Code Camp, Bar Camp, Foo Camp, Mobile Monday, Geek Meetup?

Earlier today, Charl and I were having a discussion about some of the new technologies / existing ones but now have a marketing-enabled name technologies around. It was fun. But we also got intrigued and decided to check out what has been happening on the African scene and South Africa as far as Internet Startups were concerned.

After about a few hours of googling, we had to deal with the harsh fact that Africa in general is totally trailing as far as these were concerned. So, we focused our research specifically on South Africa and started crawling the local blogs. A few things popped up:

• many geeks out there are web 2.0-aware: that's a good thing.

• there are quite a number of them coming up with innovative ideas for starting a startup: that's exactly what we were looking for.

• however, there seems to be big problems with the infrastructure available at the moment. For example, there is absolutely no company in South Africa that locally provides Ruby on Rails hosting and from what it seems, there's a huge demand for it [ market gap to be filled, anyone? ].

• almost none of the blogs we've crawled had topics related to mobile devices [ the quite present and certainly future of human communications ].

• finally, we found out that there were a few startups with products already online but no-one and when we say no-one, [ forget about the few thousands users ], we really mean no-one knows about them: there are almost no reviews written on them, they are not indexed by popular aggregators [ e.g.: Technorati ], they hardly appear in google searches and one has to be really lucky to stumble upon them.

So, to sum up, the knowledge exists, but putting it to use and coming up with innovative ideas / ways of utilizing it seems to be a problem.

We took our somewhat quick research a bit further by comparing what is being done here in South Africa to enable and foster the development of Internet- startups compared to a place like the Silicon Valley in the US [ don't kick me on this: we believe that to progress, one has to compare him/herself with the best ]. The following is a list of the things that we believe are missing here in SA:

• A place where smart people like to work, study, live and innovate, possibly close to a university environment.

• Universities / Educational Institutions that provide a safe environment (sort of like a hub / incubator) for startups to actually start and grow a bit instead grad students solely focusing on academic work. Check out Stanford University as an example of what we mean.

• An educational system that teaches and promotes the entrepreneurial spirit (Have you ever seen any entrepreneurship semester course in any of the local universities brochure?).

• Venture Capitalists that do not necessarily have the face or logo of a bank stamped on them.

• There are many more things that we could highlight but we think the above list is sufficient and quite encompassing of the problems we currently face.

So, if we do acknowledge that there is a problem, we obviously aren't going to wait for a 3rd party to come and solve it, well at least Charl and I thought we wouldn't wait. In order to start solving most of the problems above, we thought that there is a need for more communication. Not exactly an established entity to do that but just a group of people with good will to get things working. Our proposal is as follows:

• In order to get things going, we geeks need to meet a lot more often. We need to start sharing ideas (don't get us wrong: blogs and comments are great! But being face to face dramatically changes the context of things), working together and all in all having the sort of community creative fun that we currently does not seem to exist.

• These meetings, we believe need to be different from the ones held by usual local Linux users groups. It has to be more technical, more focused without the need to for example use 'normal words' just so that non-acquainted participants understand what is being discussed.

• The format that we are looking at will be similar to those of code camps, bar camps, mobile-mondays and other geek meetups that already exist the world over.

• The subjects will range from anything web-related including standards, coding, designs, ideas to rich client platform applications, all the way to mobility and studies of emerging markets where products developed here in South Africa could hit really big.

The main objective? Solve the problems highlighted earlier. In simple terms, one could put it this way: if lots of smart people congregate into one place and start doing smart and creative things and solving problems, the outcomes will be greater gains in terms of advancement of technology, of standards and so on, and based on those, the creation of businesses that surely could rival those created in similar environments.

Obviously, we would like to start somewhere. And we believe that now is the ripe time to get things rolling. But first, we'd like to hear from the community out there and obviously collaborate with everyone on getting these up and running. Therefore, your thoughts, comments, contributions are the most welcome.

The Groovy Labs team.