OSCON 2008, Session 2: Creating and supporting Free Software in Africa

The African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources AVOIR experience

Some alarming perspectives

• Land mass by tertiary education is massively bent towards North America and Europe, Japan.
• By Scientific papers, worse
• HIV/AIDS, it wins by a lot

More than software

• Capetown is night and day living conditions in close proximity
• Fewer actively researching CS profs in Africa than there are at a typical midsize US university
• Lack the critical mass to find knowledge-based solutions to their challenges
• One way to solve: collaboration

AVOIR

• Started as a conversation among African academics 4.5 years ago
• Project itself was established 3 years ago
• Collaboration does not mean structural collaboration
  • It’s failed miserably - see African Virtual University
  • We want collaboration between individuals in institutions
• Collaborative Master’s Degree in FOSS
• Mentored Internships

What’s been done so far

• Established network of universities
• Alliance of partners

Partnerships

• An Alliance is a network of friends
• E-learning initiative
• Chisimba Training for SADC Parliamentary Program

Examples

• InWent
• FLOSS Include
• Animal Health
• Others

Chisimba (Application Framework)

• Distributed, Web 2.0
• For building "software and skills"
• Chichewa (Malawi) word for the framework used to build a traditional African house
• Building confidence through collaboration
• Focus on getting youth involved and contributing
• Participation in International projects
• Typical MVC, reusable objects, Modular
• Package management (idea from Debian) like apt, but uses Ajax
• Fits under PEAR, PHP, MySQL, and GNU/Linux

Package Management

• Basically web-based synaptic, allows you to apply one-off patches
• To set up e-learning, you can just install a module
• Wealth of modules, blogs, etc.

Successes

• webPresent: chameleon.uwc.ac.za/
  • Allows web-based presentation and slide sharing
  • made with the Chisimba
• His website: www.dkeats.com
• Social Content and Networking for Schools
• SANORD: South Africa Nordic Centre

More tech

• They use memcached!
• His laptop is awesome.

Internships

• They enable them to become authors of good quality code
• 90% of them have contributed to the codebase

Challenges

• Biggest: bandwidth, bandwidth, bandwidth
• Institutional understanding of the value of networks
• Cultural predisposition to silence - many are quiet, won’t speak up
• Neurotic productivity challenges the status quo
  • Lot’s of people are apathetic
• Salary structures in education
  • Income supplementation is necessary
• High turnover of students
  • Rwanda cannot keep students long enough to get them the necessary training.

Questions

OLPC

• Low cost devices into the hands of students is a good thing
• Reservations about the choices they made
• eeePC as podcast recording tools
• Sunlabs with thin clients is one of their big installations

Government assistance

• SA gov first year had good support, champion was moved out, funding slipped through the cracks

Mentoring and contribution

• Mentoring and contribution is possible at ICS: ics.uwc.ac.za

Use

• "You can use it to run a war if you want"

Languages

• UTF8, they have translations into Farsi
• Language packs

Biggest Obstacle

• Internal to the network: Getting people to be comfortable participating and committing their code while it’s incomplete
• Funding, of course
• Use outside the network