It is now almost a week since the Digital Citizen Indaba - a two-day conference on blogging in Grahamstown (see pic) in the bottom right hand corner of South Africa.

Overall it was a huge success. One way of judging that is to look at all the discussions that are still carrying on in posts and comments and Technorati links. The discussions started with the race debate which I now wish I hadn't joined (there was just something about that pig/hairless-bulldog). But it has now moved on to thinking about what should come next.

mentalacrobatics just suggested some ways forward in his post Let's create and has created a Google discussion group called African bloggers which:

has a simple task but it is a massive one. This group is created with the intention of working towards organizing a conference for African bloggers in 2007. Our discussions within this group will centre around (but may not limited to) sponsorship, dates, venues, facilities, speakers, agenda. This group is open to ANYONE who has a blog.

Let us take all this passion and try to create something positive out of it. Let’s quit complaining, defending, attacking and start debating, thinking and creating.

Point taken. So here are some random thoughts that come out of the Indaba and hopefully move beyond it.

1. First a negative one. Long debates about the definition of blogging, of Web 2.0, of the read-write web, remind me of Elvis Costello's quote that "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture". Or the guy who pointed out that the whole academic study of literature had yet to come up with a single useful pointer for the person sitting down to write a novel. Or the obvious point that you can't learn anything useful about journalism through a three-year media studies course. In other words, there is only so much you can gain from theoretical discussions about the nature of blogging. It's better to blog - or to talk about actual things that actual bloggers have done. (This isn't a dig at the Indaba schedule which had an introductory purpose.) Let's assume we all know a blog when we see one and move on to more practical sessions. That's not to stop anyone holding a parallel 'Welcome to blogging' mini-conference which would aim at converting newbies.

2. The most useful session that I could imagine would be a day-long workshop from the Kenyan blogosphere about how it has managed to pull itself up by its own bootstraps and grow into one of the most vibrant places on the African web. Kenya's bloggers have their own awards, the Kaybees, their own webring Kenya Unlimited and now their own 'eye on the Kenyan parliament' mzalendo. These are all things that could be duplicated in every country on the continent (imagine the impact of an Ethiopian website that followed up on every word spoken in the House of People's Representatives). It would be great to find out how.

3. It would also be great to get a series of sessions from the Egyptian blogosphere on the way it has turned itself into a real political force. The half-an-hour from Alaa Abd El Fattah of Manal and Alaa's bit bucket and many other things was fascinating but frustratingly short.

4. About the venue - how about Ethiopia, as the headquarters of the African Union and the Economic Commission for Africa (which has lots of conference rooms and WiFi everywhere you go). Or Rwanda, which seems to becoming one of the continent's technology capitals (and soon to become the headquarters of the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System - EASSy)

5. Presumably there's going to be a Digital Citizen's Indaba 2007. Why not encourage the folks at Rhodes to take it out of South Africa and make it a mobile affair - possibly as the core of this next conference in Addis/Kigali. Or is there any way it could be tied on to TED Africa?

UPDATE: White African challenges everyone to "be proactive and think about what would the makeup would be of the perfect web technology conference" in his post On Being a White Blogging Techie from Africa.

Original post by aheavens