Blog

Open Data in Africa

As part of a series of mini blogposts, Inquisition asked Tim Kattlic from oAfrica.com to expand on what he believes to be emerging technology in Africa. He spoke to us about the concept of open data:

“Open data has the potential to take African development to new levels of success. The time has come for every African nation to provide the opportunity for its people to understand more about their world. As José M. Alonso of the World Wide Web Foundation points out, you need to put transparency and accountability at the core of open data to create meaningful change. After all, honest data is better than concealed data - even if it reveals shocking truths.

The spread of Internet access in Africa has meant a growing push for...

Written by , 12 Mar, 2013 in Technology

A Better Way to Teach Learning

Whilst catching up on news this morning, the story of Jack Andraka, a 15 year old scientist, caught my eye. Not only was Jack's story of creating a cheap (226,000 times less expensive), near 100% accurate method of detecting pancreatic, lung and ovarian cancer amazing but so too was the story of how he started out in science. I think this is the most important lesson you can teach your kids and the most important way to push co-workers to gather new knowledge and test ideas.

Teach them the principles of enquiry, and give them the tools to find knowledge but don't provide all the answers.Lazy brains expect all answers right away, smart brains are just as excited about gathering knowledge.


I was interested in science at an early...

Written by , 11 Feb, 2013 in Strategy

If you're paying for effort you're doing strategy wrong

I've witnessed a rather disturbing phenomenon recently: businesses aren't paying for strategic thought, they're paying for pages and time. Recently I worked with a team who wanted to develop a strategy for an institution of higher learning. The client was not happy with their one-page strategy clearly defining the problems at hand, and how to solve them. They wanted something "more substantial", and in their minds, more appropriate for the scale and scope of their challenges as a business. It suddenly dawned on me that they don't want good strategy, they want bad strategy hidden between lengthy paragraphs extolling the virtues of following a particular goal, or outlining the vision of a successful future (which hinged on doing strategy right in the first place).

Perhaps related...

Written by , 19 Jan, 2013 in Strategy

Geeks. Status: Online

While every business is different and needs unique processes depending on the team and projects, the basics remain the same. Number one in terms of productivity and success, communication. At Inquisition I make sure the crew run projects which meet deadlines, and oversee the production outputs of the team - this has necessitated developing a system specifically tailored to our small business. I want to share some of the tools I use to make talking to the geeks at Inquisition painless, and effective.

So, just talk right? If you work with geeks, this isn’t always a possibility. They aren’t exactly brilliant at the talking thing. You need not worry though - below is a comprehensive list of geek-talk tools to get your productivity levels up, and maybe even bridge the gap between...

Written by , 13 Dec, 2012 in Web Services for Small Businesses

Modern Tribalism

It’s a given that the internet connects people, but it’s not as simple as that – it connects people who choose to be connected to each other. Hence the development of communities – or the trendy word for them, tribes – from communities conceived and grown organically online, to offline communities that have made the shift to web.

Nowhere are tribes or communities better epitomised than on social networks. People interact with a large social group of friends and acquaintances, as well as with smaller groups of people based on particular shared interests (such as using Facebook Groups), meaning that one person can be a participating member of a number of disparate communities, be it as an active leader or a passive follower. These communities also make it easy for people to – in a...

Written by , 12 Nov, 2012 in Community Management

Pages