that into IPA and save it for the kids. The cities are growing and languages are dying. Also, provide corpora of your languages free online to linguists and programmers can develop NLP tools. As long as African languages remain oral we wont have a mention in computing.
4) Create an online talent website. Reward people for discovering street musicians, painters, folk artists and inventors. The talent gets a mention, and whoever discovered them gets a prop. Put in some game mechanics to encourage the more affluent people with the technical means to go out of their way to interact with, the often poor, local talents. Ignore government aid and other BS. You can bootstrap this with funds from local businesses and transnationals that want to feel-good aspect of this local involvement.