Afribot: an #innovateAFRICA proposal
736 people applied to the innovateAFRICA Fund. The European Journalism Centre was one of them.
Update: we won!
innovateAFRICA is a pan-African contest run by Code for Africa that aims to accelerate digital innovation in watchdog media and civic news organisations by funding transformational ideas and then continuing to support them through a network of peers and advisors.
What do you propose to do?
Build an open source newsbot to help African news organisations deliver personalized news and engage more effectively via messaging platforms.
Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different?
Quartz, Forbes and Huffington Post have developed newsbots. Afribot will be localized for Africa’s unique use of messaging platforms, messaging conventions, etiquette, news consumption habits, and topical focus.
Describe the real world challenge that you are trying to solve for African media
Mobile internet has changed the African news industry forever. Sustaining media through traditional distribution, attention and monetization models is virtually impossible. Bots are low-cost, low-bandwidth and censorship resilient. They offer enormous reach, personalization, engagement and advertising potential, leading African media towards having a far greater voice in civic society.
How and why will your solution work?
Afribot will serve up news and data in response to conversational input from users via Facebook Messenger (initially, with possibility to scale to increasingly popular African platforms like Viber, WeChat, ChatOn, Telegram). Afribot will pull headlines, suggest articles and facilitate search for news, weather, business and sport using simple NLP, algorithms and artificial intelligence.
Afribot will build on existing open source bots, platforms and libraries to facilitate rapid development. The bot itself will be platform-agnostic allowing integration with any messaging interface. Afribot’s conversational UI will be programmed to respond to local speech patterns and communication conventions.
Who is working on it?
The European Journalism Centre (PM, developer/designer). Former Storyful CTO Paul Watson (lead designer/developer). EJC’s existing African media partners The Namibian (Namibia), The Citizen (Tanzania), The Source (Zimbabwe).
EJC has 25 years of media development and journalism innovation experience. Paul Watson developed scores of journalism bots and tools at Storyful. Our partners have existing Facebook communities that can be leveraged, and have worked with EJC on training and development previously. Following Lean methodologies, the team will deliver immediate, transparent value in weekly sprints and iterations. No complex specs or unrealistic milestones; just great, working software.
What part of the project have you already built?
Afribot will build upon open source/free bots like Buzzbot, Obama’s Whitehouse bot, Klaxon, typecaster and many more. This allows the rapid prototyping and localization of different types of conversational user interfaces. In addition, Facebook’s AI research team has open sourced its entire lab, making training AI bots easier and more efficient. When you combine that with the collective experience and local knowledge of the teams involved, it allows us to build a scalable, replicable newsbot that will be adoptable by potentially any African news organisation with a Facebook page. Other partner suggestions and collaboration are welcomed.
What would success look like for this project?
Initially, a successful chatbot prototype that leads to increased engagement for the original partners. Widespread continental adoption however is the ultimate target, with a stretch goal of a library of free chatbots serving multiple languages and messaging platforms. Integration with other projects like LiveBlog at The Source will be possible.
How would you sustain the project after the funding expires?
EJC has a very strong possibility of match-funding from two sources to take this beyond prototype into a fully-polished application. Once open sourced, EJC is confident its international network and visibility will attract funding for further development according to user needs, plus an active developer community.
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So, what do you think?
Will we find enough unique things in the news consumption and messaging habits of users in Namibia, Zimbabwe and Tanzania to justify the project? Will this work be applicable to other African countries? Can this scale? Do African news organisations really need a newsbot of their own?
You know how this works. Comments are below, or reach out to Adam Thomas on Twitter using #innovateAFRICA as a hashtag. Looking forward to your suggestions, criticisms, or offers to team up! Recommends
