Kim Tucker is a soft-spoken South African, with a long pony-tail, and extremely passionate about the potential of Free Software and free knowledge in education and learning in general. He comes from the Open Source Centre at the Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for Information & Communications Technology), managed by the CSIR in Pretoria, South Africa.

"My job is that of Open Mentor. That's the job title," explains Tucker. "The big entity (where I work) is the (South African) Council for Scientific and Industrial Research or CSIR, and within the Meraka Institute is the Open Source Centre. That centre was created to accelerate Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) adoption in South Africa, Africa and beyond."

[Update: Kim has since transferred to a research area in the Meraka Institute/ CSIR focussing on ICT in Education. his specific interest is in Libre Knowledge and Life Long Learning]

The centre has three focus areas. One is called Open Speak, which is about advocacy and informing people about FLOSS - to a point where they can make informed decisions about whether they are ready to adopt it, and how to go about it.

The next focus area is Open Project which is enabling access by facilitating, catalysing and stimulating projects. These projects could be either by NGOs, individuals or governments.
The third is Open Mentor, which is concerned with empowering people with the knowledge needed to be successful with Open Source.

"Through these focus areas we try to achieve our mission and vision: empowerment through appropriate FLOSS interventions" says Tucker.

South Africa really seems to be undertaking some impressive projects in the world of FLOSS. When did this all begin?

"Something happened in 2001. A discussion between our (national) president and a prominent representative of Finland (the home of the Linux kernel). From that meeting there was some
statement made, and a loose policy process started evolving from that," says Tucker.

At that time, Open Source and Open Standards were recognised as critical issues for addressing the digital divide in South Africa (National Advisory Council on Innovation). "Then came the second NACI document, and the idea to set up a task-force on FLOSS. The last big action that happened was a workshop around August-October 2005," explains Tucker.

He adds: "We then came out with a declaration on Free/Libre and Open Source Software, FLOSS. See http://wiki.go-opensource.org/taskforce . Now, we're putting together working groups to implement this strategy. We also did a survey of what's happening in the world in those areas."

Clearly, among the highest priorities are training, education and skills. This is where the role of the Open Mentor comes in. In facilitating, and inspiring the use of FLOSS. Both in education, and also skills and training for using FLOSS.

In real life, Tucker sees these three focus areas supporting each other. The first informs, advocates, raises the "hype level", and tells people it's great stuff. It encourages people to form the networks. Open Project involves getting into projects where FLOSS is involved. "Right at the beginning, we try to give FLOSS an equal chance in the project," he says.

Tucker adds: "We do a lot of things. We get involved in the government tender process for an ICT system; we get someone in our team to be in the tender evaluation process, and just check that
Free Software and Open Source is getting its chance.

Essentially, the policy says, if all things are equal, then go the Open Source route."

Tucker argues that his personal view favours a stronger approach. "We should say, go FLOSS. If there isn't an equivalent programme, then we should make one (in the world of FLOSS). And do it with partners in India, Brazil, China and other countries promoting FLOSS."

Interesting, the South African go-opensource.org campaign was an attempt to really make people in that part of the planet think in terms of FLOSS." It was really about advocacy and awareness. We (the Go-Opensource Campaign/Coalition) produced a TV series. There were 13 episodes explaining different aspects of FLOSS, between 2004-05," he adds.

There are a number of initiatives underway. First, this network, is looking at an Open ICDL (international computers driving licence) - training materials at: http://openicdl.org . A project concept called Free Knowledge Communities was started, which believes in generating and
storing knowledge that is free to use for any purpose - see http://communities.libre.org

Explains the site: "Libre implies freedom to access, read, listen to, watch, or otherwise experience the resource; to learn with, copy, perform, adapt and use it for any purpose; and to contribute and share enhancements or derived works."

As Tucker puts it, the whole copyrights, patents approach is threatening progress in Africa.

"We've got people talking about the African Renaissance, and a New Partnership for African Development. Some of us feel that we'd make much more progress if we have free knowledge
policies. Where African communities can create their own knowledge resources, they can take other free knowledge resources from anywhere in the world - such as the Wikipedia
(the free encyclopedia), which is free knowledge - and localise that to local conditions. And create their own knowledge resources and, in turn, share them freely," he adds. "Some of us feel progress and innovation would be much higher if we do that."

These initiatives have got some official support in South Africa. Now, they're looking for "partners across the world" who would "buy into the mission and vision".

Kim is a man of many talents and backgrounds.

He puts it modestly: "I often describe myself as one of the most mixed-up people around. When I left school, I studied psychology and computer science. I grew up in Zimbabwe. Then, I became a head of a department of computer science in a school. We taught O and A level, computer science."

His next move was to a University (of Transkei) in South Africa. He was a lecturer in computer science, and lectured computer students. Tucker was also involved in zoology and botany, and curriculum design. Then, he did a Masters' in conservation biology. Then he got a job with the CSIR as an environmental scientist. Realising his IT skills, he was also involved in that sector. After six years, he decided to make a career in IT anyway. He stayed on in the South African CSIR, but moved to its ICT-oriented business unit, now incorporated in the Meraka Institute.

Meraka is a Sotho language term it refers to an open area of land which the communities just share, for the common good.

"We intend to contribute to the digital commons. The "Tragedy of the Commons" was a tragedy because of the finiteness of resources. In the digital world, I don't think a tragedy would occur on account of lack of resources," he adds.

"On a personal note", he's a runner and does triathlons.

One of the ideas that South Africa has worked on is the 'education out-of-the-box' concept. Tucker introduces it:
"It's a project to help people produce sets of CDs for use in learning, including both software and content. Education is less about content and more about the activities that students do while learning, and the FLOSS world has much to offer in terms of tools for learning."

In terms of content, the aim is for people to create our their own content. For example, on Wikipedia - "If we get the content, we can dump the Wikipedia on a DVD and take it to some rural area where they don't have access (to the Net). And they can enhance that or produce their own new content."

There are other tools for education too. Including Moodle (moodle.org) - a course or learning management system, from the Free/Libre and Open Source Software world. Then, there's Future Learning Environment (FLE3 - fle3.uiah.fi) from Finland.

KEWL, also a learning management system whose acronym spells out as Knowledge Environment for Web Learning, is another useful option. "It's much like Moodle but with a lot of nice features," as Tucker puts it.

There are some digital library systems, like Koha, and Greenstone. South Africa has also been looking at eXe, the Elearning XML Editor http://exelearning.org , a tool that makes it easy for educators to create educational content and store it in standards-compliant formats. "Users don't need to understand anything about XML or standards or anything. They just create their learning designs easily. It's a nice idea," explains Tucker.

South African initiatives have also been spread to other parts of the continent. The next developer road show will be in West Africa, probably around June 2006.

Says Tucker: "Education is of paramount importance in Africa. But we had an interesting discussion, where we realised there's a lot of energy around education in Africa. But there's a critical shortage of teachers. And Education Out Of The Box and Free Knowledge Communities are both aimed at
helping people in communities learn. That's independent but complimentary to of the formal systems that might be there. It could help to get everybody teaching everybody. We've got a slogan, 'Enabling individuals and communities to empower themselves with knowledge'."

That's the dream. And, with determined individual like Tucker around, they're slowly moving towards that distant goal.

Contact: see http://aliens.csir.co.za/~ktucker/

Fahamu [www.fahamu.org] describes itself as a social justice
organisation, interested in ways to promote social justice
and human rights in Africa and throughout the world. They
have developed some innovative ways using technology to do
so.

"We're not interested in technology per se, but in the ways
technology can empower people. To understand human rights, to
empower them," says Fahamu production manager Becky Faith.

"We've got a range of CD-Rom based distance learning material
called 'Learning for Change'. We originally used CD-Roms
because developing distance learning material over the
internet means you're excluding large populations who don't
have access to the Net. CDroms which run on slow machines are
a good investment," Faith says.

Their approach is to combine CD-Rom based learning with
interactive exercises,and participation in moderated
mailing-list discussions. So, on joining, you become part of
a community of people learning together. With a tutor who's
not only an expert in that field of human rights, but also a
facilitator of consultations.

"We also offer optional workshops, which can take place after
a period of distance learning. For NGOs and people working in
human rights, they often can't afford to allow people to
leave their office for weeks on end; so distance learning is
a suitable way out," explains Faith.

They've delivered training to a very wide range of groups
across Africa. Many of the training material were developed
by Oxford University, so they've got a good academic base
behind them, as she explains.

Fahamu works with a range of partners, This includes the UN
Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, for whom
they've developed material on conflict prevention, and the
prevention of torture.

"These two UN courses are being rolled out across Asia,
Africa and Europe -- and are also getting them translated
into French, Spanish and Russian. Our course are going really
really well. It allows someone from very different cultures,
say somebody working for the UN in Nepal could compare their
experiences with someone working in Palestine. Everyone can
see the similarities," says Faith.

Fahamu, which means 'understanding' in Kiswihili, was founded
in the mid-nineties, by Dr Firoze Manji, who's Kenyan, and
who was excited by the way new technologies can be used to
support human rights and social justice. Dr Manji then used
to work with the Aga Khan Foundation and Amnesty
International.

"We worked on a great project with the UN-affiliated
University for Peace, on the use of the media in the Rwandan
genocide. It was written up by Gerry Caplan. We've run this
course for Rwandan journalists, and we've just also finished
running it for senior officers in the Rwandan military. It
was an interesting experience because they've got a real
hunger for learning about human rights. Gerry also
incidentally wrote the African Union report on the genocide,"
says Faith, updating us on some initiatives.

Fahamu has a weekly forum for social justice in Africa, an
electronic news letter and a website. It started some six
years ago with some 300 subscribers, and now has some 60,000
approx subscribers. It's also available on the web at
pambazuka.org (The term Pambazuka means 'arise' or 'awaken',
in the sense of dawning, or consciousness.)

Pambazuka News calls itself "a tool for progressive social
change in Africa". Produced by Fahamu, which itself deploys
information and communication technologies for the needs of
organisations and social movements working to progressive
social change, the work has already been noticed.

Fahamu was awarded by the Tech Museum of Innovation from a
field of 301 candidates, representing 64 countries. These
represent the "best of the best technologists whose
innovations benefit humanity". Fahamu became one of five Tech
Laureates in the Education category. Pambazuka News also won
the non-profit category of the sixth annual Highway Africa
awards for the innovative use of the New Media. It was
commended for its "rich content and excellent design".

Their newsletter is thematically, so for various categories
such as 'comments', 'letters'. They also have categories on
issues such as health, HIV/AIDS, education, conflict and
emergencies.

"One of the really exciting thing about Pambazuka is the
quality of writing it attracts. We're really privileged to
have some of Africa's best thinkers writing for us. There
seems to be a real hunger for it, because its content is not
found anywhere else on the web," explains Faith.

This network has brought out a book on editorials, which they
plan to release annually. "One thing we're really excited
about is to have a Nigerian blogger called Sokari Ekine doing
a weekly round-up of African blogs, a field which is really
rapidly expanding," says Faith.

What goes into Fahamu and Pambazuka? "We have a staff of 13
in offices in Cape Town, Oxford and Nairobi. But we would be
nothing without an incredible network of associates, in
Africa, and across the world really. People who write content
for us and help create our CDroms, people whom we can call
on as advisors, and that makes us much stronger," Faith explains.

By now, Pambazaku has morphed its roles. It began as an
information service, and has grown into a platform for
advocacy. Says Faith: "Now because of people's demands, it
has grown phenomenally as a tool for social justice. Advocacy
basically."

It's also involved in an association called Solidarity on
African Women's Rights. That's a coalition of women's
organisations across Africa, who have been working on a piece
of legislation called the Protocol on the Rights of Women in
Africa.

Fahamu sees itself as being part of some very successful
advocacy campaigns. For instance, they set up a petition on
pambazuka.org, and also set up a functionality to allow
people to sign the petition via SMS. Later, this petition was
presented to African Union leaders.

"We did that experiment with SMS, and realised that the power
of SMS, which is a kind of tool for political advocacy. We
saw how appropriate it is for the 'developing' world, where
the internet is expensive, and so are computers, but the
mobile phone usage has really exploded in Africa," says Faith.

In this case, people could also sign-upto get updates via SMS
whenever any new country signed the protocol. Says she:
"There's a lot of stuff in the press about the mobile phone
and the developing world, and we realised what a great tool
it was."

Fahamu also became involved with the Global Call to Action
Against Poverty. For that, they wanted to find a way to help
African voices on debt and trade to get heard. So they set up
a phone number where people could send in text messages,
about these issues. That message then got displayed on the
web.

In September 2005, the messages were displayed on the big en
during a concert. And people kept going around the event
convincing others to send in messages.

Pambazuka is about to come out with a French translation,
that it believes could transform its operations. It doesn't
have plans for Portuguese, another language popular in parts
of the African continent, but focuses on Arabic too. It sees
its French operations as "means not only a whole new
audience, but a whole new group of people writing (for
Pambazuka) and new possibilities."

Faith has been with Fahamu for four years. She sees herself
as being passionate about human rights, and technology both.
"But not technology for technology's sake. I'm interested in
technology in the service of the struggle for social justice
and empowerment," she says.

She worked in a commercial New Media industry for many years,
producing distance learning material. "And I realised that
there was so much you could do with the technology, in the
political field I was interested in. So I'm very privileged
to combine there two things," she adds.

Email contact: becky at fahamu.org

When you create some creative work, you store it away, make
sure you squeeze out the most (earnings) out of it, and don't
allow anybody to copy it. Right?

Wrong. The message of the South African Creative Commons
network -- http://za.creativecommons.org -- is that you have
a wide range of options to choose from, away from the 'all
rights reserved' model that writers, artists, musicians and
others are often psched into believing in.

Creative Commons South Africa has a real-life and web-based
presence, dedicated to "showcasing the work of local
creators, educators and administrators who use Creative
Commons licences to distribute their ideas and creative
expressions".

To begin at the beginning, what's all this about?

Two young women spearheading this initiative are project lead
Heather Ford and researcher Kerryn McKay. They say: "Our main
challenge really is persuading people to think about
ownership of information differently. And to adopt a
completely new way of distribtuing knowledge. Money still can
be made (when you share information and creative work). It's
just about changing your model."

The Creative Commons (CC) is a non-profit organization
devoted to expanding the range of creative work available for
others legally to build upon and share. The Creative Commons
website enables copyright holders to grant some of their
rights to the public while retaining others through a variety
of licensing and contract schemes including dedication to the
public domain or open content licensing terms.

It aims to avoid the problems current copyright laws create
for the sharing of information. Headquartered in San
Francisco, this project was officially launched in 2001 and
founded by Lawrence Lessig.

In South Africa, the LINK (Learning Information Networking
Knowledge) Centre at Wits University in Johannesburg promotes
official, locally adapted licences, as well as to host and
maintain the Creative Commons licences in South Africa.

Recently, the South African branch of the project supported a
web portal in showcasing regional initiatives that make use
of the Creative Commons licences, and conducted workshops on
Creative Commons licencing in Africa.

And this counter-intuitive but eminently-sensible project
introduces itself thus: "The vision of Creative Commons South
Africa is of a thriving African internet community using
Creative Commons licenses to educate our people, grow our
markets, share our knowledge and celebrate Africa's culture
and heritage with people around the world."

Ford and McKay say there's just the two of them working on
the project currently. They have three major funders, with
the Canadian group IDRC being the largest funder.

McKay was upbeat when we spoke: "We've just recently created
a multimedia CD-ROM for Grade Nine (age 14, approx)
technology learners. It actually covers everything for the
South African national curriulum. From IT to making a box."

"It's called Copyright and Responsibilities in South Africa.
It's about Free/Libre and Open Source Software, the history
of copyrights, the impact of copyright on traditional
knowledge, and then it looks at alternative forms," she adds.

Recently, they've compiled a snapshot 'digital commons' of
all educational open content organisations within Africa.

What is the range of material they cover? "Everything. Any
cultural content that would normally have a copyright imposed
on it. It covers music, audio, video, books, e-books, any
kind of reading material. And, of course, educational
material -- for Africa that's one of the most relevant
really," says McKay.

Education is vital to all of us. It's almost a basic human
need. Can anyone justify profiteering over it, rather than
taking a people-before-profits approach?

Says Ford: "People are taking to its very well. Specially in
South Africa. There are big stake-holders that have got
funding from huge corporations and funding agencies, that
have made it their business to distribute various tools --
like the Mindset network in South Africa. They're setting up
a licensing policy with Creative Commons, but it's not formal
yet."

For instance, South Africa's National Department of Education
has an internet portal called Thutong. It's an online
resource for learners, for educatiors, administrators, and
parents www.thutong.org.za They have got a policy on using
the Creative Commons licenses.

CC-South Africa was launched in May 2005. Heather Ford had
been a Reuters Digital Vision Fellow, and brought the project
to South Africa. Initally, they spent a lot of time "porting"
(adapting) the license into South African law.

Both Ford and McKay see the copyrights regimes growing
tighter -- and more unhelpful -- globally.

'Most of major educational technology players in South Africa
have either adopted Creative Commons or plan to adopt it
shortly," says Ford. "One other important thing is that there
has been a lot of media attention to alternatives to
copyright law since we started," she adds.

They ran a comppetition with the local music station YFM, and
it involved a re-mixing competition with the 'Go Open Source'
campaign (run by HP-Shuttleworth-CSIR-Canonical). "We ran
this competition around Software Freedom Day, and it was to
get musicians to get Free Software and free content to remix
music under Creative Commons license. Also DJ Fresh, a famous
DJ, agreed to release the components of one of his tracks.
Because he owns his own label, he was able to do that," says
Ford.

One challenge: the publishing industry is still very fearful
of Creative Commons.

"We got phone calls, with people telling us that sharing and
remixing music would be detrimental to artistes. They saw
this as a threat and basically started saying to us, 'Can you
prove that all the content on your website is always going to
be legal... and that the other people haven't just sampled
copyrighted songs'," says Ford.

"They also said this is going to make people take any song and
believe they can remix it. Which is nonsense...," said Ford.
She points to misleading campaigns which equates sharing
music with stealing handbags or cars.

