ANIC is looking for ideas that will transform the way that African media work. This means that your idea should offer significant and tangible improvements to existing tools or techniques, or should propose new ways for African journalists to gather news, tell stories, engage with audiences, or sustain media organisations.
Ideas that have the potential to be replicated or that could scale continentally will have an advantage.
1. What do you propose to do?
Helping local media leverage contributors’ participation, Feowl provides comparative data on social and economic impact of electricity supply.
2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?
Few media in Africa mix data visualisation, data collection and transmedia initiative. Feowl will place one local TV and one local Newspaper at the heart of an actionable data production and visualisation system.
3. Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media
The project intends to initiate a transmedia culture within the media landscape in Cameroon. Allow traditional media use the possibilities offered through the platform to poll their audience, visualise the results gathered and monetize actionable data collected.
4. How and why will your solution work?
Electricity supply is the main social preoccupation in Cameroon. Citizens, civil society and businesses need to air their concerns. Journalists need business models to secure revenues.
Feowl will build a transmedia initiative allowing participation of the public in a social survey, and will provide local media with a tool and a know-how that can be used for other issues. The project will create a culture of data collection and processing for journalists, and habits of survey participation for citizens.
Feowl will allow TV and press story building using data collected.
To collect data, Feowl will build sensors which will be distributed to a panel of companies and will automatically report a power cut. Please see here the use of sensors in reporting.
5. Who is working on it?
Feowl brings together:
-Le Jour, famous Cameroonian private newspaper and its web version + ongoing discussions with Canal2 and STV2, two leading private TV in Cameroon
- The GICAM, leading association of Cameroonian CEOs
- The most connected advocacy specialist from Cameroonian diaspora (@JulieOwono, head of the African desk at @internetlibre)
- The leading European experts on data journalism and visualisation @nicolaskb and @pirhoo of Journalism++
- The best Cameroonian developers, around Jean-Luc Nta and @wasamundi, who developed the university-related social network @usepulse
- The most talented number crunchers, back-end and API specialists in the EMEA open-source sphere (Tesobe and especially @iChaib)
- The best Cameroonian industrial electronic manufacturer MultiTech Center
6. What part of the project have you already built?
Thanks to a grant received from the IPI news challenge, the team will launch the open source platform in October 2012. This first version allows media partner using Feowl to gather electricity related data by polling voluntary contributors on their experience of power cuts. The API to receive and process data is done, developers can fork the code on github. The beta version will be launched in the fourth quarter of 2012.
Feowl needs additional funds to help media partners gather and visualize intelligent and strategic data on economic impact of electricity supply. Feowl has received a great support from the Cameroonian and African online community.
7. How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?
Thanks to the platform, the media will be able to sell intelligent data to international organizations or businesses. The data journalism knowledge transfer will allow local media to produce high quality information that can be sold to international media. The use of the platform will be replicable for other issues, with the support of the Feowl team.
Requested amount from ANIC: 100,000 USD
Expected amount of time required to complete project: 6 months
Total Project Cost: 223,770 USD
Name: Feowl
Twitter: @feowl
Organizations: Quotidien Le Jour, Journalism++, Wasamundi, Internet Sans Frontières, TESOBE, Multitech Center
Country: Cameroon
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