Swarm Creativity Blog

One day my Ghanian friend asked me to look at her PC. She wanted to install new language training software, and the PC sound board did not work properly. I noticed that the sound drivers were not correctly installed, and decided to reinstall WindowsXP. At the end of the installation process, Windows asked me for my authorization code. I was working on an 18 month old HP Pavilion that my friend had bought with Windows XP preinstalled when she was still in Switzerland. When I had entered the authorization code, Windows tried to verify it over the Internet. Oops! Out of luck, as my friend did not have an Internet connection at home. Private Internet is still an expensive option in Ghana, at costs of at least about $50 per month, even over a dialup line. I was then offered a list of Microsoft phone numbers to call to verify my authorization code. Unfortunately, both phone numbers given by Microsoft for Ghana did not work. Finally, I ended up calling the Microsoft Hotline in Redmond, over m...

On a hot and steamy Thursday morning last July I went with my Ghanaian friend to the “37” Trotro hub in Accra, to learn more about how the Trotro system operates. The Trotro hub is a huge walled-in place of dusty mud, overcrowded with people, little buses, and taxis. Like ants coming and going to their hive on ant roads, hundreds of Trotros enter in a never-ending stream the huge place, while at the exit a similar flow of vans streams out. Inside the place, the little buses seem to cover every inch. What is not taken up by Trotros is plastered with little booths where street vendors sell drinks, dried fruits, pastries, sunglasses, newspapers, mobile phone cards and all the others things travelers might need. Besides the Trotros and the sales booths passengers squeeze by, always ready to jump to the side when a Trotro inches by to its destination, whatever that might be. In a bird’s eye view, the entire station looks like the proverbial anthill, with Trotros, sales booths, and passenger...

The husband of my friend, Ghanaian by birth, had recently started an oil palm tree plantation. On about 100 hectares of land he had planted 16,000 palm trees, complemented by a pig barn, a duck pond, and goats and chickens. Of course he could not do all this work by himself, but he needed lots of help. To take care of his farm, he initially hired about 50 workers. The most labor-intensive part was tending to the palm trees. He had recruited a group of about 25 workers from nearby villages to take care of the trees. Their task was to remove the weed around the trees, bring out fertilizer, and chase away pests such as tree-eating insects and rodents. At the last workday of the first month, he paid each worker his agreed on monthly salary, cash in the hand, as is the custom in Ghana. On the next working day, he was in for a really bad surprise. Out of his 25 workers, only 4 showed up. They reported that the others would not want to come. They had currently enough money to get by for anoth...

For the last 5 years a group of friends and I have been working on getting computers to schools in Africa. So far we have shipped a few hundred used computers from Switzerland to Kenya and equipped a school in Nigeria. Now we would like to extend our project to Ghana. The goal of our project is to create learning/innovation communities between Ghanaian middle school students and Western middle school students, age group 14-16 years (at this age the Ghanaians should already master English sufficiently to communicate with their counterparts). Towards that goal, we are currently working to set up Internet-enabled computer rooms at rural schools, away from Accra. The main problem is to make our project sustainable & maintainable by locals. The idea is to ship a classroom of computers to a school, and identify a local who can operate the computer room as an Internet cafe half the time for profit, and provide it the other half of the time for free to the students. We just got 20 compu...

Using our TeCFlow software tool to do coolhunting, I recently checked out the Web buzz on different presidential candidates. The first thing I did was looking at the latest poll results on various US Presidential contenders. Here they are: As you can see, Hillary Clinton is the clear leader for the Democrats, while Rudi Giuliani and Condolezza Rice are tied for the Republicans. Using TeCFlow to do coolhunting, and looking at who talks about whom most on the Web, shows another picture: The most central people (having the largest squares) are Rudi Giuliani, and surprisingly, John Edwards and Al Gore. Hillary keeps very quiet, and is not very central on the Web! At the same time, we see that two Web sites are clear "kingmakers", one of them - not so surprisingly - Wikipedia, and the other - more surprisingly - is www.ovaloffice2008.com. Links from those Web sites greatly boost the centrality of a candidate. In other words, the more back links from one of those Web sites a cand...

In summer 2006 I was visiting an old friend in Ghana. There I encountered amazing examples of swarm creativity and self-organization entirely outside of the realm of the Internet. It already began when I was picked up at the airport of Accra by my friend and her husband. When we drove back to their house I noticed that the streets were filled with small vans of all types, ages, and makes, starting and stopping at odd locations, and picking up groups of people at every corner of the street. When I asked my friends about these vans, I learned that these minivans, called “Trotros”, were the public transportation system of Accra, providing fast, efficient, and cheap transportation in this city of 2 million inhabitants. The most amazing thing about the Trotros, though, is that each van is owned and managed by its driver, without central coordination. More on later posts