Creative Commons ideas are specially suited for education.
Argues Ford: "It's important for education. Not just for
South Africa. Because we need to adapt all available material
for our specific environments. We need to be able to make
derivative copies, in other words, translate material, into
different languages. And we need to be able to share content,
because content is expensive (to create)."

Besides, making a book available online could only stimulate
demand for the print product, McKay points out. It also helps
publishers get their work noticed by education
decision-makers.

What was their inspiration?

Says Heather Ford: "I was at Stanford, doing the Digital
Vision fellowship programme. At that time, the Creative
Commons project was based in Standford. I started
voluntering. Then, I realised that IPR ("intellectual
property rights") is probably the most critical issue for
development in South Africa." She came back home to launch
the project in 2004.

Even Henshew-Plath is based in San Francisco, is a
lead-engineer for his day-job and counts himself as an
activist (with the independent media network Indymedia and
other organisations) out of his passion.

His email address -- evan@protest.net -- says it all. It's
based on a protest portal which "unites activists under one
URL", as the New York Times once described it. Protest.Net
calls itself "a collective of activists who are working
together to create our own media" and publishing their own
public record of political activities, so as to take a "stand
against the established media".

Indymedia, the independent media collective, started around
the WTO protest in 1999, notes Even, when people wanted to
create a people's newsroom. It was intended to be a
collaborative newsroom of alternative journalists. "It was
fairly successful," says he.

By now, Indymedia has a model of incorporating video, radio,
internet and newspapers (print publications). Originally it
focused on protest, and later turned into communications
support institutions for social movements.

Where does Even himself fit in?

"I set up the computer labs, and get the internet
connections, build the software, find the computers,
translate, sometimes even take photos and write stories. But
mostly I do things with the computers," the bearded
engineer-campaigner points out.

He has, by now, already written a bunch of different
applications. For Indymedia, he has done work on the several
different content management solutions (CMSs). CMSs allow
non-techies to easily update a website, by reducing this task
to almost a cut-and-paste job.

Indymedia's CMSs include Mir, SF-Active, Active and Dada.
"They all basically do the same thing. They're publishing
systems for people to publish content over the internet, in a
very free and open way," says Even. "I worked on all those."

Beyond that, he's also built applications for telephony. "So,
during a protest, you could, with your mobile phone, call in
and find out the latest news about what is going on. Listen
to radio stations. And find a calender of events. It's all
based on mobile phone-web integration," he explains.

Over the past few months, his attention has gone to
RiotTones. What's that?

"It is a free ring-tone creation and distribution system. You
would be able to create ring-tones, or upload audio files and
convert them to ring-tones, and send them to people's mobile
phones," says Even.

Indymedia activists in the Philippines started doing amazing
things with ring-tones, he points out. And haven't we all
heard mainstream media stories about politicians' voices
talking corruption via their ring-tones?

"But they didn't have the tools for it. This (attempt) tries
to build the tools, so that it can be used beyond the
Philippines. We're working out a site at riotones.org, but
it's not done yet. People have tried to do some applications
on that in the US, but it is not yet taken off. The music
quality and the mixing are very important. It has to be very
catchy, and have a beat," says Even.

How does one do it? If you're going to make a new tone, you
need access to the Free Software tool Audacity. Or, if you
don't have an audio recorder, some parties even have an
application which does in-browser recorder. Using Flash. You
can use that to produce and MP3s.

What does Even see as suitable online tools for activism? He
suggests civicspacelabs.org. It's useful, he says, if you want
a content publishing system for organisations of political
parties.

Indymedia applications are at mir.indymedia.org,
sf-active.indymedia.org, dada.indymedia.org Then, you can get
blog-hosting at blogspot.com or wordpress.com "It's not a
specific activist tool, but useful," says Even.

"Blogger.com works really well for a beginner. It works
really well and is free (as if beer, not free speech)," he
adds.

"I maintain blog-aggregatory sites (that bring postings from
various blogs onto one place), which have been very useful.
There's anarchoblogs.protest.net -- it's just an aggregation
of people who identify as anarchist in their blogs. It's very
useful, because when someone starts blogging, no one knows
about it. So if you bring together all their writing, it
raises everyone up," explains Evan. indyblogs.protest.net
does the same thing for Indymedia activists.

Even also believes in the potential of podcasting tools.

Podcasting, he explains, is distributing radio programmes as
MP3 files over the internet for listing to later. Usually,
this is put out on an Ipod or an MP3 player, but sometimes
just on a computer.

"The application I developed for Podcasting is Open Source in
part. We have an OS X dashboard widget, and that's GPL'd. But
the server side isn't GPL. It takes an RSS feed, with
'enclosures' (links to MP3 files), and you see it like a
directory of radio programmes you want to listen to. It's a
very pretty interface," says Even.

There's an application you can install on your desktop, and
it will download these radio programmes at night. It assumes
you have a pretty fast internet connection, though.

What's the best place online for content meant for radio, say
a small community radio station?

Says Even: "The best directory of community radio programmes
is radio4all.net You can also find programmes at odeo.com. If
you want sound clips and elements, you could go to the
freesoundproject -- freesound.iua.upf.edu -- which is all
Creative Commons-licensed, and has a tremendous collection of
samples, musical beats, voices. It's very good at adding
riches to programmes.

Protest.net, which Even is part of, notes: "We are standing
up and showing that serious activism is alive and well at the
dawn of the 21st century. Everyday from Kansas to India
activists are meeting, organizing, and protesting to demand a
better world for all. When the corporate media takes note of
our activities it is only to spit upon our struggle. We are
accused of being misinformed bleeding heart hooligans with
nothing better to do than march up and down blocking traffic.
Yet the rich get richer, and we are told to be complacent, to
wait for our due.

"They say the environment isn't being destroyed, it's OK to
kill millions of Iraqi's with vindictive sanctions, that the
billions living in slums just need to work harder, that
global domination by a corporate elite is the only way.
Activists around the world are fighting for a better world.
We can't rely on the media establishment to cover our
movements. We will rise up and seize the means of
communication!"

What does he see as effective tools for campaigners?

Says Even: "The most important tools for social change in
technology are not the complicated ones. They're mailing
lists, they're wikis. Blogs are the simplest ways of
publishing online. Email too."

How did Even get involved in activism? "It was a process.
Nothing in particular. It was my friends and the environment
at the university," he says.

Wire Lunghabo James talks to Frederick Noronha about
organising Africa Source 2, running a GNU/Linux-based firm
from the heart of Africa, and why Free Software is specially
relevant to the continent. James turns 32 this year, and has
one son. He studied in Uganda's Makarere University.

Q: How much of a challenge was it to organise an event like
Africa Source 2?

Initially, I didn't expect it to be such a challenge. But
when when the actual work began, I realised how big it was.
The location (Kalangala, an island on the banks of Lake
Victoria in Uganda) is so remote; you had to plan for the
smallest thing. We were planning for everything, down to
staples. It was a logistical nightmare. Also, coordinating
the travel for delegates... from the airport to this point.

Q: Why do you see Free/Libre and Open Source Software as
particularly relevant for Africa?

I still insist that FLOSS is the way to go for Africa and
even for other countries. We finally have an opportunity of
(charting out) our progress in the digital world. It's
unfortunate that we've got used simply used to consuming (IT
products). IBM has done it for us, Microsoft has done it,
Oracle has done it. (With their approach, it's a question of)
just buy and use.

But there are challenges which come which simply using
something which has not been customised. We have to adjust to
technology, as opposed to technology adjusting to our needs.

With FLOSS we stand a very good chance, because we can adjust
technology to our needs. It gives us an opportunity to learn
very speedily from others. Knowledge which was earlier
available to just a few, is now public knowledge.

Q: Do you see young people as picking up FLOSS speedily? Does
this system of informal mentoring really work?

At the university level, I've interacted with a number of
them, and they've begin to realise that FLOSS is for real.

That it's there to stay. Some three to four years back you
couldn't tell them that. All they were interested in was
Visual Basic, DotNet... all Windows-based proprietorial
software technologies.

Today, my companies receives a lot of enquiries from people
wanting to do internships. And the reason they contact us
is they want to learn how to use FLOSS. That's already a sign
they are appreciating it.

Q: Do you see African students learning FLOSS technologies
fast?

Yes. Students here learn very fast. Some are naturally lazy,
not self-driven. They need pumping like in the classroom
approach. But some are self-driven. And within three to six
months, the knowledge they attain is really amazing. They can
be very fast learners. When you put them to some task, they
can do a lot of research and come up with something really
amazing.

Q: As someone running a private company that offers GNU/Linux
services, do you see yours as a successful business model for
your part of Africa?

Frankly speaking, in East Africa, to be a GNU/Linux
specialist there's still a lot to learn on how to run your
business. You have a lot of challenges. Even me, upto now, I
keep changing my approach on how to do business.

Every six months to one year, I keep changing my approach. I
haven't yet come up with the right way to doing things. It's
a learning phases. Just like the proprietorial companies took
time, I believe we're in the same phase.

Q: What do you see as the impact of Free/Libre and Open
Source Software on Uganda? And, in the rest of East Africa?

In East Africa, FLOSS is making very good progress. Starting
with Uganda, I can say the levels of deployment and
awareness, especially in the corporate sector, are
impressive.

When you start with administrators, Linux is no longer
something strange. When you get to government, many solutions
deployed by third party service providers involve FLOSS in
one way or another.

This is mainly due to the competition. Companies compete for
government projects, and costs become an issue. A number of
companies that bid for big government contracts, end up
subcontracting to us at Linux Solutions for specific areas.
When we come in, we cut down their costs by a big chunk.

In Uganda, the situation is good. But when it comes to
decision-makers, we still have a long way to go. Not only on
FLOSS, but also in ICT (information and communication
technologies) in general. I think this is an industry
decision.

In Kenya, there's been some good progress in the last two
years from my observations. This is evidenced from facts like
one of the founders of Linux Chix is a Kenyan lady. There's a
Kenya Linux Users' Group [1] that came up in the last one year.
It's growing. Every other day, I see new members adding to
it. It's at Kenyalinux on Yahoogroups.

They also recently formed a Linux professionals association
in Kenya. It is a sign of an emerging FLOSS user base.

Q: In the continent, South Africa is probably the leader when
it comes to deploying FLOSS?

Without doubt. South Africa is really, really ahead. One of
the reasons is their advanced infrastructure. You cannot
divorce the issue of infrastructure (from the spread of
FLOSS).

Q: What other achievements of Africa are noteworthy?

In Namibia, I like the Schoolnet model. About Ghana, I still
don't know enough about how entrenched FLOSS is. But as far
as general ICTs are concerned, I'm really impressed.

Another country is Egypt. From my interaction with the few
people who come down from Egypt, I've come to the conclusion
that it could almost be neck-to-neck with South Africa.
Because it's more Arab-oriented (and non-English) we don't
tend to notice what's going on. But there's a lot of buzz
going on there.

As far as Tanzania goes, I'm impressed by the translation
efforts taking place there. Kilinux.org for Ki'swihili Linux,
for example. That's a project aimed at translating Linux to
Ki'swahili. They've completed Open Office, which they're
moving on to the next task.

Nigeria too. Sorry, I'd actually forgotten to mention it.
Right form the rural areas, there's a lot happening. Take the
case of a group like Fantsaum Foundation, deep in Kaduna
state, in the north. There's a lot of things happening.

Q: What do you see as the secret of spreading FLOSS in your
part of the globe (Africa) or mine (Asia)?

One of the things I've realised is the crucial role played by
enthusiasm. If you can find some fire in the target group,
then you don't have to be there (continually to build up
things).

In the case of the Nigerian Fantsaum Foundation, I was
invited there in 2003. They then knew nothing about Linux.
The things they've done since then... it started off with
just a five day training. Everything I hear, I'm amazed. Just
from the small seed laid there. Despite nobody being there
(to hand-hold all these years), they still had a fire a them.

You need an approach that not only offers people the skills,
but also raises their skills. You don't have the resources to
keep going back. Once you light a fire in them, they will
keep doing the research.

Q: How did you get involved with FLOSS?

When I just joined IT, I had this this friend, an assistant
admin in an internet service provider. The company I was in
ran a Windows server. That was NT 3.5 around 1997. When he
came and changed the server systems, he told us of the
advantages. Earlier, we used to stay awake practically the
whole night, just to reboot the servers. When we changed
servers, everything was so, so stable. From that time, I got
inquisitive. I read up a lot about servers. Sometimes, I'd
stay awake at night ... reading material from the internet.
One day, I made up my mind that I'd be going into Open
Source, come what may.

In those days, a simple installation of [GNU]Linux would take
a week. You had no drivers for the card. You spent two days
looking for drivers, and when you did find it, it wouldn't
work on Slackware! Then you found someone with a working Red
Hat (distribution of GNU/Linux). When installed, a monitor
would blow up....

Q: Does he have any regrets about the road taken?

I had some sense of feeling scared sometimes; feeling maybe
I've not made the right decision. Maybe, I felt, it might not
take me anywhere. Something deep within me told on, just stay
on, keep up the fight. But by that time I was such a techie,
that I always wanted difficult things.

When discussing with people, they would discourage you.
'There's no future in Linux,' they would say. I remember
someone quoting an American expert, who gave [GNU]Linux a
very bad bill of health. And who said in two years time,
[GNU]Linux would be nowhere. That was in 2000. Laughs. But
said it's okay....

Q: Did you'll also get some help and inspiration from the
outside world?

At that time, most of our help came in the form of
mailing-lists. From Europe or Australia or the US. Occasions,
when you go for a technical sessions we would meet great
techies like Brian Candler. He's one of the kernel hackers
for Linux. I met him, and he changed my life. It was at a
workshop in the US. I immediately started to use such
opportunity to learn.

Q: In this world, there's a lot of sharing of knowledge...

Very much so. Techies are ready to share, because they also
learnt through sharing.

At that time we realised we were so many, but all scattered.
We used to meet in bars. Around 2001, we came up with the
site linux.or.ug and the idea of setting up a mailing list.

Right now we have over 300 members on the list
lug@linux.or.ug. Of which, about 80 percent are local. The
others are international 'observers' and well wishers.
[Laughs.]

That helped us to network closely as Ugandans. When we
started sharing our problems, we realised we had the answers
here itself, though we were looking for them outside. Once
the Kenyans realised how this worked for us, they started
their own network. The same was the case with the Rwandans.

Q: Tell us something about your firm.

Linux Solutions is a private company, set up in 2000 to offer
solutions and support based on FLOSS. Mainly to the Ugandan
private sector, NGOs, and government too.

That's one reason (for our active participation) in Africa
Source 2. One of the things I'm going away with from here is
the idea of looking seriously at the (GNU/Linux in) education
sector. I keep gathering such ideas, and seeing how
applicable it is to us.

Some of these ventures require a philanthropic approach. But
we don't have the money to just keep throwing. The models in
education I've discussed, seem to be viable though.

Q: How do you see the interaction between business and IT?

Business is a hub of innovation when it comes to IT. That is
the field where most people have certain needs, and they
insist to getting them across. When you look at sectors like
government, they will settle for what's there. But business
demands what it expects. So business plays a key role in
innovation.

Business also plays a key role in the spread of technology.
We're the ones who amplify whatever has come up. You can't
expect the average person in Africa to knows about (the Free
Software distribution) Ubuntu, unless we guys make a noise
about Ubuntu.

Business with a social responsibility angle can impact
technology in so many ways. Through interaction with society,
they could give up some technology they've been using and
place it in the public domain. By extending what has been
considered as private. They could educate the public about
the potential benefits of technology. They could increase
awareness. Yes, business has a very big social responsibility.

Business is also there to a check. Without the insistence of
business, many governments would be living in the stone age.
The business world is really key in moving IT.

[1] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kenyalinux/

Natasha Primo is chair of the APC, or the Association for
Progressive Communications (APC), which one publication [1]
described as being founded by a team "clued in to the
potential power of ICTs at a time when many of us still
thought of computers as glorified typewriters". Primo is also
the executive director of the South Africa-based Women's Net.

Primo has long been associated with gender activism and
activism. Formerly an academic, her teachings focussed on
gender and development. She describes herself as a "planner
-- in city and regional planning -- but who never practised".
Primo has earlier worked in research, and also taught at the
University of the Western Cape, South Africa.

At the backdrop of Africa Source 2, an event meant to promote
Free/Libre and Open Source Software in the not-for-profit
community, Frederick Noronha caught up with Primo at a
hurried breakfast, to learn more about the plans and
priorities she's currently working on.

Excerpts from an interview:

Q: After taking over as APC's chair very recently, what do
you see as the upcoming priorities?

For five years, upto 2008, it's about building capacity
around ICT policy and advocacy. There's also building
capacity about the strategic use of ICTs. The third big
programme is the women's programme.

Within each, there's a set of priorities. In strategic use,
for instance, Free [Libre] and Open Source Software is one of
the major ones, even though it hasn't moved as far as we
wanted to. Chris (Nicol of Pangea in Barcelona, who became
part of APC in 1995) had passed away (after a year's battle
with cancer), and he was the person who had pushed away the
FOSS agenda. He undertook some tasks... but some are waiting
to be completed.

The other priority is wireless networking or alternative
access. Some workshops have been happened. We had two in
Africa, another two planned in Francophone and Anglophone
west Africa, and another in Latin America. I'm not sure if
there's money and plans for organising the same in South
Asia.

In the policy area, one of the major activities is the
development of thematic and regional ICT portals. Like
genderit.org, the Africa portal (which is linked to the APC
website at www.apc.org), also a Latin American ICT portal.

The portals have been used to both generate, capture, share
information around ICT developments, in the regions. These
were also used to develop partnerships, specially in the WSIS
process, at the regional level.

The next step is the development of a number of national ICT
portals.

So, there's a kind of a refocussing to the national level,
and building capacity at different places. That's really for
member (organisations) to take up. There's some money within
APC to take up the processes.

There has also been a concern about members understanding
enough of the issues to feed into the development of an APC
position on definitions. On issues like internet governance,
on inter-connection costs or whatever. A number of issue
papers were developed.

Q: How do you see APC shaping up, changing, morphing over the
years?

