One of the participants at Africa Source II is Doug, a geek in his twenties
who is making an interesting contribution to the world of social software --
that helps in making the world a place with more communication, and gives
software a people-before-profits approach.

Doug describes his project: "It's called Gadgets. It stemmed from my partner
Kwindla "Kwin" Kramer and I wanting to combine different aspects of social
software applications within one platform and application. The applications
we specifically wanted to merge were the wiki, the blog, flexible tagging --
all with complete e-mail integration. So you can subscribe to either a
thread, or a particular author's post, or a particular tag."

The other thing they wanted to do, which is still in its nascent stages, was
to make sure that they had a flexible platform for allowing people to
translate the application itself. Translating software applications is a key
way to ensure that they work in multiple languages, and thus don't exclude
users simply because they don't speak some 'global' large language.

How long did they work on this? "It's a difficult question, because we've
been working on parts of this system, that comprises it, for parts a few
years," says Doug.

They started with Kwin writing XML::Comma, which is a Perl framework,
licensed under the GPL. (The General Public License, or GPL, is the most
popular Free Software or Open Source software license, and allows developers
to put out their work for others to share, without allowing anyone to take
control over the same.) It's a framework for flexibly managing large stores
of documents.

"We ended up building quite a few different websites on top of XML::Comma.
We combined that with a templating framework HTML::Mason. Just to make
dynamic websites," explains Doug.

A few of the sites they built with this were allafrica.com, which is the
largest provider of African news on the Internet. They also did a complete
set of tools for the Democratic Party in the US. As well as many more,
African-centric and progressive political organisations in the United
States, and abroad.

How is their product better than others in the field?

"This is the first time that I've seen all of these different social
software applications -- the blog, wiki, tagging, image handling, audio
handling, basically any sort of file attachment -- with complete email
integration, all combined into a single piece of software," explains Doug.

Says he: "You can create new posts via email, which allows bloggers in
low-bandwidth situations to communicate with the outside world via a
hand-held device that supports email. We have plans to extend that support
to SMS as well."

While accessing the Internet at high speeds is not an issue in many larger
cities, it is a major hurdle for most places of the planet, where citizens
in smaller communities simply don't have the bandwidth to access the Net at
anything other than crawling speeds.

This software is available in a repository for anybody who needs. Doug says
you can get a copy by writing to him at dug@plusthree.com "We plan to have a
public release within a couple of months," he announces.

Doug calls himself a "freelance hacker and sometimes entrepreneur", based in
New York. He's 28. Kwin is the CTO of All Africa Global Media (which runs
allafrica.com), and a couple of years senior, is based in Washington DC.

What motivates him to do this work?

"It's fun. I get to do this kind of an event (Africa Source II), and meet
these wonderful people who are doing amazing things, and it's both exciting
and inspiring," says he.

Doug studied English Literature at the University of Washington, but adds "I
didn't get a degree". He explains: "I actually was too distracted by social
life, so when I had to drop out and get a real job. I got a job at an
Internet service provider, Seanet, a local provider at Seattle Washington
and and actually enjoyed it."

He views Gadgets as not just a piece of software, but it's also a platform
for developing social software applications.

What are his priorities for the further growth of social software, a realm
that doesn't offer billions in profit, but could really help meet the need
of allowing people to communicate and share knowledge in ways they badly
need to?

"The things I always end up coming back to are ease of use, accessibility
(ideally for everyone), translatability and localisability," he says.

And others at Africa Source II say they're already impressed by his work.