Grocott's Mail has teamed up with Highway Africa to produce a mobile internet website (mobisite) that will be used for the first time at this year's conference. The site is called HANow and was launched this week by Grocott's Mail online editor Michael Salzwedel.
Grocott's Mail has teamed up with Highway Africa to produce a mobile internet website (mobisite) that will be used for the first time at this year's conference. The site is called HANow and was launched this week by Grocott's Mail online editor Michael Salzwedel.
An initiative of the Rhodes University School of Journalism and Media Studies and almost always hosted at its Africa Media Matrix centre, Highway Africa is the largest annual gathering of African journalists, media professionals and academics. Its 16th edition begins on Sunday.
This year Highway Africa's Digital Citizen Indaba partners with the Global Forum for Media Development, which in turn will run its third world conference. Together these three conferences form the Global Journalism and Media Development Summit.
Delegates will this year be keeping in touch with proceedings using their cellphones.
“The site is built on NikaNow. It is a platform that was developed here at Grocott's to enable community publishers or similar organisations to establish their own localised mobisites,” said Salzwedel.
Through the mobisite delegates will be able to access the latest conference news, the programme, webcams, currency converters, local weather (always interesting at this time of the year), conference-related Tweets and Facebook updates, as well as specials from local businesses. Delegates will also be able to leave comments for the conference organisers.
Conference director Chris Kabwato said he hoped HANow would allow the organising team to deliver news about the event and respond to questions in real time.
“HANow is a great information tool,” Kabwato said, “It is frustrating at conferences when you don’t know what is going on.”
The HANow site is in line with Highway Africa objectives of applying technological innovations to the media, Kabwato said. “Highway Africa is an event based on new media. We need to showcase the way that we can utilise the internet and mobile communication.
Second, the conference must begin to engage with its primary constituency and listen to the conversations they are having so that each year the event is improved.”
The conference's media co-ordinator, Anele Ngwenya, said the mobisite would guide delegates as they navigate the conference by providing information about different events.
“Basically HANow is a way to involve delegates,” Ngwenya said.
Kabwato and Ngwenya acknowledged MTN's generous donation that enabled the development of the conference mobisite. MTN will also provide SIM cards to get delegates using the system right away.