When it started it was really a network of ISPs (internet
service providers) that were focussing on the development
sector. In the early 'nineties, Sangonet, Greennet were all
involved in providing in connectivity in 'developing'
countries, very cheaply. Way before commercial ISPs were
actually active (in making internet access available and
accessible).

As the environment for ISPs became much more competitive, and
users became accustomed to a 24 hour helpdesk, it became
difficult for APC members to compete within that framework.

They offered a different quality of service. So more and more
of them ceased to exist, or had to completely change their
core business away from providing connectivity and user
support. They changed to building databases, websites,
providing training and finding news areas for operation.

Our members have had to re-invent themselves.

As part of that process, it also started a debate within APC
about the criteria for membership. Currently, there are a lot
more content initiatives. A lot of the new members coming in
are offering either training or content-based initiatives.

A lot of the old members have shifted into developing
websites using CMSs (content management solutions, or
simple-to-update websites). You've got kind of convergence of
old and new around the services offered.

Q: Which parts of the globe are most representative in APC's
membership?

There are far more member (organisations) in Latin America,
and historically, in the Central and Eastern Europe
countries. Now, you have more members in Africa. It used to
earlier be that you could only have one member per country;
that's changed. And you have far more members in Africa.

In terms of regions prioritised for developing membership,
it's Asia and South Asia (that we are now looking at). We do
have some members in North America, but it's not an area for
membership development.

In terms of initiatives encouraged to seek membership, it's
broad as long members' work coincides with the mission and
vision of APC. Which is, using ICT for human rights and
social development purposes.

Q: What are the main challenges when it comes to non-profit
organisations and NGOs (non-governmental organisations)
deploying ICTs (information and communication technologies)?

One of the major challenges is not really understanding the
need for communication. That's at the core of NGOs not
thinking strategically about the use of ICTs. When there's a
funding crunch, it's an area that gets dropped first. There's
a lot of work to be done there.

In terms of Free [Libre] and Open Source Software advocacy,
people don't have an appreciation of the fact that there are
options available. There's so much of management activity
around resource management of an NGO, except for computer
resources and related issues.

I think there needs understanding that this is an area where
you need to be much more informed about what your choices
are. That's one area I like to stress, apart from all the
philosophical issues that go with FOSS advocacy.

Q: Tell us something about Women'sNet in South Africa...

Women'sNet was started in 1997-98, at that time as a project
within SangoNet. It was a joint project with the Commission
on Gender Equality. The purpose of Women's Net was to provide
a repository around gender issues in South Africa. It really
developed a kind of profile of itself in the three years,
before I joined it in 2001.

Because of restructuring within SangoNet, we asked the board
about taking it out of SangoNet and taking it up as a
separate organisation. So it formally exists since 2002, but
in terms of work goes back to 1997-98.

We really have three areas of training for women's
organisations as well as girls. In content development, and
how to use the tools. Building basic skills in the use of the
tools, by working with women's organisations and tools. The
second area is around content development -- working with
text, with audio, and now also with a bit of video.

Policy advocacy is the third area.

Q: And in terms of staff?

We operate with six people, including five full-time.
Whenever we need additional capacity, we buy that in, and
then budget for it.

Upto date, most of the activities we've run, we've fund-raised
for, and invite NGOs to be trained in those skills. We've
just set up a FOSS lab in Johannesburg, which we also want to
use as an income-raising component, as part of our
sustainability efforts. We've been wanting to develop some
training courses for NGOs.

The fact we've offered them to free in the past, sure going
to have difficulty that they're going to have start paying
for these service.

Q: What seems to work, when it comes to deploying ICTs in
non-profits?

When we started, we brought people to a central place to
provide the training. With some projects, we go on-sight. The
idea is to connect them with some of the resources in their
locale. So when we leave, they know there's a place they can
go to continue their skills.

That's going to be increasingly the way we operate. Through
Government-funded telecentres. To connect with women's
organisations and telecentres, specially when it comes to
technology- and migration-planning.

[1] The African Digital Commons: A Participant's Guide 2005
www.commons-sense.org

FILM-MAKER HUNTS FOR AN UNUSUAL TECHNOLOGY FILM... IN AFRICA

David Madie is from Copenhagen, and he's on an unusual
mission in Africa. Following a young computer entrepreneur,
whose story, he believes, would show quite another face of
what has been condescendingly called the Dark Continent.

Documentary film-maker Madie runs his own company called
Eighty Days Productions. Its name is inspired by the novel of
Jules Verne. "The story was about this man who didn't know
what he was doing, went out and then thought he wouldn't make
his round-the-world trip in 80 days. He makes it anyway,
because thought he thought he was a day late, he had not
counted the international date line (and the extra day that
gave him)," explains Madie.

"I'm new to film-making, so I don't know what I'm doing.
Sometimes I think I won't make it. But I hope I'll make it
anyway," says the Dane, who's 37, and earlier did filming
in the mountainous Asian kingdom of Nepal.

But his current film is different.

It's a character-driven film, more than an issue-driven film.
The film is about Free/Libre and Open Source Software. But
the focus of the story is on the characters. The characters
that fight for FLOSS.

"Therefore," says Madie, "as much as it's a film about FLOSS,
it's also a film about fighting for your beliefs. This film
will show the characters fighting for what they believe in.
This happens to be Open Source, which I think is also an
important agenda."

[The phrase FLOSS, sometimes called FOSS, is an inclusive
term designed to be neutral when referring to both free
software and open source software. Software and code was
often freely traded among hackers but in the 1980s owners
starting asserting copyright over their code effectively
closing off this free exchange. Today, the FLOSS movement has
become successful in building a wide range of alternative
computing tools, including operating systems. More than that,
it is influencing a whole new way of creating and sharing not
just software but also knowledge, information and education.)

Why this unusual, maybe unglamorous and certainly technical,
subject?

Explains Madie: "That's because I used to be in the IT
sector. I once ran a joint-venture company in Uganda and came
to know about an African country like Uganda. I was very
ignorant about Africa -- as many Europeans are -- and I was
surprised by the skills and the talent, and all the modern
science of a capital city like Kampala, that has skyscrapers
taller than what we have in Copenhagen."

So, that was the eye-opener.

But Madie believes that people in many European countries
don't know about this. Because, the only images they see on
television are those from the rural areas. Images of hunger,
drought, war, AIDS, corruption and all these things that are
on the news and mainstream TV.

"I want to make a film that shows the life of the young,
urban generation in the cities. In this way I can show people
how the reality of life is here also. Because I think it's
damaging to a country like Uganda if people perceive it as a
place that is so far behind, when in fact there is a middle
class, when in fact the country is progressing. I hope this
film will make a lot of people say, 'Wow, we've never seen
such a film before'," says Madie.

His focus is around the character-sketch of James Wire, whom
he thinks of as a role model for Africans. Someone who fights
for his beliefs, and someone who is very
"internationally-oriented".

Wire Lunghabo James from Uganda runs a firm call Linux
Solutions in Africa, and has been part of the East African
Centre for Open Source Software. From mentoring young techies
just out of their teens, to working on local translation
projects, Wire has done it all. He's also quick to help
spread FLOSS skills in other parts of the continent, and has
been closely involved with a number of initiatives to spread
FLOSS in the continent. [1]

"I think he is also a role model in the sense that he
combines doing a business, with doing social work. To him
these things are not opposites; these are things that can
perfectly work well together. You can do business in a social
manner," says Madie.

Madie met James when he started the joint venture in Uganda
in 1999. Later, Madie started a web-development agency with
local partners. "It was also a social business; we made money
but we also started the web industry business in Uganda. We
were by far the biggest web firm in Uganda. In one month, we
hired 15 people and there were no web agencies in the country
at the time. And then we started to work for the
multinationals, the donors and the big local companies. And
we trained people," he says.

Madie had already been in the industry for five years.
"Nobody then had that experience (here). We put in our
systems, procedures. Our employees (from Europe) went to
Uganda and trained the local staff. While I was in the
business, I met James who was not doing websites, but server
stuff, which we didn't do," he recalls.

But, life involved drastic changes, and Madie since went into
films.

"Then, I sold my company after nine years. I continued to
work there for three more years. Then I felt it was time to
do something new. I thought I had always been too busy to
follow my more artistic inspirations, and by accident I came
into film making," he says.

And yes, he's a self-taught professional. He took two years
to learn the trade. Often attending short-term training
courses.

When is his film expected? "It's always hard to say with a
documentary. But I guess it will be released in Spring 2007.
And it will go to documentary festivals, I hope, all over the
world," says Madie.

He sees this as an "international story, with an
international subject". Free/Libre and Open Source Software
is on the agenda in many countries. "I don't think such a
film has been made before. We hope to sell it to
broadcasters; but it's important to get it around to film
festivals, to an audience that really cares about documentary
films," says he.

Did his work go down the expected route?

Says he: "When I started, I thought I was going to make the
kind of documentaries with talking heads on the screen. I soon
realised that the interesting stories are about the
characters. I'm surprised how much of the work is related to
understanding the people you are focussing on. But that makes
it even more interesting, specially if you can capture the
essence of a character in a particular situation."

It also came as a surprise for Madie to realise how difficult
it is for documentary film-makers to raise money for their
films. "We are definitely running on a low-budget, and we
have to put in hours ourselves where we don't get paid. This
only means that those who really make the film are those who
really want to make it. You can say it's those documentary
film-makers who really fight for their beliefs (that get
through). Maybe that's why I'm so fascinated by James;
because we have some of the same blood in one sense," he adds.

Madie has been tracking James Wire for nearly a couple of
years, on and off. Says he: "I've been filming on three
occasions so far, we expect another three. We'll have got 60
hours of footage, when we're done here. We're going to end up
with around a hundred hours, and will reduce it to 52
minutes. Only one per cent of everything we do is going to be
in the film. That's the only way (to get an interesting
story)."

Two other films on Free/Libre and Open Source Software have
also been made in the past -- 'Revolution OS' and 'The Code'.

"This is a very different film. First of all, because it's
filmed out of Africa, with Africans. I frankly think this is
one of the places where [Free/Libre and] Open Source is most
relevant. Due to many factors, as you know. But also it's
different because it shows Africa (and its capabilities) in a
different light."

Would it echo the colour and sounds of Africa?

Yes and no. "We point the camera to the modern side. We want
to challenge people's prejudice about sub-Saharan Africa.
Many people will see the film and won't believe this is
modern Uganda, because they haven't seen those images below,"
predicts Madie.

Email contact: david at eightydays.dk
[1] http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/218

FILM-MAKER HUNTS FOR AN UNUSUAL TECHNOLOGY FILM... IN AFRICA

David Madie is from Copenhagen, and he's on an unusual
mission in Africa. Following a young computer entrepreneur,
whose story, he believes, would show quite another face of
what has been condescendingly called the Dark Continent.

Documentary film-maker Madie runs his own company called
Eighty Days Productions. Its name is inspired by the novel of
Jules Verne. "The story was about this man who didn't know
what he was doing, went out and then thought he wouldn't make
his round-the-world trip in 80 days. He makes it anyway,
because thought he thought he was a day late, he had not
counted the international date line (and the extra day that
gave him)," explains Madie.

"I'm new to film-making, so I don't know what I'm doing.
Sometimes I think I won't make it. But I hope I'll make it
anyway," says the Dane, who's 37, and earlier did filming
in the mountainous Asian kingdom of Nepal.

But his current film is different.

It's a character-driven film, more than an issue-driven film.
The film is about Free/Libre and Open Source Software. But
the focus of the story is on the characters. The characters
that fight for FLOSS.

"Therefore," says Madie, "as much as it's a film about FLOSS,
it's also a film about fighting for your beliefs. This film
will show the characters fighting for what they believe in.
This happens to be Open Source, which I think is also an
important agenda."

[The phrase FLOSS, sometimes called FOSS, is an inclusive
term designed to be neutral when referring to both free
software and open source software. Software and code was
often freely traded among hackers but in the 1980s owners
starting asserting copyright over their code effectively
closing off this free exchange. Today, the FLOSS movement has
become successful in building a wide range of alternative
computing tools, including operating systems. More than that,
it is influencing a whole new way of creating and sharing not
just software but also knowledge, information and education.)

Why this unusual, maybe unglamorous and certainly technical,
subject?

Explains Madie: "That's because I used to be in the IT
sector. I once ran a joint-venture company in Uganda and came
to know about an African country like Uganda. I was very
ignorant about Africa -- as many Europeans are -- and I was
surprised by the skills and the talent, and all the modern
science of a capital city like Kampala, that has skyscrapers
taller than what we have in Copenhagen."

So, that was the eye-opener.

But Madie believes that people in many European countries
don't know about this. Because, the only images they see on
television are those from the rural areas. Images of hunger,
drought, war, AIDS, corruption and all these things that are
on the news and mainstream TV.

"I want to make a film that shows the life of the young,
urban generation in the cities. In this way I can show people
how the reality of life is here also. Because I think it's
damaging to a country like Uganda if people perceive it as a
place that is so far behind, when in fact there is a middle
class, when in fact the country is progressing. I hope this
film will make a lot of people say, 'Wow, we've never seen
such a film before'," says Madie.

His focus is around the character-sketch of James Wire, whom
he thinks of as a role model for Africans. Someone who fights
for his beliefs, and someone who is very
"internationally-oriented".

Wire Lunghabo James from Uganda runs a firm call Linux
Solutions in Africa, and has been part of the East African
Centre for Open Source Software. From mentoring young techies
just out of their teens, to working on local translation
projects, Wire has done it all. He's also quick to help
spread FLOSS skills in other parts of the continent, and has
been closely involved with a number of initiatives to spread
FLOSS in the continent. [1]

"I think he is also a role model in the sense that he
combines doing a business, with doing social work. To him
these things are not opposites; these are things that can
perfectly work well together. You can do business in a social
manner," says Madie.

Madie met James when he started the joint venture in Uganda
in 1999. Later, Madie started a web-development agency with
local partners. "It was also a social business; we made money
but we also started the web industry business in Uganda. We
were by far the biggest web firm in Uganda. In one month, we
hired 15 people and there were no web agencies in the country
at the time. And then we started to work for the
multinationals, the donors and the big local companies. And
we trained people," he says.

Madie had already been in the industry for five years.
"Nobody then had that experience (here). We put in our
systems, procedures. Our employees (from Europe) went to
Uganda and trained the local staff. While I was in the
business, I met James who was not doing websites, but server
stuff, which we didn't do," he recalls.

But, life involved drastic changes, and Madie since went into
films.

"Then, I sold my company after nine years. I continued to
work there for three more years. Then I felt it was time to
do something new. I thought I had always been too busy to
follow my more artistic inspirations, and by accident I came
into film making," he says.

And yes, he's a self-taught professional. He took two years
to learn the trade. Often attending short-term training
courses.

When is his film expected? "It's always hard to say with a
documentary. But I guess it will be released in Spring 2007.
And it will go to documentary festivals, I hope, all over the
world," says Madie.

He sees this as an "international story, with an
international subject". Free/Libre and Open Source Software
is on the agenda in many countries. "I don't think such a
film has been made before. We hope to sell it to
broadcasters; but it's important to get it around to film
festivals, to an audience that really cares about documentary
films," says he.

Did his work go down the expected route?

Says he: "When I started, I thought I was going to make the
kind of documentaries with talking heads on the screen. I soon
realised that the interesting stories are about the
characters. I'm surprised how much of the work is related to
understanding the people you are focussing on. But that makes
it even more interesting, specially if you can capture the
essence of a character in a particular situation."

It also came as a surprise for Madie to realise how difficult
it is for documentary film-makers to raise money for their
films. "We are definitely running on a low-budget, and we
have to put in hours ourselves where we don't get paid. This
only means that those who really make the film are those who
really want to make it. You can say it's those documentary
film-makers who really fight for their beliefs (that get
through). Maybe that's why I'm so fascinated by James;
because we have some of the same blood in one sense," he adds.

Madie has been tracking James Wire for nearly a couple of
years, on and off. Says he: "I've been filming on three
occasions so far, we expect another three. We'll have got 60
hours of footage, when we're done here. We're going to end up
with around a hundred hours, and will reduce it to 52
minutes. Only one per cent of everything we do is going to be
in the film. That's the only way (to get an interesting
story)."

Two other films on Free/Libre and Open Source Software have
also been made in the past -- 'Revolution OS' and 'The Code'.

"This is a very different film. First of all, because it's
filmed out of Africa, with Africans. I frankly think this is
one of the places where [Free/Libre and] Open Source is most
relevant. Due to many factors, as you know. But also it's
different because it shows Africa (and its capabilities) in a
different light."

Would it echo the colour and sounds of Africa?

Yes and no. "We point the camera to the modern side. We want
to challenge people's prejudice about sub-Saharan Africa.
Many people will see the film and won't believe this is
modern Uganda, because they haven't seen those images below,"
predicts Madie.

Email contact: david at eightydays.dk
[1] http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/218

Like speed-dating, these are introductions-in-a-hurry. Some 11 interesting
projects got a chance to introduce themselves to participants of Africa
Source, during the week-long event in Kalangala, on an island in Lake
Victoria, Uganda.

You have four minutes to hear all about them, before having to move on.

Dorcas Muthoni of Kenya represented LinuxChix. Despite its light-hearted
sounding name, the group is working on the serious job of improving
women's participation levels in Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

"We're a pan-Africa organisation, very focussed on African women. We are
creating a programme to mentor young women to get into computing. We
encourage chapters for local activity (in various parts of Africa) and
share best practices across our mailing lists," she said.

See africalinuxchix.org for more details. There are also other initiatives
across the globe. Sulamita Garcia from Brazil visited Bangalore, India and
inspired women there to make their voice heard in the world of FLOSS.

Africa's group was launched in February 2005, and currently has some 90
members. "We do work mainly online, and want to see how we can work on the
ground. We're looking for funding partners too," Dorcas adds. They have
lists discussing their issue in both English and French, in a continent
where the language of the colonial ruler is still, well, the lingua
franca.

LinuxChix Africa plans roadshows soon.

ArabDev.org's Manal of Egypt introduces us to how their group installed
FLOSS in schools in Upper Egypt, some three-and-half hours from Cairo. They
have a computer lab that offers FLOSS, and a telecentre. Each child gets 4-6
hours of computer time a week. And there are five children per PC.

