I’ll spare you my own personal new year’s resolutions (which run to four pages), but I do have a few ambitions for the creative and tech scenes here that I thought might encourage the community. So, here are my ambitions for the year in Ivory Coast…
– web – I want to see some decent content-sites including blogs and web services that have a vastly expanded reach, both lower down the income-scale in Ivory Coast, and with a greater impact overseas, including with the diaspora. I want to see high-quality events, a stronger community and a community-agreed vision for where Ivory Coast wants to be in 2 years’ time. I also want to see much more online debate and commenting on blogs, and also someone opening an ihub/ihub style centre in Abidjan. Finally, I’d like to see more people taking a cue for what’s going on in anglophone Africa and not only asking ‘why are we behind?’ but also ‘what can we do to do what they do soon?’
– mobile – I hope to see the introduction of 3G and a real drive to publish local content for these high-end users who’ll be online ‘wherever they go’. A smartphone for 50,000 cfa would be great as well.
– internet – I want to be paying a lot less for my internet in 12 months’ time (I currently pay 336,000 CFA francs a year, or $670, for 512kbps). The opening of a couple of new international undersea cables will be the means of doing this, and if the providers are prepared to cut their prices, this should lead to an expansion of access to broadband internet and a growing local market for content.
– photographers – I want to see more exhibitions, often done cheapily, more events for photographers to meet each other, and also more photographers prepared to push themselves, with more ambitious photo-shoots that go beyond ‘pretty girls, well photographed’ to a theme, a concept, an idea, or a setting. I think the best young photographers doing this sort of thing are Kader S and Atomique Supertronique.
– video – I want to see a lot more published work from film-makers; from the use of mobile phone cameras to create content (documentaries, music videos, soaps, artwork), as well as the increasing use of high-quality of filming digital SLRs for the elite. I want to see some people producing high quality videos published within 48 hours of an event.