I was able to sit down with Jean-Patrick Ehouman and talk about BarCamp Abidjan and what he is doing as part of the team behind the Africa Startup Challenge. I was unable to attend the barcamp, but Jean-Patrick told me that it went great. People were very excited once they understood the format. That happened to be one of the biggest initial challenges was that people were used to the traditional conference format. This is a common problem everywhere in the world as people have to grasp that they organize the conference themselves and that everyone is an equal. After about an hour or so, people really took to this in Abidjan and Jean-Patrick said that one of the best moments was a when a PhD student gave a talk on cyber criminality.
Of course, there were obstacles. The worst one came when two days before the event, the sponsors pulled out. This led to having to find a new venue immediately that ended up being at the poly technical school. In turn, this made for a great many students being part of the barcamp. But it wasn't just limited to them. A number of journalist showed up as well as some Germans and French who happened to be in the country. Overall, it was a young and mostly male crowd though.
As to media coverage, those journalist didn't seem to make any noise as there was virtually no coverage of the event in Côte D'Ivoire, following the event. It was until days later when the BBC wrote about the event (in English I might add) that the local Ivorian journalists picked up on what had happened and decided to cover it. This got the ear of the ICT Minister in Côte d'Ivoire who is apparently on Facebook and contacted Jean-Patrick on friendly and encouraging terms.
As to the future of barcamps in Côte d'Ivoire, they want more and they want them now. They would love to organize another in November, but there are some rather tricky elections happening then for the current president who has been in office four years too long. But, quite possibly in February, they'll have another either in Abidjan or in the capital of Yamoussoukro. I wish them well and hope that I'll be able to attend any of these in the future.
One small note I'd like to add is that if anyone translates this article, pay attention to the fact that the video is on dotSUB, so you can write a translation of the video in the target language there and embed that version along with the text version here so that everything gets translated. This is the first video on BarCamp Africa to have this treatment and we hope to use it more in the future to encourage even further cross-lingual communication.