Given their background, the geeks supporting the project, including this
young Arab lady who is threatening to teach belly-dancing to members of the
camp, find no problems in supporting the project.

"As techies, we not as used to the Arabic interface (for computing)," she
adds, honestly.

David comes from Fantsaum Foundation, a group in Nigeria that focuses on ICT
(information and communication technologies) and micro-finance. They're
working on the 'solo' computer, which will consume just 85 watts of power in
a resource-poor continent laden with untapped-talent. In addition, it will
have no moving parts, and use flash-memory.

Fantsaum acts as an "infomediary" and shares useful agri-based information
available from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Computer
Aid International, meanwhile, ships in once-used PCs for schools and
non-profits, and re-uses a vital resource in a tech field where obsolescence
(and planned obsolescence!) can otherwise result in a huge waste of computers
and mountains of perfectly-working but discarded computers.

Meanwhile, kubatana.net is a Zimbabwean network that helps civil society to
communicate with the rest of the world. It has an online directory of 270
online organisations currently, and works hard to keep its information
updated and useful. A critical job in continents like Africa and Asia, where
people tend to be enthusiastic verbal communicators, but reluctant to deploy
the written word to share their ideas.

Kubatana finds that human rights defenders tend to be the most articulate
contributors. Those in the development community appear the worst. They get
about 2500 visitors a day. "FLOSS has not really played a part (in our
activities) to date. But our organisations are undermined all the time by
viruses," says Kubatana's representative.

Rudy from South Africa gives a speedy intro to eRiding. He's from
ungana-afrika.org and points out that other non-profits badly need tech help
that comes from an NGO background. One that understands them.

"What we do is not tech support -- or attending calls to deal with, for
example, a broken printer -- but technology planning. This is very
important," says he.

Live support is very important. So also is help to migrate to FLOSS. When an
eRider finds something that works well with one organisation, (s)he
cross-pollinates with other organisations.

"eRiders are (tech support personnel for NGOs who) are motivated by work
they're doing. They often don't get salaries at commercial levels. But the
networks of eRiders are very supportive of each other. They're almost like a
[GNU]Linux users' group." That was all Rudi had time to narrate, quite
out-of-breath, before the alarm sounded for each group to move on and hear
of another experiment.

Bukeni from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) told us about work
being done to build awareness about child soldiers. Video is used here as a
tool for both advocacy and outreach. They take the videos, together with a
generator and a with bed-sheet (which doubles up as the screen). Films are
then shown in villages which HAVE probably never even seen a television
before.

Now, they've got local youth to use the cellphone as a tool for reporting
cases of children being inducted as 'soldiers'.

Hilton, a burly South African, warns you that he's got some "toast for
breakfast". And how! He's part of the Shuttleworth Foundation, set up by
geek-cosmonaut-billionaire Mark Shuttleworth to spread FLOSS and education
across South Africa.

So, they've come out with a 'vending machine' that sells -- you guessed it!
-- Free Software. Put in a CD, and take out a 'distro' or distribution of
your choice. And while your waiting for the CDs to be copied, keep reading
about the world of Free Software and what it really means.

Each CD vending machine costs US$5000 approx. But the plans are available
online and you're free to replicate it. And don't forget to claim your free
Ubuntu CDs at http://shipit.ubuntu.com

[We in India adopt a low-tech solution of encouraging FLOSS supporters to
start up low-cost, low-margins CD stores. They 'sell' distros at about a
dollar per CD, and this gives them enough of an incentive to keep on 'in
business', and share the Free Software while earning a little. That works
too.]

Goretti Zavuga Amuriat of Uganda introduces us to the women's network
Wougnet's programmes. These focus on information sharing and networking,
tech support, and rural access. They also provide a platform for women to
get speaking, through mailing lists, a monthly electronic newsletter, a
website and an online discussion forum. They offer an unusual link to the
internet, using WorldSpace's satellite radio receiver to download data to
remote village communities.

Baldati.org meanwhile is a network of villagers in the tiny country of
Lebanon. It currently links some 1468 villages. For a country which has a
lot of out-migration, it builds links between emigrants and their
villages.

Baldati -- which means simply "my village" -- helps to put up maps, GIS and
population statistics online. Then, it leaves all the content-creation to
the local people. It takes a smart bus packed with computers, to different
locations, and invites people to put *their information* online.

If villagers have issues like solid waste or environmental issues, they try
to put the people in touch with experts.

Finally, our group ended up with a rather exhausted Mark from the San
Francisco-based Inveneo. (He had been speaking to all the groups ahead of
us, repeating what he said so many times.) It has a solution which attempts
to take communication to rural areas -- thin clients, using just six watts
of power, VOIP (voice over internet protocol) for two phones, and a rugged
wireless unit that connects to a hub. From remote village to cyberspace.
Possible? Check inveneo.org where you can find details on how to build the
system, including its software.

Price? $1800, including the solar panel.

Food for thought, ideas for inspiration. The big question: can such projects
be scaled up sustainably, to ensure that real change occurs and makes the
lives of the people on the planet that little bit less of an uphill
struggle?

Dwayne Bailey (34) lives in Pretoria and comes from Cape
Town, South Africa. In the world of Free Software and Open
Source, Dwayne is well known for preaching the localisation
gospel.

Says Dwayne: "Actually localisation is everything that makes
the computer work for you in your locale (country and
language). Translating the computer interfaces is by far the
biggest task and ongoing. But its not the complete picture.
Keyboards, fonts, locales, date systems, rendering, bidi are
all part of localisation."

Dwayne has been involved with a major translation project in
South Africa. As he put it when we last spoke, "At
Translate.org.za we're localising Free and Open Source
Software into 11 South African languages. One is English,
it's quite an easy one (smiles). The others are Afrikaans,
Zulu, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Tswana, Siswati, Northern Sotho,
Southern Sotho, Ndebele." [2]

But this time, at Africa Source 2, we focussed on another issue.
What's the best route for a small-to-medium language to take, if it
wants to enter the world of computing?

Says Dwayne: "What I'm discovering now is that the first
things to do (for any language) is to get in place the basic
infrastructure. One reason is so that they can start, the
other is so that they can write and do things in their
language."

Three things need to be checked, he explains.

Firstly, whether you can type your language, and have a
keyboard to do so. Then, you need to be able to see the text,
so font-rendering is the issue here. The third important task
is to define a locale for language and country.

(In simple language, this is a configuration file that
defines whether your language uses the metric or imperial
system, what are the names in your language for the days of
the weeks and months of the year, what calendar system do you
use, and so on...)

After this, what?

Then, says Dwayne, you're really free to do
translations. That's when you need to really start
thinking about what you want to achieve. Even a
small group can achieve change, he believes.

"The reason why you need to define goals is to ensure you
don't kid yourself about what you're doing. If you're
localising [GNU]Linux into Bulgarian, and you say this is
being done so that Bulgarians can use a computer in their
language, when in fact they all use Windows, then you need
objectives that are based in reality," he explains.

Your objectives could be anything. "I'm happy if someone says
I'm translating Thunderbird, the email client, into Afrikaans
for my 100 year old granny," jokes Dwayne, whose specs and
lean figure makes him look much more serious than he is.

The import thing is to understand what your goals are like.

"It's all about focus. Your objective helps to focus where
you put in your energies. In our organisation, we found we
were being pushed from pillar to post. Everyone wanted us to
translate something, and there was always a good reason," he
narrates.

But what works well for a small language?

"My feeling is that you have to translate stuff that focuses
on the end-user. And that narrows down your scope. End-users
are the people that are mostly going to benefit from whatever
you do," he stresses.

Dwayne also suggests that localisation teams look at
cross-platform tools, i.e. those that work on multiple
operating systems such as GNU/Linux, Windows or Apple Mac.
"Even within that, I would define (the more useful tools as)
a sub-set: anything to do with communication is probably the
most important thing to work on," he explains.

Has he emerged wiser from his experiences of past work? "If I
was going to do things again, I would prioritise it in the
following order: email client, instant messaging and a word
processor. When you look at (the whole of) Open Office, it's
a relatively large project. But you can (begin by)
translating only the word processor."

Can localisation in computing really make a difference to a
language's future?

Dwayne narrates the "interesting story" of the Venda
language, which has some 700,000 speakers. "We needed to
translate it. I found there were some extra characters needed
-- beyond the Latin characters. So I investigated how to make
a keyboard, and made it just for fun. I made some fonts."

One translator in the team was a linguist. He talked about
'mechanical imperialism', where the deficiencies of the
computer were changing the way people could write a language.
That is still a problem.

This worked itself out in odd ways: a professional translator
employed by the South African parliament to translate into
Venda, couldn't type all the characters needed. So they would
type things out, and then add the 'missing' characters by
hand. "Which is completely sad. Valuable information which
could be created for the language is completely lost. That's
a demonstration that simple things could do amazing things
for a language," says Dwayne.

Isn't it sometimes an uneasy relationship between techies and
linguists, both of whom need a stable partnership to make a
translation project a success?

Says Dwayne: "Whereever there are issues about techies and
translators, the reality is that techies don't appreciate
translation. They appreciate translation when it looks good
in a press release; but in their behaviour there's not that
kind of care. But having said that, there are certain
projects where there's a growing respect for the localisers.
The key thing there is usually to have a representative for
the localisers (in tech teams). They often act as the
go-between."

Check the TranslateWiki [3], a great starting point for
localisation of your language. It offers links to: The
WordForge project; The Translate Toolkit (a toolkit to
convert between various different translation formats);
Pootle (a portal that will enable you to manage your
translation project, do web-based translation and offline
translation); the Localisation Guide (a guide to how to start
and run a localisation project) and a glossary of translation
terms.

Once programmers see localisers as valuable members of the
community and once localisers see responsive programmers both
sides begin to see a very healthy relationship, argues
Dwayne. "Something that can take us onto 100 languages."

Here are some figures that remind us of how serious the task
is: There are about 239 languages in Africa with more than
one million speakers. Free/Libre and Open Source Software
covers about 50-60 languages in total. In Africa currently
covered are 10! Says Dwayne: "Localisation is a task that
many people can do and clearly we need lots more people to
contribute."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_localization
[2] http://www.tacticaltech.org/node/237
[3] http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/

With a name like LinuxChix, you might almost think this is a
flippant group. It isn't. On the contrary it's taking on the
very serious job of empowering women in technology, and
extending their participation, in the world of Free/Libre and
Open Source Software.

LinuxChix Africa, the Kenya-based Dorcas Muthoni says: "We
see LinuxChix Africa as a solution provider and also a
development organisation." They have an interesting forum and
website at http://africalinuxchix.org/

Linuxchix Africa was formed in 2004 "by African women and for
African women". It actually is a chapter in Africa affiliated
to Linuxchix worldwide. Its aim? To help toward building the
critical mass of GNU/Linux skills among African women, and to
advocate for the use of Free/Libre and Open Source Software
for the many community development challenges being faced by
Africans, especially African women.

South Africa's Anna Badimo and Kenya's Dorcas Muthoni are
both co-founders of Linuxchix Africa.

Says Dorcas: "I'm a believer in business models to
approaching problems. If you don't approach with a business
model, you start asking questions how do we go, and how do we
grow. I do consultancy and also work on contract. I love
development work, but would always prefer when its packaged
in a business model, so I see where it's going."

So far, LinuxChix Africa has seen "a very nice response".
Their focus is on implementing activities. "We are working to
get communication going with other partners across the
continent. We've been drafting our business plan for the next
three years. Basically it places more emphasis on networking,
both for recruiting members and for recruiting partners,"
says Dorcas.

Africa faces a number of challenges currently: HIV/AIDS,
illiteracy, the lack of development, building up the
educational infrastructure, an unfair global economic system,
and more.

Linuxchix Africa argues that community development can no
longer be viewed in isolation but require multi-tiered,
cross-sectoral, and well-coordinated approaches that are
aligned to Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

"Without ICT, communities get left behind and are unable to
take advantage of its social and economic benefits. This
integration of ICT into social development programmes is
often referred to as eDevelopment, eHealth and eLearning and
represent models of ICT intervention in development, health
and education respectively," argues the group on its website.

FLOSS, or Free/Libre and Open Source Software, now makes it
possible to make software available to people who would
otherwise not afford it. Countries will no longer have to
prioritise between poverty and the digital divide. Women,
affected the most, need to be "properly tooled and
positioned" to make that difference in their lives.

ICT also still tends to be male dominated; this is
particularly true in Free Software and Open Source.
Demystifying FLOSS is one of the key role the LinuxChix
Africa sets for itself.


MAIN BLOCKS: What has kept women away from a supposedly great
tool, FLOSS?

Dorcas says: "Generally, there's lack of awareness about
FLOSS. Women are more seriously affected by this. Few people
(in our part of the world) have contact with, or a background
in, IT. Women also try to avoid science or mathematics.
They've not been in big numbers in IT or computers. So we've
had very few opportunities for women to interact (or mentor
other women)."

"I think people anyway fear computers, and women are more
affected by (this fear). This is true in the case of say
mobile phones too. Women tend to be a bit shy about playing
around with their phones then men are," Dorcas said in an
interview during the recent Africa Source II event, held in
Uganda.

But with a lot of technology tools coming into their lives,
they're becoming more and more open to this. The whole IT
industry has opened a lot of specialised areas, which are not
necessary geeky. Women have started getting a lot of
attraction of IT. They're getting training it IT, not maybe
in developing but in networking, web-design and web-devlo.

What's their priority then?

LinuxChix Africa plans to go for young school-going girls,
and inform them more about information technology as an
industry. They feel this would help them identify IT -- and
FLOSS in particular -- as a career of choice. "Without that
information, very few will even consider it. I believe if
well informed, women are going to take up technology as an
option of choice," says Dorcas.

In Kenya, she narrates, the girl who topped the board exams
recently said she wants to go into IT. "I still want to say
hi to her, and if possible share with her some ideas that can
excite her imagination," adds Dorcas.

Young women lack mentors, and they don't know what to do or
how to get started. They don't have the confidence too. With
LinuxChix Africa on the horizon, could that change?

See more such features on the Africa Source 2 wiki [3]

[1] http://africalinuxchix.org/
[2] http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource2
[3] http://wiki.africasource2.tacticaltech.org/

ENGINEER-ACTIVIST SHOWS HOW RADIO CAN INDEED PLAY AN UNUSUAL ROLE FOR INDIA

Arun Mehta (52) is an engineer-activist from India, and moderates various
discussion groups in cyberspace. He's also the CTO (chief technical officer)
of the Radiophony.com network.

One of the few alumni of India's prestigious Indian Institute of Technology
who decided to stay back, and not add to the brain-drain, he has been a
long-time campaigner for the apt use of technology. Recently, he also moved
into teaching computing science at the JMIT, near Karnal in Haryana. He is
known for his work in campaigning to open up radio broadcasting to the
citizen in India, and works on ICT-for-disability issues.

Below, an exchange of views with Frederick Noronha:

Q: Why do you see radio as particularly relevant to the 'developing' world?
Can you give some examples of how its efficacy actually works out?

We are indeed looking at the innovative uses of low-powered FM.

For one, there's community radio (where low-powered FM broadcasting is
opened to non-profit groups). In India, we are relying on the fact that 50
milliwatt FM transmitters are commonly available in the market; we assume
the use of this were legal. So we set up a 50 milliwatt transmitter in
Oravakal village in Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh in 2002-03.

It's possible to build a simple, low-powered community radio station for
under a thousand rupees (US$25).

The other application we've deployed is simultaneous translation. For
example, at the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad in 2003, we did simultaneous
translation for more than 8000 people. In three languages, Telugu, Hindu and
English.

We put up three low-powered FM radio transmitters in each hall, one for each
language, all set to broadcast at different frequencies. Participants were
given tiny Chinese-made FM radios, with earphones. Each participant tuned
the radio to his or her language's frequency, and then could walk around and
even even get some coffee, but still keep listening.

So basically, this was simultaneous translation for under one-dollar per
participant. When you're talking about 8000 participants, you can't do
(multiple-language) translation in any other way which is affordable. The
radio becomes part of the conference kit, so it becomes a very nice item to
carry home too.

Q: You mentioned the use of low-powered FM radio in keeping noise pollution
down too....

Yes, concerts without noise pollution. That's another application.

Our concept for such concerts is distributed sound. Rather than having one
large set of speakers, what we do is feed the audio to a low-powered FM
transmitter. Then, we place radios where the people are actually sitting.

So, rather than producing sound at one end of the hall, and expecting people
at the other end to hear it, we produce the sound only where it is actually
being consumed.

So, at the Ban Ganga festival near Malabar Hill in Mumbai, held in January
each year we tried it out. Incidentally, the organisers were forced to
cancel it one year, due to noise pollution reasons.

Earlier, they were consuming something like 2.5 kilowatts of power. Our
system only used only 30 watts of power. What that reflects in how much, or
how little, sound you're creating. So you go 20 metres away and you can't
hear a single thing. Yet, at the venue there's excellent sound.

Q: Wouldn't this result in a loss of quality of the audio, or music?

In fact the quality is better. When you're pumping in a lot of power into one
large speaker, it doesn't behave in a linear fashion. If you have small
amounts of power going into a large number of speakers, you get better
sounds.

Q: Isn't it more than a bit ironic that your work is being appreciated at
different international venues, but hardly gets the attention it deserves
from the authorities in India?

Yeah. We've demoed this at events like Asia Source (an international event
for NGOs held in Bangalore in early 2005), Radiocracy in Cardiff (Wales)
around 2000, and at Africa Source II held in Uganda recently.

This is very simple and inexpensive technology. The parts that go into the
transmitter for a 50 milliwatt thing is under $2. The parts are available in
any small town where radio and TVs are repaired.

Q: What are the legal issues that block the deployment of such solutions in
India today?

In India we have the most absurd system for management of spectrum. If you
go strictly by the letter of the law, you need to get clearance from 34
governments before putting up a tube-light in your house!

Anything above 1 milliwatt requires a licence. There are only two exceptions
-- certain kinds of cordless telephones, and the other is 2.4 gigaherts
wifi.

