Zulfa says there is need to have more conversations with digital creatives. Photos | Isaac Ssejjombwe
More than 30 people from different creative circles; fashion, design, music, publishing, audio-visual, animation, performing, visual and literary arts gathered at Motiv last week to learn more about the digital creative industry.
According to Bobina Zulfa, a data digital rights researcher, she started a research in February to map the landscape of the creative industry and try to look at the issues from the sector, including production, trade, commerce, public policies and how technology is affecting the digital space.
“What we have been doing is a dissemination of the research paper called ‘enduring blind spots and infinite opportunities’. It has basically been about having a conversation with digital creatives, intermediaries in the digital creative space,” she said.
Her research report, which she presented at the gathering, explores a number of sector wide concerns through exploratory qualitative research methodologies around issues of access and use of digital technologies by digital creatives, the role of emerging technologies on the sector and finally, the policy ecosystem governing the creative industry in Uganda.
Her report also draws from existing literature on the traditional creative industries in Uganda given the limited scholarship on the digital creative industry in the country.
Since 2017, Pollicy has been running a fellowship programme that aims to introduce students and young professionals to civic technology initiatives while enabling them to utilise their development skills to create innovative data products.
It is on this background that Zulfa took on the research as part of her fellowship project.
She was, however, not the only speaker during the evening. Others were Raymond Malinga, the CEO Creatures Animations, Lorna Okeng, a cultural technologist and Dr Tegan Bristow, Fakugesi Principal Researcher and senior lecturer at the Wits School of the arts.