Google Wave use cases in Africa With al...

Google Wave use cases in Africa

With all the Google Wave hype sprouting up all over the web I've been left slightly underwhelmed. The reasons are relatively simple; I don't know enough people using Wave to interact with and I'm not doing business or working on projects with the people I do know on Wave.With that said though, I can see some potential use cases for Wave in Africa.Generally there are some fundamental problems with the Internet through Africa. The biggest of the lot involve the digital divide.

Wave in the classroom

Let's, for a second, imagine that a School A in South Africa partnered with School B in an area that was struggling to find quality educators.School A provides a computer room with 20 PCs and broadband Internet (potentially sponsored by Telkom/Mweb/etc) and goes to lengths to educate the pupils on web usage and Google Wave. This would be a laborious process, I agree, but let's just imagine.What could happen next is almost magical. Students receiving lectures from the teacher at School A could start a Wave, "Mathematics, Grade 12, class 14". School A's students and teacher could make notes, upload documents and collaborate on these documents and lecture notes with School B. Thus educators in School A could partially attribute to School B's education. This is not a foolproof, 100% solid solution to a massive education problem Africa faces, but it is possible.

University collaboration

Along similar lines as the school example above. University lecture and project collaboration could become seamless across African borders. Students and lecturers could share, comment and interact with one another in real-time. No delays, no restrictions (other than the broadband issue) and no bureaucratic processes to concern themselves with while debating with multiple scholars from multiple disciplines across multiple borders. Just simple debate.Access to previously restricted or hard to reach areas and school of knowledge could be opened up to an immense audience in Africa that his hungry for the chance to interact with other pools of knowledge.Of course the major challenge with this example is that it hinges on many people committing to a Wave and contributing to it on a consistent basis.

Business Mentoring

Small businesses are the way of the future for South Africa and Africa on a large scale. What many of these small businesses and young entrepreneurs are missing is guidance.A mentorship Wave that provides valuable readings, insights, guidance and tips could be invaluable to businesses people trying to stake their claim and start up a successful business.You may argue that many of these business people wont have access to the web, well there are Internet cafes across the country that hundreds of thousands of people use on a daily basis.

More...

Are there any more use cases? Without a doubt. Have we realised the potential of real-time collaboration yet? Probably not. But the future is there for the taking.Let me know how you might see Google Wave being implemented in Africa.