So, the entire approach to the handling of spectrum is a big, big millstone
around all our development activities. Because in rural areas you're not
able to take wires to people's homes. You need wireless. And, the government
has a complete stranglehold on it. It only very reluctantly gives any new
licenses; and often takes years.

Q: What's the way forward then, in such a situation?

The dilemma for government in the handling of spectrum is that it basically
knows just two ways. One is that you auction out the spectrum. In India, you
know what a terrible experiences that is. Take the case of FM licenses, or
basic services. The whole thing is a mess.

The other way that governments knows is a 'beauty contest'. You try and
identify which are the better applications of technology and allocate
spectrum to that. Here, the problem is that this becomes a total vested
interests' pull-and-push game. And you're also expecting the government to
play technology god, which is ridiculous in this day and age.

The only sensible way to deal with spectrum is Open Spectrum.

What governments can do in Open Spectrum is to lay down rules for social
behaviour -- ensuring that you maintain low power levels, that you don't hog
any segment of the spectrum. It's the basic rules for wifi.

The classical way of dealing with spectrum is based on old technology, where
they gave you an exclusive slice of spectrum, and only you could use that
spectrum. Modern technology, where you have smart radios, allows you to do
spectrum sharing. Like in wifi, where several users are using the same
spectrum. It works spectacularly well.

Related link: www.radiophony.com
Email contact: mehta@vsnl.com

George Lule is director for operations and training at the East African
Centre for Open Source Software. This network was conceptualised some time
back, but actually opened only in 2004. It is funded by the IICD
(International Institute for Communication and Development) from the
Netherlands.

"It's very important to note that EACOSS is a partnership between academia
and the private sector. So it's being run between the Uganda Martyrs
University and Linux Solutions. I'm at the UMU as the head of ICTs
department," says George.

So far they've been involved a lot in advocacy and training. "Actually we
are very strong in the training sector. In training we use both local and
international instructors. Some come in from Ordina, which is a very large
IT company in the Netherlands, who happen to be part of our international
partners," says George.

Others who help in the task of building Free/Libre and Open Source Software
skills come in from the Catholic University of Nijmegen and Radbound
University, both in the Netherlands.

Their immediate goal is quite broad. "To ensure the spread, and taking on of
(FL)OSS in the East African region," says George.

How successful have their been in the task? "When you look at the aim, you
realise it can't be achieved until we have the critical mass. We are still
building up the critical mass, and we are quite successful specially in
training."

Currently, their main activities focus on advocacy and training. "We have a
regular event, which we call the Free Software Weekend. There, we invite
people, talk to them, and offer them free training. We've penetrated quite a
lot of ICT organisations, so they invite us for quite a number of talks,"
explains George.

The strength of this organisation, he feels, lies both the directors and in
the market. Says he: "Directors come from diverse backgrounds, with diverse
experiments. The market is quite virgin. So it's an interesting
combination."

EACOSS is located at the UICT, the Uganda Institute for Communication
Technologies at Nakawa, in Kampala.

In cyberspace, some URLs:
http://www.eacoss.org

Other interesting Ugandan links you could google for include:
* AFNOG mailing list
* Ugandan linux users group
* I-Network

Arun Mehta is an IITian -- or, a product of that prestigious and
almost-elitist training network of Indian technology -- who is currently
campaigning to ensure that more people get access to computing, as a tool to
improve their quality of life.

Says the 52-year-old Delhi-based engineer-activist: "What the computer has
done for blind people is to make the written word accessible to them.
Earlier, they only had access via Braille, which is a very limited amount of
content."

Mehta argues that software which works for the blind also works for other
situations as well. It could help the 'print-disabled'. It includes both the
blind and the illiterate, he says. People who were unable to access the
written word.

Says Mehta: "If you take a country like India, or anywhere in the developing
world, where there are so many illiterate people, how are you going to
address illiteracy when there are so few teachers?"

Distance learning holds a promise, he believes, if the illiterate can access
computers. In addition, there are also situations where you cannot look at
the screen -- like when you're driving -- and that's why navigation software
talks to you, he explains. Therefore, as Mehta argues, software for the
blind can be useful for more people than just the sight-deficient.

But what's the current situation in terms of availabity of software for the
blind?

"There are good screen readers available in (on the proprietorial) Windows
platform, even though writing a screen reader in Windows is much harder than
in the Free/Libre and Open Source Software environment. What a screen-reader
is does is making software that is not fundamentally designed for access by
the blind; it's only trying to make it accessible," says he.

The screen-reader has to go along, do OCR (optical character recognition)
and try to make sense of what the alphabet is. And, as he points out, OCR
can be unpredictable. Sometimes it works; sometimes it doesn't.

With proprietorial software, says Mehta, you cannot go into the source code,
and put in a little bit of code to make the software accessible. For
example, at the places where information is being outputted to the screen,
you could put in commands to make that information accessible via audio.

"That is where (Free and) Open Source would be really great. The problem is
that very few blind people use Open Source; I don't know a single one
myself," says the chief technical officer of the Radiophony.com website..

There's a screen reader under GNU/Linux called Gnopernicus. "But it's not
that great. For example, one major problem with that is that we were not
able to make it work with (the wordprocessing tool) Open Office. Which is a
very fundamental thing when you're using the computer," says Mehta. "Maybe
it's also a problem in my own knowledge of the area, but I've not been able
to explore this."

DOING FOR THEMSELVES: Arun Mehta argues that his view is that it's very hard
for sighted developers to put themselves in the shoes of blind people, and
then write software for them. It would be much easier to teach programming
to blind people.

Says he: "The advantages for that are at several levels. If you look at the
software life-cycle there are four aspects -- conceptualisation, coding,
testing, then the maintenance. For stages one, two and four, the blind would
have much more of a commitment. The only one link in the chain which is
missing is actual coding. That's the portion we need to address."

How did he get involved in this field? Mehta got the opportunity to work on
the software needed by Stephen Hawkings, the physically-challenged but
amazing brain known for his work throughout the world.

"Through Stephen Hawkings, when I saw how much difference the computer had
made in his life, and how hard it was inspite of it all for even him to get
(software) support. I saw this as something would make a huge difference and
a huge opportunity. We've only scratched the surface in terms of what ICTs
can do in the lives of the disabled," says he.

Currently his team is nearing completion on work for developing a
Hindi-English bi-lingual screen-reader. This is needed, for instance, when
you're using an English-language browser, and accessing a Hindi web-page.
This is being done by the Indian National Association for the Blind (NAB).
There are just a few bugs left to weed out. It next goes for beta-testing.

On Sunday mornings, Mehta has started an online mentoring class, which
people with disability can join. They've also been having a Saturday
afternoon workshop at the Indian NAB's RK Puram Technology Centre in New
Delhi. (As an aside, Mehta mentions that this centre is itself running out
of funding.) This is one of the few places in the country where the blind
can be taught how to use computing.

There was another project one of Mehta's students had taken up. It could not
be completed though, because the youngster got a job before its completion.
It was to make a simple Hindi speech-enabled text editor.

Says Mehta: "There are a lot of manual typists who are blind. When their
office switches from manual typewriters to computers, what should have been
a boon, because you get the crucial backspace key (to remove errors),
becomes a tragedy. They lose their job because there's no Hindi screen
reader. They can't use the computer at all in Hindi. That applies to many
other languages too, except the (Roman script-based and) European
languages," explains Mehta.

He argues that the blind are "at the forefront" in standard-setting in
information handling. They have set up a standard DAISY (Digtal Accessible
Information System).

Visually-challenged persons use audio books a lot, Mehta says, but says it's
a "joke" to call these audio books. "You can't scroll. You can't search.
There's no index. So what the DAISY standard does is that it allows you to
synchronise text with the corresponding speech.

In a DAISY book, if you want to scroll, you just type 'Take me to the next
para'. What the software does is to use the text, take you to the correct
page, and then start playing the correct page. You can do that with
text-to-speech or use human speech. You're actually using the text, but
playing the audio," he explains.

Mehta believes the computer can be a wonder tool for the blind, but he badly
wants geeks to look seriously at this issue, and teach the blind some neat
way of programming. He also believes the visually-challenged can look up to
some useful potential from the world of audio and podcasting.

USEFUL LINKS:
Blindprogramming.com
india-gii.org Check resources on the wiki
cilberkley.org Centre for Independent Living, at Berkley (check URL)

FREE AS IN FREEDOM: IN SYRIA, FLOSS FLIGHTS AN EMBARGO FROM ABROAD

Anas Tawileh (29) is based in Cardiff, Wales. But he's doing an unbelievable
job in promoting Free/Libre and Open Source Software in his home country,
Syria.

Says he: "We have a very nice point (to make) in Syria. We are currently
under a technological embargo from the US. Which means we cannot legally
obtain the license for any kind of software, whatever it is. Even Windows
95, Windows 98 or server applications. Because these things are considered
as 'high-technology'."

So, Anas is just going about building a network based on FLOSS. From ground
up.

Anas narrates a story: "One guy won a personal computer, because he
subscribed to a magazine via the Middle East. But because it was violating
the US export law, they refused to ship it to him."

This leaves his country with only two options. To "pirate" (i.e. illegally
copy) software. But even those who take this route would not be able to
access the much-needed support for proprietary software. The other option,
points out Anas, is FLOSS.

Anas is currently doing his PhD in FLOSS, and is founder of the Syrian
GNU/Linux Users Group. His PhD looks at information assurance in FLOSS
communities. He explains that saying: "I'm looking at how you can trust
information produced in the community. How can you trust the things you see.
We want those guys to believe in what we do. It's not a question only of us
(FLOSS communities) believing in our work. My PhD work is still at an early
stage. I started just last year."

His vision? In the current situation of Syria, Anas hopes to foster a very
active community that could support government, businesses, and
universities, when it comes to their software needs. Simply by eliminating
the need to play around the US export law, and by providing solutions based
on FLOSS.

With that objective in mind, they started "many initiatives". The most
important of which is the Syrian Linux User Group.

SLUG was started in February 2002, and, Anas says, "when we started it was
only me". Growth was initially slow, very slow. "But we kept insisting on
our mission until now we have almost 700 members, and it's growing everyday.
People are contributing to what we are doing," says he. Initially, decision
makers gave the cold-shoulder.

"I tell decision-makers that after we built some capacity, a local community
that could support you. You would be self-sufficient, when it comes to your
software needs. We initially encountered lots of resistance, because most of
the people in decision-making positions are relatively old. So they're not
that open-minded to new ideas," says the 29-year-old.

What more: "When we went to ally with software technology people, those guys
were trained on proprietary software. So they were not willing to retrain
themselves and adapt to the new technology landscape."

So Anas and his determined team kept working, doing awareness programmes,
free training programmes, volunteering programmes, and even some
recreational activities (like picnics). This reinforced the relations within
the group and the community.

"We were lucky enough to find some people who are well-enough known and
influential for people to hear what they say. They believed in our mission.
Particularly the community, and the strong ties among members of our
community. They said, something's happening there. Let's look into it...,"
he recalls.

In 2004, they did their first international event, which was the Free and
Open Source Software Workshop, 2004. That was pretty good, because it
attracted attention of the media -- local and international, lot of
ministers attended the workshop, and the recommendations went to the
government. "That was pretty cool," says Anas.

Within the year, between 2004 and 2005, he says they were able to make a
huge difference. "We did a lot of activities, we trained people, we collected
money from donors and raised a lot of funds. We put that into the community.
Mainly in training and capacity-building. By that time, government and
officials were more open to what we were saying," says Anas.

Syria is surrounded by Jordan and Lebanon, which Anas sees as "both
dominated by Microsoft for so many reasons". There are people working on
FLOSS, but at the country-wide level the decision is made to go in for
proprietary software, he notes.

"We don't have that; we can't have that. Microsoft, or any other American
company for that matter, can't get into the country. This gives us an
advantage as FLOSS advocates in Syria," he says.

This plays out in strange ways. There are examples too. It happened once
when the country wanted to implement a very large project, relating to the
public data network. Sun refused to sell them their Solaris operating
system. So, after a lot of debates, and negotiations, the decision-makers
asked for assistance to change the design from Sun Solaris to a
GNU/Linux-based system. That was one of the major victories, coming in late
2004 and early 2005, narrates Anas.

"I see the situation of FLOSS in Syria in a critical state currently. If the
momentum that was created by all the previous activities could be sustained
and stepped up further, the country could be the pioneer for the use of
FLOSS in the Arab World and the Middle-East. But if we fail to achieve that,
then I see it natural for FLOSS to fall apart from the future of the
software industry in the country," he says.

He sees some negative trends too.

Says Anas: "What I would like to see is people contributing more. We have
contributed already. We translated the LPI (Linux Professional Institute)
training materials within the user-group. But still, and it's not only a
problem on the Syrian level but an Arab world-wide problem, we don't
contribute code. I believe that until we contribute code, we are not really
contributing."

[As an aside, if anyone would like to know more about the Linux Professional
Institute and its training, contact Glenn McKnight glenn@lpi.org and mention
Anas' name. It won't hurt.]

Work needs to be better co-ordinated too, says Anas.

"I'm seeing people translating the interface of PostNuke. They think they've
done something amazing. Actually, it's only a kindergarten job. It's not
coding. We don't have the proper understanding of the mechanisms of this
movement, so we still magnify our achievements... on the personal and
organisational level. One organisation might install a server with Apache on
it, and then say, 'We use FOSS'. Which is simply not true. There's a lot
more to it than that," says he.

In his view, people need to really learn how FLOSS works, and they should
benefit form it too. It will take time, he feels; but we need to speed it
up. "There is a momentum now. We need to capture this momentum. Otherwise it
will take much longer and cost us more."

Currently, he says in Syria, Government is convinced, so is business. Says
he: "You can see ads advertising for PHP developers. Our situation
currently, compared to other countries, is fairly advanced. In the
conference we organised in 2005, we had 18 speakers from all over the world,
including Richard Stallman himself, who explained clearly why he started the
thing altogether."

They started a dedicated supplement in a technology monthly magazine called
T-Mag, of which Anas is editor for the supplement. "Every month you can expect
more news, articles, and more. I translated the Free Documentation License.
Everything in this supplement is published under this license," he adds.

Getting the supplement published was not easy. "It took me so long to
convince the guy. It costs him $10,000 per month. We're at issue Number 6.
We've also translated The Cathedral and The Bazaar (Eric Raymond's book
which argues why the Open Source model actually makes business sense) into
Arabic."

Anas encourages university students to send in articles. They have good
ideas, but are sometimes awful at arranging the structure of the article.
"You can't imagine the self-esteem they get (when the article gets edited or
re-written and published)," he adds.

Together with partners, they've launched the Nosstia Centre of Excellence.
It's run in collaboration between an NGO called Nostia, Damascus University,
some donors and the user-group to build capacity in FLOSS. They've also
created a certification programme in FLOSS, which they are delivering in
this centre.

"I have 700 people (around the user-group); 80 of them are certified
internationally. We raised some funds to deliver a training course in RHCE
(Red Hat Certified Engineer). That involves 96 hours of training; then we
conducted exams. We had lot of problems with the US export laws as well. Now
we have six Red Hat Certified Engineers and five Red Had Certified
Technicians. RHCE involves an eight-hours exams. We now have 45
LPI-certified personnel."

Anas feels they've all worked so hard to build this momentum. "If we can
push it a little further... What the Malaysians did, by way of a FLOSS
master plan, is very very good. If we can learn from them, and then convince
people in Syria, that this is the way to go. If this happens, you will
create a complete eco-system of modifiers of code, trainers, consultants,
consumers. A complete ecosystem that will retain the money that will be
drained when we have to buy proprietorial licenses. This (building up local
capacity and skills) is development as I understand it, from a technological
point of view."

FLOSS's skill-share is "not like Microsoft contributing Microsoft Exchange
for 1000 users, to an organisation, and after three years asking for an
upgrade or charging for consultants to install it. It's not even training
kids and university students on Microsoft, Oracle or some technologies where
they will be stuck with it for the rest of the lives. GNU/Linux is open, so
they are free to do whatever they like," explains Anas.

He explains that when in Syria in July 2005, for a conference in Damascus,
students from the Homs University asked him to conduct a day-long workshop
in FLOSS. "They organised the whole thing in three days. And it worked
perfectly well," he says, recalling their gratitude and how eagerly they
accepted all this.

"I used to do any activity every 2-3 weeks when I was in Damascus (before
moving to the UK for higher studies). You can't imagine the happiness when
young people come and ask you things, and get replies for it. I had an email
from three young women who said they wanted to build an object-oriented
operating system."

What does he see as future priorities? Building a solid partnership of
networking. For instance, they've networked with a French centre to build
FLOSS. They've taken 30 thin clients, and put up an English-learning
software for women and girls. Anas has also authored a book in Arabic,
called 'Open Source, Unlimited Opportunities'. Says he: "It's not a
technical book at all. It's a message to people at high levels who can make
choices."

Now, that's doing a lot. Isn't it?

Some random quotes from the edge of Lake Victoria....

There's so much to share. -- Alan "Gunner" Gunn.

If someone has more questions (to ask), does he get more beer? -- Eric from
Ghana

The cool part of my job is that I'm (often) meeting up with musicians and
authors. -- Heather Ford, of the Creative Commons project in South Africa,
which encourages creative persons to share their content instead of using
restrictive copyright licenses.

Protests. Elections. Corruption. Citizen media. Aggregator. Blogs, New
faces. United front. Violence. Forgery. Digital cameras. Cross generations.
RSS. Creativity. Posters. Monitors. -- Egyptian bloggers offering keywords,
on what technology tools could achieve, and help fight, in campaigns.

It's never okay to tell someone 'you're stupid'. -- Alan "Gunner" Gunn

Someone asked me why we didn't have Africa Source 2 in Ghana in 2005. We'll
we couldn't find an island, which was so beautiful... and so far away. --
Eric.

You get all the things here that you get in a small town. The only thing we
found a stockist for though is beer. Patrice Reimens, FLOSSopher, making an
announcement.

I ask NGOs what did you do (to make Free Software more usable). This is not
software you buy; this is software you create. -- Ala, Egypt.

I'm a web-developer and want to know if there's anything to replace
Macromedia Flash. -- Camp participant.

