THEMES AND TOPICS

Code Switch is a book with many layered throughlines and recurring concepts. For those who are having a hard time navigating them, here are some of the most important themes throughout the book along with relevant links and explanations.

Tech

  • Web 2.0 - an era of Internet innovation that lasted from (roughly) 2003 to 2015, marked by the creation of MySpace

  • Social Media - Internet innovation that allowed people using the web to communicate and share in real-time

  • Probabilistic Language Processing/Natural Language Processing (NLP) - computational programs that allow computers to parse, process, and assign probability scores to human language thereby allowing programs to ‘read’ or ‘write’ like humans

  • Predictive Analytics - a computational method of using one historic dataset to ‘predict’ what a future dataset might look like

  • Data Science - an area of computer science focused on the collection, manipulation and analysis of text or numerical data

  • Big Data - an area of computer science dedicated to solving problems related to collecting, manipulating, and analyzing data sets too big to handle with normal computational resources

  • Real-Time Crime Center - data centers used by police departments who use Internet and data tools as part of their investigations

  • Phreakers - phreaks were computer hackers before personal computers, they largely used signals to spoof tones that allowed them to manipulate analogue phones

  • Open source (1) - a type of computer enthusiast community led loosely associated networks of volunteers, hobbyists, corporate partners and researchers. Open source projects (like Linux, one of the most famous) are often the breeding ground for concepts later adopted an commercialized by others.

  • Open source (2) - in the U.S. defense and military world, an open source is an unknown, unverified, and untrusted source of information. Usually used to refer to civilian sources of information in hostile (or at the very least, unsecured) environments.

Music

  • DJing - the act of playing existing recorded music for a live audience, often associated as one of the founding pillars of hip-hop

  • Hip-Hop (1) - Hip hop or hip-hop music (also known as rap music and formerly known as disco rap), is a genre of popular music that originated in the Bronx borough of New York City in the early 1970s. It consists of stylized rhythmic music that commonly accompanies rapping, a rhythmic and rhyming speech that is chanted

  • Hip-Hop (2) - the annoying nickname given to Jon Gosier by a random Estonian man drunk on Absinthe

  • Beat-matching - a method of DJing where the drum patterns of two records playing at the same time are synced to play on time, originally acheived by manipulating the pitch lever on a vinyl turntable

Culture

  • American Black - the cultural concept that black Americans outside of America are American first, a self-awareness that often only emerges from traveling or living abroad

  • Neo-pan Africanism - a forward-looking view of Africa and it’s future in business, culture, and politics

Companies and Organizations

  • Meta/Facebook - then fledgling company Facebook was ambitious in its plans to expand to Africa, hosting workshops called Garages for developers

  • Alphabet/Google - Google ran its Google Africa and Google.org initiative for over a decade

  • Twitter - micro-messaging/microblogging site started in 2006 that enabled disruptive political movements around the world

  • MetaLayer - a company founded by Jon Gosier and Matt Griffiths in 2011. It was inspired by the now defunct SwiftRiver/Swiftly opensource project. Later rebranded as D8A (“data”)

  • Appfrica - a company founded by Jon Gosier in 2008 that helped companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, banks and various telecoms enter the African market until 2011 when it was succeeded by Hive Colab (http://hivecolab.org)

  • Abayima - a non-profit technology company founded by Jon Gosier, Matt Griffiths, and Ahmed Maawy in 2012 aimed that applied SIM card hacking and other mobile phone innovations to various humanitarian causes, most notably during the Arab Spring.

  • HiveColab - a Ugandan co-working space and innovation hub. It is a non-profit founded by Jon Gosier, Teddy Ruge, Barbara Birungi-Mutabazi, Daniel Stern and Mariéme Jamme

  • AfriLabs - a non-profit association of African innovation hubs like HiveColab that now span the African continent in more than 90 cities and 30+ countries

  • Ushahidi - a Kenyan non-profit technology company that pioneered with many contributions to the global open source tech community, including crowdsourcing, geolocation, geospatial analysis, micro tasking, microblogging, text messaging, and crisis-mapping. Founded by Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, David Kobia, and Juliana Rotich in 2007. Many of the crisis, emergency, and privacy tools used by social media companies emerged from the company or the greater open source community working with it.

  • Samasource - a non-profit technology company founded by Web 2.0 Internet pioneer Leila Chirayath-Janah that innovated with micro-tasking, a form of crowd sourcing that divvied up large projects (or tasks) into thousands of smaller projects that could be carried out by hundreds (or thousands) of workers around the world.

  • Swiftly/SwiftRiver - a startup tech company that aimed to solve deep-computational problems associated with processing large amounts of text and numerical data using natural language processing, probabilistic language processing, predictive analytics and data science as far back as 2009. It began as an open source project conceived by various volunteers working with Ushahidi

  • Liberation Tech - a volunteer community of enthusiasts and professionals who use technology for humanitarian efforts

  • FrontlineSMS - a non-profit technology company that pioneered with opensource contributions to the global open source tech community, telecommunication networks, mobile phone devices, SMS/text messaging, philanthropy, and crisis communication.