Danny, I’m glad that you’re still reading the blog, despite your disagreement with the post that got you to take a look in the first place. Most of my work and writing these days is more focused on these sorts of ideas – helping people make their voices heard – than on “traditional” aid strategies like that pursued under the TED prize.

On your first point – absolutely, the digital divide in the US is a real, continuing problem. What’s tricky about it from the perspective of someone who’s worked on the digital divide in the developing world is that it’s unclear whether solutions to one set of problems work in another situation. While there are parts of the US that don’t have electricity and telecommunications infrastructure, they’re the small minority… while that’s the predominant situation in many developing nations. And there’s often access to the Internet via schools and libraries. In the US, the digital divide seems to have a great deal to do with making computing affordable enough that it can be part of people’s home life… and sufficiently relavent that more people choose to get involved.

Your point about the existing African disapora is well taken. In my experience, a good percentage of the African and Afrophile blogosphere (30-40%, I would guess) are Africans living in the US, UK or Europe. These are some of the most dynamic voices currently talking online about Africa. My great hope is that this population can expand from a few hundred articulate commentators to a wave of thousands or tens of thousands of people knowledgeable about African issues talking about their concerns and helping these issues make it into newspapers and policy debates. That’s the change I’m trying to help happen in whatever small ways I can…

A remark though,
1) There is a digital divide here in Amreica between the afluent white population and the rest (mainly African American and Hispanic population. We need to talk about that too.
2) There are over a million Africans (from Africa)who live in North America and who have been speaking and no one was listening for the last 40 years. May be such a conference need to have Africans come and talk about their continent and the obstacles they need to overcome.

This is the best warmup for a speech I have heard (read) in a long time. Make sure you let the audience know about your blog post so that they can follow the embedded links to more information. If this is your speech, you’ll knock ‘em flat.

The way I see it, the early birds will get the worms re: positive and productive engagements with and support of the new citizen leaders and entrepreneurs emerging from Africa and the diaspora today. In the next ten years or so a lot of people around the world will be saying, “Damn! I wish I had been paying attention to Africa back in…”

take care