This is that everybody-understands-English (logic). -- Western participant,
critical of the view that Free/Libre and Open Source Software doesn't need
to be localised before it gains wider acceptability.

For me, the real world and cyber campaigns are not separable at all. We
started on the web, but had ripples everywhere else. -- Ala, Egypt.

Less than 5-10% of the population has access to the web. But the majority
don't read pamphlets either. So start your campaigns on the web; but don't
stop at that. Use leaflets too, and every other possible media. No one could
have predicted that blogs could have been such an effective channel. -- Ala,
Egypt.

There is no one who is using a computer right now who is not literate. --
Another point of view.

Instead of calling (the GNU/Linux distro) Mandrake, we should be calling it
M'bata (which means 'duck'). -- Charles Loku of Uganda.

Language questions are very complete. They are connected with issues of
literacy, politics and more. There is much more to localisation than
translation.... Translation is good, but much more is needed. We need more
users, and more techies. We, the Arab users have to solve our own ks
Arab problems. If we do have training and more users (we can do that). --
Ala, Egypt.

People pushing for localisation are usually people from larger tribes and
people from groups which have well-documented languages. -- One African
participant.

I feel very, very sad. You guys over there: are you okay [pointing to his
head]? One of the basic tracks of training is communication. How are you
going to communicate? One major reason for any digital divide is because of
language (issues). Why should people learn English, German or French simply
because they want to use computers? We have some rich people in our
countries, who don't know English, and spend their money of fancy cars,
instead of on computers, because of that. -- James Wire, Linux Solutions,
Uganda.

You're stretching the joke a little bit too far... trying to spread the
Gospel (of GNU/Linux) will be easier (with localisation). -- James Wire,
Uganda.

Training and translation need each other. If we translate, we shall make it.
-- Participants views, at the debate on what's needed for migration to
FLOSS.

Once people are trained in FLOSS, localisation will come about easily... --
Another view.

Every voice in this room has experience. We honour that. -- Alan 'Gunn'
Gunner.

We start the day whenever you're woken up by Gunner. -- Marek

You may think were here to learn about software technology. The Number One
reason is to meet and get to know the people in this magical circle. --
Gunner

Conversations happened (once we linked the various blogs together). We
linked political groups together too. Instead of seeing protests with just
70 people, we started to see much larger numbers. We created websites for
all. We used SMS to get out the latest news. We're using mailing lists and
email, blogs, websites and aggregators that bring content to one place. Our
audience is small, but influential. All activists and journalists read it.
Anything we publish has a good chance of getting picked up and being
mentioned in (the influential Arab world media organisation) Al Jazeera, or
the Christian Science Monitor. -- Ala, Egypt.

The Wikipedia is one of the most amazing websites in the world. Wikis are
websites that anyone can go along and edit. People coming out of
universities are terrible at working in teams (since they work
individually). Wikis help solve the issue of collective functioning. -- Arun
Mehta, engineer-activist from New Delhi.

We've used a wiki to develop a guide about the information commons in
Africa. Wikis are great. But if no one is going to take the time to edit the
information (then it's of limited use). -- Heather Ford, Creative Commons
South Africa.

Speed-geeking is like speed-dating. In speed-dating, you get two minutes to
talk, and if you like each other, you exchange phone numbers. If we gave
everyone time to tell their story, we would be here till December. -- Alan
"Gunner" Gunn, introducing the concept of how stories from a range of people
are being introduced to camp participants, in a nutshell.

We have about 500 blogs in Egypt. But that's still quite small for a country
of 70 million inhabitants. -- Ala, Egypt.

You can start a campaign on the Net. But you still have to use the mass
media (and its influence). Using the international mass media helps to
protect you too. -- Ala, Egypt.

He became the first-ever Afronaut. But the debonair young
South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has also
touched another high, by distributing for free six million
CDs of Free Software. He has posted these software tools to
enthusiasts across the globe, with the goal of planting new
ideas of sharing and creating knowledge.

Shuttleworth started young -- programming on the Free
Software platform from the ages of 11 to 14. Then he took a
gap, and resumed from the age of 19. The high-profile sale of
his digital encription company, just before the dot-com bust,
was the source of his wealth, which he is ploughing back for
the further spread of Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

Shuttleworth (32) made his name through IT entrepreneurism,
and then attracted the headlines by joining a Russian space
expedition. But, in recent years he made big news by
promoting hisUbuntu distribution of the Free and Open Source
software. Ubuntu means "humanity towards others".

"(Distributing) CDs is a labour of love. We've touched six
million CDs distributed already," Shuttleworth told this
journalist in an interview, on a moonlight night on the banks
of Lake Victoria, Uganda. At this remote setting, he joined
an international camp to promote Free/Libre and Open Source
Software among not-for-profit organisations that is currently
underway (in mid-January 2006).

But is this sustainable? Can Ubuntu go on distributing CDs
indefinitely? Even postage is not charged for...

"I don't know if it is sustainable. At this stage I fund it
because I feel it's the right think to do. I owe a lot of my
wealth to the fact that Linux was there when I needed it.
Linux allowed me to build a business in Cape Town in the
midst of the dotcom boom," says Shuttleworth.

"My goal is to keep the (Ubuntu) software free. And free of
encumbents," he said.

Recently, Ubuntu and its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, both won
awards at the Linux New Media Awards in late 2005 Linux World
Expo in Frankfurt, Germany. The Best Debian Derivative
Distribution award was judged by a 200-member international
jury from industry and the FLOSS community. This award
recognises the effort the Ubuntu team have put into working
with Debian in order to produce an easy-to-use desktop
environment, suitable for everyone.

"That was an honour," says Shuttleworth, in his modest style.

KUBUNTU, EDUBUNTU: Now, Ubuntu is spilling off into other
projects.

"We started with the single distro (Ubuntu), an what we are
trying to do is show you can produce a distro on the
six-month release schedule. And that you could make it very
usable and also keep it on to a single CD," says
Shuttleworth.

Along the way, they "found" people were taking their work and
adapting in all kinds of different directions. They found
that GNOME was being replaced by KDE. "So, we support that
and call it Kubuntu," says Shuttleworth.

"We found people using Ubuntu a lot for education. Different
groups were adding on educational applications to it. By
creating the Edubuntu (project), that work is now being
shared (with others)."

What does he see as the biggest roadblocks in the wider
adoption of Free Software and Open Source worldwide?

Linux allowed me to build a business in Cape Town in the
midst of the dotcom boom," says Shuttleworth.

"My goal is to keep the (Ubuntu) software free. And free of
encumbents," he said.

Recently, Ubuntu and its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, both won
awards at the Linux New Media Awards in late 2005 Linux World
Expo in Frankfurt, Germany. The Best Debian Derivative
Distribution award was judged by a 200-member international
jury from industry and the FLOSS community. This award
recognises the effort the Ubuntu team have put into working
with Debian in order to produce an easy-to-use desktop
environment, suitable for everyone.

"That was an honour," says Shuttleworth, in his modest style.

KUBUNTU, EDUBUNTU: Now, Ubuntu is spilling off into other
projects.

"We started with the single distro (Ubuntu), an what we are
trying to do is show you can produce a distro on the
six-month release schedule. And that you could make it very
usable and also keep it on to a single CD," says
Shuttleworth.

Along the way, they "found" people were taking their work and
adapting in all kinds of different directions. They found
that GNOME was being replaced by KDE. "So, we support that
and call it Kubuntu," says Shuttleworth.

"We found people using Ubuntu a lot for education. Different
groups were adding on educational applications to it. By
creating the Edubuntu (project), that work is now being
shared (with others)."

What does he see as the biggest roadblocks in the wider
adoption of Free Software and Open Source worldwide?

Says Shuttleworth: "The biggest long-term constraint in the
adoption of Linux is the availability of skills. When people
talk of access to support, they're really referring to the
[limited amount of] pervasiveness of Linux skills in IT. The
good news is that because the software is freely available,
people can give themselves the skills quietly, because they
can get it (by learning on their own)."

Shuttleworth anticipates that at some "tippling point in the
future", once the availability of skills grow, all businesses
will add the possibility of offering Linux skills to the
proprietorial software-based Windows-skills they offer. Once
that happens, we could see a great acceptance for Linux, he
says.

"We're entering a time where the functionality of Free
Software is pretty much on par with proprietorial software.
It's about the availability of skills, and also the
perception of the availability of these skills," says
Shuttleworth.

TOUR OF ASIA: The Ubuntu team is planning to have business
tour around Asia in early 2006. Says Shuttleworth: "I'm
really looking forward to the visit. It's my first to India
(and many parts of Asia). We start off in Pakistan, and then
move to India, China, Japan, Korea, Sing pore, Indonesia and
Malaysia."

"India is very interesting from an Open Source and Free
Software point of view. On the one side you have an
acknowledgment of the need for development, and the passion
and pride that comes from (achieving) in the world of
technology. One would think it would be fertile ground (for
non-proprietorial software). Surprisingly, India is a little
late in its adoption of Open Source," says Shuttleworth.

He believes that what we are seeing now is a rapid pendulum
swing. "I'm hoping we can help the swing of the pendulum. (In
Asia), I'll be visiting universities, companies that provide
professional services -- such as integration, business
process outsourcing -- as well as government officials," he
adds.

His visit takes him to India over two stretches, including
for the Linux Asia event held in New Delhi from February 8,
and also for another stint around mid-January.

ECONOMIC PRESSURES ON DEVELOPERS: Shuttleworth believes that
economic pressures could keep the 'developing' countries from
contributing more significantly to the Free Software world.

He says, "In wealthier countries, you can often find folks
who can take a personal decision to fore-go their personal
income in view of values of Free Software. It's that maybe
that has made it difficult for the young Indian software
enthusiast to throw themselves into the Free Software world."

As we talk, a young tech enthusiast from Africa wants to know
if their continent could "learn lessons from India". Says
Shuttleworth: "What India has going for it, is its scale.
Africa is fragmented by national boundaries. It's hard to
build something that is genuinely African. To get bandwidth
between Uganda and South Africa just imaging the amount of
hurdles and regulation one has to go through."

Shuttleworth believes India encouraged the early adoption of
ICTs (information and technologies for communication) and
helped investments in field. "Today India is reaping the
rewards of those involvements," says he.

"Africa could do very well in competition with India, if we
got our act together. We all have the time-zone advantage,
since our time is same as Europe's. We also speak major
European languages," says he.

EDUCATION, FUNDAMENTAL: Education is fundamental to economic
growth, he argues, bring in his social perspective into
business. He sees it as the "fundamental investment you make
in your people".

Economics of the 21st century all about either massive scale
or sophistication, in his world-view. "It's very hard to
compete with China on scale. You can compete in terms of
knowledge and specialist," he adds.

For a 32-year-old, he seems to have given away a significant
amount of his wealth to philanthropy. ("The more he gives
away, the more his net worth increases," says Ugandan IT
professional James Wire.)

Shuttleworth calculates that he gives away six million
dollars each year to the foundation he set up. (In fact, you
can just log onto the internet website
http://shipit.ubuntu.com and ask for free GNU/Linux CDs from
here, for instance. You not only get the CDs for free, but
even the postage is paid for.) Ubuntu Linux costs him ten
million dollars a year. "That is not all in philanthropy. I
hope Ubuntu would become viable one day," says he.

Says he: "My real passion is the Ubuntu project. I love the
project. Enjoy working on it. Meeting community developers.
Maybe we're just the right thing at the right time. We came
and focussed on the desktop just when all the desktop pieces
started falling in place. We cant' take credit (for its
speedy succes)." He sees its special worth coming from its
"straightforwardness, ease of installation, and ease of use".
"Our community is very very strong", as he puts it.

Ubuntu's biggest user-base today is in the US, which
Shuttleworth finds amazing. "Only one country which is very,
very strange. Japan is very, very small in terms of acceptance
of Ubuntu," says he. "Hopefully we can keep Red Hat honest,"
he says, referring to the giant GNU/Linux distribution and
its move-away from supporting a free distribution.

Says he: "I think Microsoft has every right to charge for
their software. They wrote 99 per cent of it. They genuinely
own the code they're selling. With Ubuntu we write a tiny
fraction of it. The cost of producing that CD are largely
borne by other people giving of their time. Therefore it
makes sense that the revenue structure should be very
different as well. We're trying to build a business model. I
don't know if it will succeed. My goal is to make is
sustainable, without charging for it."

Ubuntu started less than two years ago. For the first six
months it was "quiet", he says.

Shuttleworth is quick to point to the achievements on the
GNU/Linux front. "We have stuff like (the the e-education
platform) Moodle which is coming along very quickly. But it's
server-based. You're not conscious of the fact that your
using Linux. Where Linux has huge advantages are your ability
to do thin client solutions -- it gives you massive cost
advantages," he says.

EDUCATION: Shuttleworth sat beneath an African half-moon,
with tall trees overlooking, as he discussed with young
people from his continent on how students needed more
educational software, and about what glitches they perceive
as needed to smoothen out wider adoption of Free Software.

He says he looks forward to broaden his philantrophic
activities from education in Africa -- its current focus --
to other activities as well. "But it (the Shuttleworth
Foundation) needs to get very credible in education, before
we move ahead," he says. "It's difficult to manage...
specially when you're fighting too many learning curves at
the same time."

He explains that they've started a project to produce
computer-based curriculum for students aged 8 to 18 in
Africa. "We are not producing maths teachers in South Africa
now. It's getting harder and harder to find a good maths
teacher in South Africa. Why do we teach maths in school?
It's because we need to produce analytical skills. It really
helps, even if all of us don't remember our high school
mathematics," he says.

BIGGER HIGH: What gives him a bigger high: going to outer
space at the cost of millions of dollars aboard a Russian
spacecraft, or promoting GNU/Linux from the heart of South
Africa?

Shuttleworth laughs: "Actually, doing Ubuntu has a lot to do
with going to outer space. Space is such is such a incredible
environment, people are so fascinated by it. So, after you've
been one, it becomes very difficult to anything but be an
astronaut. So when I came back (from outer space) I decided
to look around and find something that would be really hard,
really interesting and make a big impact in the world. It
took me a while to do it."

But when he found it, it was Ubuntu. "Both give me a high for
different reasons. Space was a high for me; I spent that
money for myself. Ubuntu is for everybody".

Why does he call his user-friendly distribution "Linux for
human beings", I asked. Back home in India, this tag-line
always seems to attract attention in geek circles.

"It's a little cheek. It's also aimed at the idea that Linux
(traditionally) hasn't been people friendly. Ubuntu is built
for people, not for techies. But at the same time. you want a
project which is attractive to developers. Or you don't get
all that love, collaboration and Free Software development.
It's a fine line."

BUSINESS OR SOFTWARE: What's more difficult, developing
software or dabbling in the world of business, as a
billionaire?

"I don't think I'm that good at either," he says, with the
understatement that runs through our exchange. "I love
software development. I enjoyed the clarity of thought it
required. The intensity of the experience. It involves diving
into a problem, mentally organising yourself, and producing
code that gives a solution. I also enjoy working with the
different kind of relations that go into a business."

Why is his work based out of Africa? "Africa is important to
me; it's important to the world, I think. Open Source is one
of the key drivers for change in today's world. To leapfrog
and build an infrastructure for us. Putting those two
together, it's the right place at this time. I'm sorry I
can't be at this camp (Africa Source II, which has been meant
to encourage non-profit groups use Free Software) for the
whole week. Conversations here are fascinating."

FAST CARS, FAST WOMEN: Sometime in the past, Shuttleworth had
jokingly said he could have splurged his money on "fast cars
and fast women". When reminded, he laughs: "That's Plan B. If
I fail, maybe I go back to it."

He sees the development of Free Software and Open Source as a
"genuine post-capitalist model". Says he: "Some say it's
communist. But it's a lot about people collaborating at one
level, while still competing at another. In a lot of areas of
technology, it doesn't make sense to try and differentiate
(and compete) on everything."

Shuttleworth believes we're going to see "that spirit of
collaboration" spreading not just in Free Software, but also
in the media. He cites the example of collaborative online
media tools such as Slashdot and podcasting.

"Fpr the first time, both the skills and the tools to
practice the tools can be accessed together. To me it's a
fundamental change in the industry. It remains to be see if

it will become the defacto way of the (software) industry (to
work in the future). My instinct tells me this could happen."

Contacts: mark at ubuntu.com

Stephen Settimi (52) is the USAID's Global Health Bureau's senior technical
advisor for knowledge management and ICT4D. Based in Washington DC, his
background has been in software application development in health
management, patient tracking and health surveys. He explains his work and
his perspectives to Frederick Noronha:

Q: What is USAID doing on the issue of health and ICTs?

We've been working at a couple of levels. We look to help develop national
systems and we look to develop systems that can be used in the field for
health management. We also work in developing systems for human capacity
development. Above all, we look to find ways to integrate across sectors
with health as a major component.

Q: Can you give us some examples of how this works out?

For instance, the John Hopkins' INFO Project which has a large knowledge
management component to it, on health research dissemination in family
planning and reproductive health.

Another example that addresses the Free Libre and Open Source Software
(FLOSS) community is the capacity project, and that's a $250+ million dollar
five year contract, scattered across Africa. They have chosen to use
(Free/Libre and) Open Source Software as the basis for developing the
framework for the software. This aims to help national, municipal, and
district level governments meet their unmet needs for staffing for
health-professional nurses and professional training needs. People that work
in clinics and health centres.

Q: It seems that ICT (information and communication technologies) have been
used very little in the field of health (as compared to say, in education or
agriculture). We do see examples from the high-end segment for the affluent,
but few for the common(wo)man. Why?

I think, historically, that's because the communities that we generally
serve are people who have less health equity. Resources aren't usually there
for public health. So the resources that go for public health in ICT are
somewhat lagging behind too.

But the trend seems to be changing. What the model is, is to use ICT to not
only help in health programmes, but also to provide opportunities for
livelihoods, using that technology and or developing entrepreneurial
opportunities that would naturally follow that progression.

Q: Which countries in Africa in Asia do you see as doing good work in this
field?

The ones that stand out most are places like Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Ghana.
I've heard a lot of good things about Tanzania, and I'm certain there are
others. We hear a lot of development going on in the Philippines, the Mekong
area -- Thailand, Cambodia. And of course in Jordan, parts of India. I think
there are good examples coming in now from everywhere.

