Mobile Journalism Toolkit for Pop!Tech Fellows (unboxed), originally uploaded by whiteafrican.

This week I'm at the Pop!Tech Fellows Accelerator in Camden, Maine along with about 15 other individuals who are doing some even more amazing work in the social entrepreneur space. Today I was floored - as a gift, the Pop!Tech team has given us the Reuters mobile journalism toolkit. There really isn't a much better package for creating video, photo and text reports on the go.

One of the more interesting thoughts around Ushahidi is how there is a convergence between citizen and traditional journalism taking place. We cluster news with everyday citizen reports. I wonder how this will look in a situation where we get even more data than in Kenya - what patterns will emerge? Who reports things first - who is more accurate? What about images and video?

Fortuitously, Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS was billeted with me in one of the cabins that we're staying in for the Fellows program in Camden, Maine. As FrontlineSMS is an important local-connection component for Ushahidi, we've already had some interesting conversations around the collaboration between our two platforms. On top of that, he's just a great (funny) guy:

WhiteAfrican and Kiwanja at PopTech 2008