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5c5a8089 » Erik 2008-07-23 An awesome presentation on ... 1 = OSCON 2008, Session 2: Creating and supporting Free Software in Africa
2 == The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources AVOIR experience
3
4 === Some alarming perspectives
5 - Land mass by tertiary education is massively bent towards North America and Europe, Japan.
6 - By Scientific papers, worse
7 - HIV/AIDS, it wins by a *lot*
8
9 === More than software
10 - Capetown is night and day living conditions in close proximity
11 - Fewer actively researching CS profs in Africa than there are at a typical midsize US university
12 - Lack the critical mass to find knowledge-based solutions to their challenges
13 - One way to solve: *collaboration*
14
15 === AVOIR
16 - Started as a conversation among African academics 4.5 years ago
17 - Project itself was established 3 years ago
18 - Collaboration does *not* mean structural collaboration
19 - It's failed miserably - see African Virtual University
20 - We want collaboration between individuals in institutions
21 - Collaborative Master's Degree in FOSS
22 - Mentored Internships
23
24 ==== What's been done so far
25 - Established network of universities
26 - Alliance of partners
27
28 ==== Partnerships
29 - An Alliance is a network of friends
30 - E-learning initiative
31 - Chisimba Training for SADC Parliamentary Program
32
33 ===== Examples
34 - InWent
35 - FLOSS Include
36 - Animal Health
37 - Others
38
39
40 === Chisimba (Application Framework)
41 - Distributed, Web 2.0
42 - For building "software and skills"
43 - Chichewa (Malawi) word for the framework used to build a traditional African house
44 - Building confidence through collaboration
45 - Focus on getting youth involved and contributing
46 - Participation in International projects
47 - Typical MVC, reusable objects, Modular
48 - Package management (idea from Debian) like apt, but uses Ajax
49 - Fits under PEAR, PHP, MySQL, and GNU/Linux
50
51 ==== Package Management
52 - Basically web-based synaptic, allows you to apply one-off patches
53 - To set up e-learning, you can just install a module
54 - Wealth of modules, blogs, etc.
55
56 === Successes
57 - webPresent: http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za/
58 - Allows web-based presentation and slide sharing
59 - made with the Chisimba
60 - His website: http://www.dkeats.com
61 - Social Content and Networking for Schools
62 - SANORD: South Africa Nordic Centre
63
64 === More tech
65 - They use memcached!
66 - His laptop is awesome.
67
68 === Internships
1dc69265 » Erik 2008-07-26 Spelling corrections 69 - They enable them to become authors of good quality code
5c5a8089 » Erik 2008-07-23 An awesome presentation on ... 70 - 90% of them have contributed to the codebase
71
72 === Challenges
73 - Biggest: <b>bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth</b>
74 - Institutional understanding of the value of networks
75 - Cultural predisposition to silence - many are quiet, won't speak up
76 - Neurotic productivity challenges the status quo
77 - Lot's of people are apathetic
78 - Salary structures in education
79 - Income supplementation is necessary
80 - High turnover of students
81 - Rwanda cannot keep students long enough to get them the necessary training.
82
83 === Questions
84 ==== OLPC
85 - Low cost devices into the hands of students is a good thing
86 - Reservations about the choices they made
87 - eeePC as podcast recording tools
88 - Sunlabs with thin clients is one of their big installations
89
90 ==== Government assistance
91 - SA gov first year had good support, champion was moved out, funding slipped through the cracks
92
93 ==== Mentoring and contribution
94 - Mentoring and contribution is possible at ICS: http://ics.uwc.ac.za
95
96 ==== Use
97 - "You can use it to run a war if you want"
98
99 ==== Languages
100 - UTF8, they have translations into Farsi
101 - Language packs
102
103 ==== Biggest Obstacle
1dc69265 » Erik 2008-07-26 Spelling corrections 104 - Internal to the network: Getting people to be comfortable participating and committing their code while it's incomplete
5c5a8089 » Erik 2008-07-23 An awesome presentation on ... 105 - Funding, of course
106 - Use outside the network