Q: Would you agree that ICT seems to be viewed as a magic wand, one that
will take care of all our problems and unsorted difficulties, including the
economic and political ones, all in one magic go? Isn't that an unrealistic
expectation anyway?

I think it's kind-of seen as a sort of panacea. With anything like that,
there's a kind of truth. It does provide investment opportunities. It
provides opportunities for building skills, for learning, and of course if
it's used to also address some of the more pressing issues -- like giving
information and knowledge out to communities, and get back information from
communities as a two-way street. Theoretically we should expect some kind of
improvement.

Q: From your experiences, what works best?

The solutions that have proven the best in international development are
those that are heavily-driven by community expressions of need and desire to
develop in certain ways. Needs for better health, or needs for better
transportation of water. When it's community-driven, we get better outcomes.
Specially if the community is integrally involved.

Q: Could you cite any small-but-successful projects?

Small is a relative term. Let me think... ICT for communications, exposing
people to new ideas, giving people a chance to exchange and share knowledge.
Among youth, internet cafes are a real good investment. Community portals
for using internet technology for a variety of purposes also help.

Some of the larger ones could be the Last Mile Initiative. It's an attempt
to bring technologies, specially internet connectivity, out to the most
rural areas in countries.

I guess if you're also looking at the specific tools, once they get their
wikis and blogs, these could be very important for the community; such tools
serve as channels for communication. It offers learning from people who live
elsewhere on what could be done or not.

Q: Any examples of useful software in the Free/Libre and Open Source
Software world?

Interesting ones might be (for the field of GIS, or geographical information
systems), the map server, developed by University of Minnesota and NASA.
This was work done on FLOSS. This suite of tools is being developed by
IntraHealth, and involves a suite called Power Tools, for managing human
resources in health programmes. Take a look at Capacityproject.org.

I think FLOSS is an opportunity for an easy leg-up for countries and
communities to get involved in a very low-cost or no-cost basis for getting
them involved in ICT. For them to understand the mechanics. So that if they
decide to invest in other technologies, they have the platform to make some
sound decisions.

Sites to visit http://www.usaid.gov (see under 'health bureau')
Email contact for Stephen Settimi: ssetimi at usaid dot gov

There are no rules, but only guidelines. Yet some of these guidelines are so
clearly laid out here, that you can't but get the impression that you better
not fool around with them.

Show respect for others at all times. No insulting others. Not even in
moments of philosophical disagreement and passionate exchange. Include
everyone 'in the circle'. Broaden networks. Introduce yourself to strangers
"early and often". Ask questions "early and often".

Embrace a spirit of sharing. After all, everyone is an expert in their own
realm. Share first, debate later. Relationship-building and dialogue is
considered as fundamental here.

It's one ride to hell that takes hours to complete. But when you get there,
it's paradise. "This place is falling apart," an unusually exasperated Arun
Mehta, engineer from New Delhi, said half-way through the came. He must have
just been overly tired. But the pressure on the water and electricity (not
to forget the overworked kitchen staff) notwithstanding, Kalangala is a
great place to be at.

For those of us who do not live next to a beach -- not me! -- this is the
next best thing to paradise. There's birdsong in the morning, when Alan
"Gunner" Gunn isn't waking us up with his stringed-piece of wood. The beach
sands are the colour and texture of pure white, almost like fine wheat
flour.

Everyone is peaceful here. The concept of theft seems unheard of. A digital
camera found by someone else gets immediately returned. (Patrice can't
located his New Yorker magazine. But that must be something special about
the New Yorker.)

On Day 1, last Sunday, we were woken up to a sea of dark clouds in the
morning. We had some heavy rain, soon later. Our Ugandan friends stressed
that rain is seen as a good omen, though, as in many Asian cultures. In the
pre-dawn hours of Thursday, a noisy thunder storm struck.

"If you experience a collapse of your tent (in which some participants
live), or have either a lake or river running through yours, please let us
know," an organiser told the Morning Circle. Our Greek friend Simos whispers
with a strange look on his face: "I actually had to hold on to my tent."

James Wire, one of the core organisers, reminds participants to carry bags
to the nearby fishing village on their Thursday trek, so that they can come
back with some fish.

Joris "Mr Schoolnet Namibia" Komen is threatening to take participants out
birdwatching, with our South African friend Rudy. He stresses that he's
interested in "looking at birds... with feathers, and others".

By night, the generator chugging along churns out power, but the bulbs seem
too dim to read the notes you made by daytime. Bandwidth is limited,
frequently failures occur, and the daily report of how much bandwidth is
left of the 3GB quota (for the entire camp, shared among all participants)
is met with some sighs. Rooms are lit by solar energy, and if your indicator
lights show orange or red... power is running down and you're going in for
trouble.

This place strongly reminds you what life is for the Majority World. We were
talking life expectancies the other day, and were reminded that there are
countries where a 40-year-old is "old" and can't expect to live much longer!

I told an African lady that the vegetation reminded me much of home. That
is, Goa in India. Except that the trees were taller. "These are *tall*
trees?" she asked, incredulously. "You haven't seen any forests then?"

Meal times are always the highlight of the day, offering fine African food,
which the staff struggles to prepare on time via firewood-stoves, Matoke is
banana-based, while there's often a maize dish, generous servings of fish,
watermelon and (sometimes) pineapple. But the peanut sauce is what I go for
all of the time.

We're warned of a possible bacteria in the river, our Western friends seem
to be on anti-malarial preventive tablets, and some feel we should be
even brushing our teeth with bottled water. But this all doesn't deter Kim
"Meraka Institute" Tucker, who plans to swim anyway, and get tested to
ensure nothing's wrong when he gets back home to South Africa. (Meraka
is a Sotho language term from South Africa, that refers to an open area of
land which the community shares, mainly for grazing. A kind of a commons!)

When we arrived, there were some swarms of river-flies all around. Some
mistook them for mosquitoes.

A piece of tense-sounding Western classical music reminds everyone that it's
getting time for a session. You delay too much and Denmark's Thomas Krag
simply starts shouting in what could easily pass off for an SS kamp
kommandant's voice. "That's music from the Congo," said a participants, as
he sat back to pound his keyboard, while others went treking to the hills
and villages nearby the Thursday off.

Under an African moon, we talked of wider issues, of whether humankind is
moving ahead or moving backwards, and USAID's Stephen Settimi had this
theory that humankind had been planted on earth by some superior life-form.

There was a long round of applause for Joseph, who had actually woken up at
4 am one pre-dawn African day, to cover the computers and hardware as a
storm raged.

Africa is a fascinating place. And one is always intrigued by it. "And this
is a very gentle and kind introduction to a vast continent," said Arun Mehta
(52), one bright morning. Hopefully, there will be lot of pleasant memories
to take back home. But more than just that!

Like a train chugging down differing tracks, the Africa Source II offers
participants a possibility of taking one of three possible routes. You can
either look to 'migration for NGOs', 'migration for education' or the
'information management' track.

While the first helps you to shift non-profits over to Free/Libre and Open
Source Software, the second is aimed at making the same possible for those
working in the field of education.

But it is the 'soft' skills, and the 'information' part of the IT world,
that often gets overlooked and sidetracked. To help participants realise how
to shape and share the information they have on hand, there's a special
track focussed on this goal.

And, it would seem participants have a whole lot of expectations of what
they want from here.

Some asked for details about online tools for publishing. Others wanted the
low-down on building and managing community portals. Then, there was a
request for inputs on multimedia authoring and publishing (in both video and
audio). Participants also wanted to know how to build a news website.

After breaking in groups and listing their expectations, it was found that
some wanted ideas on how to network and collaborate with other
organisations. Someone had a query: could they find out how and if blogs
could be useful to Africa.

There was a request of understanding how to better-engage eRiders (see
article alongside on eRiders). Could blogs be used to create communities? Is
there some way of better understanding this entire phenomenon of social
software (including wikis, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking)?
Can FLOSS offer tools for donor-management and member-management? Is there
some replacement for web-design tools and Flash animation? Is it possible to
extend skills by undertaking online mentoring for non-profits via the Net,
and encourage them to get their information out....

Many questions!

Heather Ford, the resource person, promised to look at "most of the points
raised" over the next seven days. She said a special emphasis would be given
to audio (including transmission), content management solutions (that make
updating a website an easy, almost cut-and-paste job), blogs, wikis,
graphics, and SMS modems.

This sounds interesting! To me at least.

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.

Dirk Slater (41) is based in New York and has a lot of non-profit
administrative background. After years in eRiding, he recently shifted to
working with TacticalTech.org. Dirk comes with a range of experiences --
activism in the world of anti-war issues, campaigning over poverty and
gay/lesbian issues.

He explains: "I used to be a DJ for almost a decade, in San Francisco. By
education, I have an uncompleted degree in anthropology. When I became an
eRider, I was studying anthropology, trying to study policy change in the
urban areas being forced by low income people. The eRider position was for
work with low income communities trying to change policy towards policy. So
if fit perfectly with which I was trying to study, and I learnt a lot. But I
didn't actually complete my studies, and don't feel the need to go back to
school right now."

In an interview below, he explains to Frederick Noronha the concept of
eRiding, and his experiences with supporting the information technology of
non-profit groups:

Q: Could you tell us something about eRiding?

An eRider is a person who is a shared resource among a group of NGOs
(non-government organisations), around supporting their use of technology.
The important criteria for an eRider is that as a shared resource, he or she
is seen as part of the community -- seen an IT community coming in (from
outside), but as part of the larger NGO community, and having the same goals
as what the NGOs mission is.

Q: How did the model come about?

In the United States, circuit riders in the 19th century were preachers who
were shared by a religious congregation. Often Methodists. Congregations
that were in the West, and who couldn't afford their own preacher, would
depend on the preacher who would ride their circuit, and be a shared
resource. (Actually, my great grandfather was a Methodist preacher, in the

late 1800s.)

Q: So how did this get morphed into eRiding for technology?

The his ory is a little muddled, but it was started in the mid-1990s by some
folks who where trying to move, in the US, progressive non-profits forward
in the field of technology. That's because they have a tendency to be behind
the curve, compared to other entities, in using technology.

People at forefront were the W.Alton Jones Foundation, a US national
foundation. It really got taken off by the Rockefeller Technology Project.
Actually the project I was an eRider on was incubated by the Rockefeller
Technology Project.

Q: So how did it grow then?

In the late 1990s, it really took hold in the US as a movement. I attended
the second Circuit Rider Round-Up in 1998, and there were 30 people there.
Over the next three or four years, the round-ups essentially kept doubling
the number of people involved. A lot of people who were already doing
consulting with multiple non-profits were drawn into the network. It just
grew and grew and became really big in the States.

In about 2000, they started looking at how the model could be used in the
developing and transition countries, because it was so successful in the US.
That's when they came up with the term eRider (compared to circuit rider),
so that it could be more culturally acceptable. The major players then were
Ninth Bridge/Engender Health. They really started developing the model and
getting it out there.

There was also the OSI (Open Society Institute) information programme which
started up several eRider in transition and developing countries, partly
through partnering with local foundations.

Q: In which parts of the globe is it strong today?

Now it's present in dozens of countries. Largely in Central Asia, the
Caucasus, Eastern Europe, and West Africa. We're starting to focus some

energy now in South East Asia.

Q: What do you see as its strengths and weaknesses?

Its strengths are that eRiders come from that community, and able to speak
the same language -- not just language, but use the same terms -- and are
can be mission-driven. They're not seen as coming in as an IT consultant to
make money. That's very successful.

The challenges to that eRiders are very rare. It takes a certain kind of
personality and skill-set to be one. One of the challenges for an eRider
project, is that you get the personality, you do not get the skill-set. You
need both technology and non-profit skills.

What often an eRider project has to do is spend time, getting the team up to
speed, as they might not be able to get the skill-set locally. It takes
longer for an eRider project to get going in a developing countries, than in
say the US. It tends to be very resource intensive.

Once they get going, keeping them funded is a huge challenge too.

Q: Is local funding a possibility at all?

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We're working with a whole lot of
eRider projects and helping them to develop social enterprise, to help them
subsidise their other operations. For instance, Interspace in Bulgaria is
doing website development, which they're charging for to help develop their
eRider project.

Q: How do you see the role you played in promoting the eRiders idea?

My eRider project was LINC (Low Income Networking and Communications
Project). I started as the sole eRider and built and developed the
project with two other eRiders. We covered the entire US, but worked with
low-income led organisations. We were very specific in looking at people who
were receiving public benefits, such as welfare.

Q: Looking back, what would you see as the interesting episodes in your life

as an eRider?

Over seven years, there were so many interesting episodes.

Probably the most important movement for me was when I had to make a
presentation on technology use at a conference that was for all these kinds
of organisations. There were about 80 people in the room, and they were all
women. I was the only man in the entire room.

There were others making presentations, and the women were treating the
presenters really rough. I thought, this is it. They were going to hate me
and I got really nervous. It was in 1998, and it was among my very first
experiences.

So, I got up to give my talk, and said 'I just want to acknowledge I'm the
only man in the room, but I want you to know that I was raised by a single
mom who was on and off welfare when she was raising me. And I think she did
an incredible job raising me, and that you're all doing incredible jobs with
your children. And I know my mom did an incredible job because she was so
worried about being a single mom.'

They all started applauding. I said, 'Please don't applaud.' And a couple of
women in the front row said, 'Honey, we're not applauding for you; we're
applauding for your mother'."

And after that I had a great presentation. They were really engaged and
involved in the presentation. They saw me as part of the community and they
saw me as working with them. The door was opened for me to start working
with the organisation.

Q: It must be tough working with groups that can often find technology so
alienating amidst all their real-world work pressures....

The big lesson there was that they needed to see me not as an 'other', not
someone not part of the community, in order to allow me just to communicate
with them. But once I started working with them, what was important was that
I was discussing about their work, what they were trying to accomplish.
Their mission, their campaigns.

After that first conversation, we would discuss how technology would help
them accomplish what they were trying to do. The inroad was how to match
technology to their work. It wasn't technology for technology-sake. But
technology meant to build their capacity.

When I could talk to them about saving money, saving time, or just being
more effective as an organisation, they were very open to it. Then I could
develop a technology plan for them for them which we would help them to move
forward in using technology.

Q: Where does this fit in?

The development of technology plans are very critical for eRiding.
Organisations don't know how to approach technology. So this becomes a road
map for groups on how to develop their technology, and what they'll have to
do in terms to getting more resources, train their staff and things like
that.

Q: How do non-profits compare with, say, corporations, when it comes to
meeting their software needs?

I don't really know corporations. Generally the stereotype of corporations
is that they put the amount of resources into technology that they need to
in order to get the job done, so that it impacts the bottom-line -- that is,
making a profit.

The problem with nonprofits is that they're often trying to fight for a
human need, trying to fight for civil society. It's a very nebulous
bottom-line. They tend to be operating in crisis mode. So they tend to be
reacting to something; they're not giving a lot of thought to strategy.
Getting them to think more strategic about their own work is something that
really helps in getting them to use technology.

Very often, an eRider is their first exposure to strategic planning.

Q: How are eRiders trained?

There's this eRider network, and tonnes of material available for eRiders.

In addition to which, there's training done physically.

Q: If one wants to become an eRider, where does one start?

Look at eRiders.net and then find the eRiders starter kit, a manual put
together by Tactical Tech and Teresa Crawford, which is really well written.

Q: How do you see the association between non-profit organisations and
GNU/Linux, or the Free/Libre and Open Source Software world?

That's a whole article, Fred. I'm sorry.... (Laughs.)

It's one of things things where, at one level, it's not about GNU/Linux.
GNU/Linux is the tool that tool that can help them cut costs, have a more
effective computer network. It makes them more effective. But that's just
about a tool that's going to help them move forward.

But on the other level, there's another side to GNU/Linux. It's important
that these distros are put together by communities of people. That's it's
put together in a very similar way that NGOs and community groups operate --
by the community -- there's a synergy. So I think that works very well.

But I've never oversold that. I think it's important for them to know about
it; yet I've always said FLOSS would help to save money, or your server will
be more stable. That is, giving them a more practical reason for using it.

Open Source Software for NGOs does give them a lot more control. They don't
get stuck with a piece a proprietorial software they can't modify. It also
allows them to share software, and it's great for coalitions. They can share
software, use it similarly and can modify it withing the coalition.

Q: Yet, getting started on FLOSS can be difficult. Support is an issue
too. If you agree, how do you tackle that?

Yeah. By making sure there's funding available. By making sure they're well
supported. And making sure they're part of an eRiders network, so they get
support.

Links between eRiders and the GNU/Linux community also happens at an ad hoc
way. There are a lot of eRiders at an event like Africa Source, but it's not
an eRider event. It happens in that way.

It's very important for eRiders to be active in the development community.
They can be a link between non-profits and developers. They can link the
community with developers in a way the developers can understand. I think
it's an unlocked potential waiting to be tapped; it's not as fully tapped as
it could be.

Two issues divided campers at Africa Source 2 like no other. Perhaps these
were meant to. One was: FLOSS is still too complicated for non-profit
organisations and schools to use. The other: It's more critical to translate
FLOSS into African languages, compared to training to use existing (FLOSS)
software".

Obvious. Issues like these split public opinion at Africa Source 2 along the
the spectogram of various possible positions.

From New Delhi, Arun Mehta argued that FLOSS still needed to be much more
accessible to the disabled. Others saw it differently: "What have NGOs done
to make it more user-friendly? This is not software you buy; this is
software you create," said one voice.

Derick Odembo agreed that it was still difficult to migrate. Dwayne from
South Africa claimed his grandmother had learnt to use Firefox (the superb
browser) and she was a hundred years old! Buy that?

A webdeveloper was concerned what tool he could use to replace Macromedia
Flash. Someone else argued that everytime FLOSS is used, it's one more
crucial vote in its favour.

Rudi from South Africa argued strongly in favour of those who "taught a man
to fish, rather than just gave him a fish". He said he's seen more people on
the FLOSS side teach others and work towards a solution than those who just
complain about usability.

