“I want to train as many people as possible in Web solutions and digital marketing. At a rate of 600 a month this would mean that by the end of 2015 when they enter the marketplace there would be an army of no fewer than 6,000 Digitisers who could take control of the world.” This was a Facebook post on 6 January by Ahmed Sami, 27, a digital strategist and founder of the “Digitisers,” a Cairo technology group. Sami's wish has now come true, and the first 600 participants have graduated from the Digitiser incubators. Sami says his idea is based on team work, and many people have wanted to participate. “We added a registration forum and wanted to reach out to a further 20 people to start with,” he said. But in its first hour of operation the forum had reached 400, he added. Now more than 4,000 people have registered for the first class, and more than 50 professionals have volunteered to transfer their knowledge to others. The 600 monthly participants are divided into different groups who attend offline sessions while anyone is able to follow up online. Sami says he would have welcomed more to attend offline if he had had enough space. The AUC's Greek Campus helped the Digitisers through providing a training hall for free. It also offered another hall for the soft launch, and the Noor Internet Company offers them a free Internet connection. Other companies offer internships to young people graduating from the Digitisers. Sami said he was tempted to call what the group was doing a miracle, as during the soft launch they only paid for simple things such as renting loudspeakers and distributing pins and stickers with the Digitiser logo. Any other event attended by more than 500 people would have cost far more, he said. “The main thing is that it is in the framework of transferring knowledge without waiting for a return,” he commented, adding that everyone working for the Digitisers was a volunteer. Commenting on the large number of people wanting to learn digital techniques, Sami said that Web solutions and the digital marketing industry were new to Egypt. After the 25 January Revolution people became more aware of the importance of the Internet and particularly Facebook, he said, and as a result they started to understand that there were other fields in the industry. Fatma Abdel-Aziz, 26, a graduate from the Faculty of Commerce and a member of the Digitisers group, plans to build her own digital company in two years and says the Digitisers would be behind her company. She said that being an initiative based on workshops instead of lectures was what made the Digitisers unique, beside the idea of building an army of trained personnel all of whom offer their services for free. “I had the ambition to get out of a rigid box,” she commented of her shift from commerce to digital industry, adding that young people in general had ambitions that the country's universities were not helping them fulfill. Zaghlul Abu-Hossam, 23, from Baltim in the Kafr Al-Sheikh governorate, also graduated from the Faculty of Commerce but is now more interested in social media. Before joining the Digitisers he created his own blog and started to work on Google Adsense, according to the Google Website a simple way to earn money by displaying targeted ads next to online content. The Digitisers have been particularly keen on choosing participants who are new to the industry. “Those who have knowledge already won't need our help as they can learn more on their own,” Sami explained. Shadi Essam, 24, a social media manager and Digitiser co-founder, said the group also aimed to encourage self-learning. It rejected rote-learning, he said, and emphasised applied knowledge instead. “Someone wrote to us saying he wanted to see the Digitisers become a national project. We think that would be a miracle, but still doable,” Sami said. The Digitisers contacted the Ministry of Youth and Sports, which welcomed the idea but it has not gone further. “If it became a national project, we would be able to produce leaders that would not cost the country anything. The state would not have to find them job opportunities, and it would not have to pay for trainers. The only thing it would provide is a place to work, and that is not too hard,” he said. Those graduating from the group would be able to work in Egypt or abroad, or even from home if they are connected to the Internet, Sami concluded. The writer is a freelance journalist.