Ivar Mugabi of Uganda cautioned against "doing nothing but training guys
when they don't understand the stuff". Deborah Aknwande, also of Uganda,
made her point. Somebody else laughed, "Hey, this is
everybody-understands-English stuff," said someone on the side which
stressed on the importance of translation and localisation of software.

Dirk, who worked as an eRider for seven years stressed the 70:20:10 principle for NGOs and
non-profits. He called this a "very important formula". And, he stressed 10%
of resources needed to go to hardware, 20% to software, and 70% needed to go
to training!

Charles Loku of Uganda called for a more detailed form of localisation. Why
not call it M'bata (Swahili for "duck") rather than Mandrake, he asked.

Alaa stressed that language questions are "very complicated", and connected
with literacy and politics. "There is much more to localisation than just
translation... Translation is good, but much more is needed. We need more
users and more techies. We the Arabs have to solve our own (Arab)
localisation issues. If we have training and more users, we would be better
able to handle this," he suggested.

Someone felt that people stressing localisation generally came from larger
tribes, and were people who used well documented languages. What happened to
smaller language groups, he asked?

And thus the debate raged.... only to show that FLOSS has its many shades of
grey.

Two issues divided campers at Africa Source 2 like no other. Perhaps these
were meant to. One was: FLOSS is still too complicated for non-profit
organisations and schools to use. The other: It's more critical to translate
FLOSS into African languages, compared to training to use existing (FLOSS)
software".

Obvious. Issues like these split public opinion at Africa Source 2 along the
the spectogram of various possible positions.

From New Delhi, Arun Mehta argued that FLOSS still needed to be much more
accessible to the disabled. Others saw it differently: "What have NGOs done
to make it more user-friendly? This is not software you buy; this is
software you create," said one voice.

Derick Odembo agreed that it was still difficult to migrate. Dwayne from
South Africa claimed his grandmother had learnt to use Firefox (the superb
browser) and she was a hundred years old! Buy that?

A webdeveloper was concerned what tool he could use to replace Macromedia
Flash. Someone else argued that everytime FLOSS is used, it's one more
crucial vote in its favour.

Rudi from South Africa argued strongly in favour of those who "taught a man
to fish, rather than just gave him a fish". He said he's seen more people on
the FLOSS side teach others and work towards a solution than those who just
complain about usability.

Ivar Mugabi of Uganda cautioned against "doing nothing but training guys
when they don't understand the stuff". Deborah Aknwande, also of Uganda,
made her point. Somebody else laughed, "Hey, this is
everybody-understands-English stuff," said someone on the side which
stressed on the importance of translation and localisation of software.

Dirk, who worked as an eRider for seven years stressed the 70:20:10 principle for NGOs and
non-profits. He called this a "very important formula". And, he stressed 10%
of resources needed to go to hardware, 20% to software, and 70% needed to go
to training!

Charles Loku of Uganda called for a more detailed form of localisation. Why
not call it M'bata (Swahili for "duck") rather than Mandrake, he asked.

Alaa stressed that language questions are "very complicated", and connected
with literacy and politics. "There is much more to localisation than just
translation... Translation is good, but much more is needed. We need more
users and more techies. We the Arabs have to solve our own (Arab)
localisation issues. If we have training and more users, we would be better
able to handle this," he suggested.

Someone felt that people stressing localisation generally came from larger
tribes, and were people who used well documented languages. What happened to
smaller language groups, he asked?

And thus the debate raged.... only to show that FLOSS has its many shades of
grey.

Freedom Toaster - Hilton

Schoolnet Namibia - Joris

Computer Aid - Gladys

Child Soldiers Project - Bukeni

Arab Dev - Manal

Baldati - Chaker

Fantsuam Foundation - Deborah

Linux Chicks - Anna

Ungana Africa/ eRiders - Rudi

Kubatana Net - Brenda

MARRYING TECH AND DEVELOPMENT... YOUR DATE WITH SPEED GEEKING

FN

Like speed-dating, these are introductions-in-a-hurry. Some 11 interesting
projects got a chance to introduce themselves to participants of Africa
Source, during the week-long event in Kalangala, on an island in Lake
Victoria, Uganda.

You have just four minutes to hear all about them, before having to
compulsorily move on.

Dorcas Muthoni of Kenya represented LinuxChix. Despite its light-hearted
sounding name, the group is working on the serious job of improving women's
participation levels in Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

"We're a pan-Africa organisation, very focussed on African women. We are
creating a programme to mentor young women to get into computing. We
encourage chapters for local activity (in various parts of Africa) and share
best practices across our mailing lists," she said.

See africalinuxchix.org for more details. There are also other initiatives
across the globe. Sulamita Garcia from Brazil visited Bangalore, India and
inspired women there to make their voice heard in the world of FLOSS.

Africa's group was launched in February 2005, and currently has some 90
members. "We do work mainly online, and want to see how we can work on the
ground. We're looking for funding partners too," Dorcas adds. They have
lists discussing their issue in both English and French, in a continent
where the language of the colonial ruler is still, well, the lingua franca.

LinuxChix Africa plans roadshows soon.

ArabDev.org's Manal of Egypt introduces us to how their group installed
FLOSS in schools in Upper Egypt, some three-and-half hours from Cairo. They
have a computer lab that offers FLOSS, and a telecentre. Each child gets 4-6
hours of computer time a week. And there are five children per PC.

Given their background, the geeks supporting the project, including this
young Arab lady who is threatening to teach belly-dancing to members of the
camp, find no problems in supporting the project.

"As techies, we not as used to the Arabic interface (for computing)," she
adds, honestly.

David comes from Fantsaum Foundation, a group in Nigeria that focuses on ICT
(information and communication technologies) and micro-finance. They're
working on the 'solo' computer, which will consume just 85 watts of power in
a resource-poor continent laden with untapped-talent. In addition, it will
have no moving parts, and use flash-memory.

Fantsaum acts as an "infomediary" and shares useful agri-based information
available from the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture. Computer
Aid International, meanwhile, ships in once-used PCs for schools and
non-profits, and re-uses a vital resource in a tech field where obsolescence
(and planned obsolescence!) can otherwise result in a huge waste of computers
and mountains of perfectly-working but discarded computers.

Meanwhile, kubatana.net is a Zimbabwean network that helps civil society to
communicate with the rest of the world. It has an online directory of 270
online organisations currently, and works hard to keep its information
updated and useful. A critical job in continents like Africa and Asia, where
people tend to be enthusiastic verbal communicators, but reluctant to deploy
the written word to share their ideas.

Kubatana finds that human rights defenders tend to be the most articulate
contributors. Those in the development community appear the worst. They get
about 2500 visitors a day. "FLOSS has not really played a part (in our
activities) to date. But our organisations are undermined all the time by
viruses," says Kubatana's technical director Brenda Burrell (admin at
kubatana.org.zw).

Rudy from South Africa gives a speedy intro to eRiding. He's from
ungana-afrika.org and points out that other non-profits badly need tech help
that comes from an NGO background. One that understands them.

"What we do is not tech support -- or attending calls to deal with, for
example, a broken printer -- but technology planning. This is very
important," says he.

Live support is very important. So also is help to migrate to FLOSS. When an
eRider finds something that works well with one organisation, (s)he
cross-pollinates with other organisations.

"eRiders are (tech support personnel for NGOs who) are motivated by work
they're doing. They often don't get salaries at commercial levels. But the
networks of eRiders are very supportive of each other. They're almost like a
[GNU]Linux users' group." That was all Rudi had time to narrate, quite
out-of-breath, before the alarm sounded for each group to move on and hear
of another experiment.

Bukeni from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) told us about work
being done to build awareness about child soldiers. Video is used here as a
tool for both advocacy and outreach. They take the videos, together with a
generator and a with bed-sheet (which doubles up as the screen). Films are
then shown in villages which HAVE probably never even seen a television
before.

Now, they've got local youth to use the cellphone as a tool for reporting
cases of children being inducted as 'soldiers'.

Hilton, a burly South African, warns you that he's got some "toast for
breakfast". And how! He's part of the Shuttleworth Foundation, set up by
geek-cosmonaut-billionaire Mark Shuttleworth to spread FLOSS and education
across South Africa.

So, they've come out with a 'vending machine' that sells -- you guessed it!
-- Free Software. Put in a CD, and take out a 'distro' or distribution of
your choice. And while your waiting for the CDs to be copied, keep reading
about the world of Free Software and what it really means.

Each CD vending machine costs US$5000 approx. But the plans are available
online and you're free to replicate it. And don't forget to claim your free
Ubuntu CDs at http://shipit.ubuntu.com

[We in India adopt a low-tech solution of encouraging FLOSS supporters to
start up low-cost, low-margins CD stores. They 'sell' distros at about a
dollar per CD, and this gives them enough of an incentive to keep on 'in
business', and share the Free Software while earning a little. That works
too.]

Goretti Zavuga Amuriat of Uganda introduces us to the women's network
Wougnet's programmes. These focus on information sharing and networking,
tech support, and rural access. They also provide a platform for women to
get speaking, through mailing lists, a monthly electronic newsletter, a
website and an online discussion forum. They offer an unusual link to the
internet, using WorldSpace's satellite radio receiver to download data to
remote village communities.

Baldati.org meanwhile is a network of villagers in the tiny country of
Lebanon. It currently links some 1468 villages. For a country which has a
lot of out-migration, it builds links between emigrants and their villages.

Baldati -- which means simply "my village" -- helps to put up maps, GIS and
population statistics online. Then, it leaves all the content-creation to
the local people. It takes a smart bus packed with computers, to different
locations, and invites people to put *their information* online.

If villagers have issues like solid waste or environmental issues, they try
to put the people in touch with experts.

Finally, our group ended up with a rather exhausted Mark from the San
Francisco-based Inveneo. (He had been speaking to all the groups ahead of
us, repeating what he said so many times.) It has a solution which attempts
to take communication to rural areas -- thin clients, using just six watts
of power, VOIP (voice over internet protocol) for two phones, and a rugged
wireless unit that connects to a hub. From remote village to cyberspace.
Possible? Check inveneo.org where you can find details on how to build the
system, including its software.

Price? $1800, including the solar panel.

Food for thought, ideas for inspiration. The big question: can such projects
be scaled up sustainably, to ensure that real change occurs and makes the
lives of the people on the planet that little bit less of an uphill
struggle?

I can imagin that most of you are already packing up your things and thinking about the trip.

Just to remind you about few things:

• passports, tickets, proves of vaccination if required
• 30 USD in cash if you will buy visa on arrival
• get emergency phone numbers with you too
• prepare yourself for camp vibe not a five star hotel! - some people will share rooms some will stay in tents (like I do)
• get summery clothes, with few warmer things for the evenings
• if you need - please have malaria medicine with you and use it
• hats are recommended too

OTHER important items:

• bring books, prints, movies for the temporary library
• bring small FM radios as we gonna have FM set up for the workshop
• also bring items for the bazaar evening, so you will be able to share with others
• bring other gizmos if you have too :-)

read updates on the preparations here: http://wiki.africasource2.tacticaltech.org/pub/blog/

and just bring a lot of patience - getting to the venue from the
airport takes time! i will write about that tomorrow - as we are really tired today :-) But you will definitely remember that experience for long time :-)

goodnight!

As said some of us decided to wake up at 4 am, two volunteers Charles and Evelyn, Hinde, Michal and I were the first who wanted to try that experience. We met in the hotel lobby at 4, dark but already warm, silent tv was presenting ridiculous movies about crazy people and human experiments with stolen bodies, receptionist was in deep phase of sleep, i looked at him and thought REM. Back in the shower i was thinking about early mornings - which i generally like regardless where it happens that i have to be awaken before the sunrise. I was thinking about the book i read years ago The Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuscinski and especially when he describes the incandescent quality of African light: “In reality, the sun comes out as if it were a ball catapulted into the air. We suddenly see a fiery sphere, so near to us that we can’t help experiencing a frisson of fear. ... It’s as if all night long everyone was crouching on his starter’s blocks and now, at that shot of sunlight ... the streets are full of people, the shops are open, the fires and kitchens are smoking.” I remember first time going to Kalangla island with Milton and Wire in March last year - when we were looking for the good venue. We also started our trip at 4 am, and it was really truly beautiful experience, whole drive that with the ferry takes about 4 hours and it lets you experience all different aspects of life in Uganda, you go through cities, villages, forests and water passing by the Equator. Of course there is amazing sunrise and thousands of different birds on the way.

I really hope some of you will experience that as well and it is worth to be on your feet at 4 am already :-)

What has happen this morning to us was not that exciting though :-) our driver did not appear for some time, we were left with silence tv set abusing our believe that actually human nature makes any sense :-) Later we found out that he had an accident, not dangerous for him, but he could not make it. So we went to our beds at 6 am, to be back in the lobby at 8 hoping we gonna make the next ferry at noon, but that did not happen either :-)

We are still in Kampala, working with new drivers, departing for the 4 PM ferry. All the equipment and internet are already there. We were join by Max from Uganda our next volunteer and our first real participant Lucas from Kenya. Two more people are arriving soon - we hope to catch Simos and Tomas (Simos is localisation and security guru, and Tomas is basically one man wireless and alternative access orchestra)

Since I started with the nature reflections, other thing i really like here is bird called locally Carole - I am not sure but i think it is called in Latin Leptoptilos Crumeniferus, I use its Latin name in purpose as it is fairly big , very handsome in my opinion, 1.5 m tall, with black and white feather pattern, reminiscent of an undertaker's suit. Very common in rural environment, especially downtown Kampala. In fact it is macabre carrion eating stork. :-) I just love it, you can see hundreds of them on every tree and roof, and it is really amazing when flying, the way it keeps its neck makes it look like prehistorical pterodactyl that's why i like its latin name). I could spend hours watching it, besides I am pretty normal.

If you are into birds you can see much more of them here inn Uganda, some examples can be found here http://www.camacdonald.com/birding/Massie/Uganda2004.html and also just so you know Joris Koman from schoolnet Namibia who is coming here too - he is not only FOSS/Wireless schoolnet guru but he actually is an amazing ornithologist who can tell you alot about birds in Africa! Ok need to move and something else.

Those interested in GIS might want to check out MapServerFoundation.org. It was set up in November.

Intro from the site:The MapServer Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects.

Developed by NASA and University of Minnesota... it's something of a convergent set of technology.

More from site...

The software is built on top of other popular open source software libraries including: GDAL/OGR, Proj.4, Shapelib, GD, FreeType, etc. It supports dozens of vector and over 40 raster data formats. It can run as a CGI application using Apache or IIS web servers or scripted through several programming languages including Perl, Python, PHP, Java and more. MapServer is known to run on Linux, most versions of Unix, Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.

We woke up pretty early at 7am, had a nice breakfast with milky tea and coffee, we met Wire (James he is not only from Linux Solutions, but he also will lead the Migration for education track) and prepared for the morning press conference.

I was surprised that we had more than 30 local journalists from major newspapers and radio. Conference went smooth, we had in the room all the hotel crowd plus Goretti, Daphne and Janet from WOUGNET (yet another co-organisers from here, Kampala) and Richard from Linux Solutions - he is Wires partner.

They were (journalist) eager why we do it in Uganda, how the local community will benefit from that, if we publish things under Creative commons licences, and why Mark Schuttleworth is going to join the workshop. We did not tell some of the details that you are learning now reading this blog, but yes we gonna contribute to the local community by helping them in our free time (only for volunteers) to build a water supply for the nearby village, we also plan other interaction with the locals there. And yes Mark is going to join as for short time. And ... yes other answers will come later :-)

Conference took about one hour, then some people were interviewed, that made Wire a star for another half an hour.

After that we had long and slow meeting (is over 30 here and humid) drinking what was possible we managed to meet the owner of the venue and finalise some agreement, we also managed to learn that just established internet connection was blow up by the wind (yes vSat antenna was destroyed), but don't worry - new one is coming today and it is going to be set up tonight - and BTW - it is so rare to be able to have an internet in the place without any struggles, actually so many struggles - that sometime i am really surprised that we have anything.

Wire and Daphne are constantly on their phones, arranging or rearranging things.
Allan (Secundo voto Killapop from Mahiti.org - he is the master of the evening program) just arrived from Bangalore, we have not meet yet, as we moved from the downtown to the WOUGNET office which is out of the center. He is already organising things for the bazaar, Iw ill join him after absorbing a pizza.

We also got online finally here, which will be visible on the list and wiki pretty soon. Some of the first participants are arriving tonight as well. Most of us will go to the venue tomorrow early morning, we have to wake up at 4 am to make the first ferry at about 8sh. All the equipment will already wait there for us and few volunteers that will help with setting all up for you!

OK i am really starving now....

and hey from the last moment - we are on the radio right now!!

Hey there, I will write short reports from our everyday preparations for the workshop, so you know what to expect when you arrive. My name is Marek and i am from Tactical Tech.

Yesterday early morning - around 4:50 i realised that i overslept my alarm-clock, i should be under shower already at 4:30. Yes, i should not go to bed at 3 am :-)

When running to the bathroom, i got a phone from Michal (Michal is also from TTC and he does NGO-in-a-box project) that he is arriving in 10 minutes, we were going to the airport in Warsaw (Poland) together. An hour later we were already leaving, it was still dark, very cold 3 below zero and very snowy, about 40 centimetres of snow everywhere.

2 hours later we landed in Amsterdam, where we met Hinde (she is too from TTC, she is our event producer) and Patrice (who is our board member and he will do the bazaar and flossophy sessions). I managed to buy sunglasses, and eat something.

Flight took us 8 hours, movies were not that interesting, so was food. We arrived at 21 local time. Wire (James is from Linux Solutions - co-organiser) was waiting for us there. Visa - that was as easy as buying potatoes in most places, you give them money they give you stuff, no discussion, no need to present any invitations, or pictures, just make sure have some dollars on you :-)

Number of mosquitoes there is pretty scary, but then in Kampala town and hotel you barely see any of those creatures flying around, which is good.

We had our firs meeting already there yesterday in the bar when big crowd of people was watching soccer match (I guess there was Manchester playing - but maybe someone knows better - Milton should know - he is from WOUGNET and we did not meet yet today)

Anyway, we ended up discussing the press conference and making some decisions about coming days... more in my next posts-!! stay tuned