Big shout out to Adam Hyde from FLOSS Manuals, and the entire Book Sprint crew. You all rock!

I’m immensely proud to be associated with this book, and the crew who wrote it.

The technology non-profit space, web 2.0, free (open source) software, open networks, open content books, africa, and small kids. These are some of the things i’ve racked up some experience in over the last few years. There’s little doubt that the book project is the most impressive project i’ve had a hand in. With litterally hundreds of thousands of downloads (250,000 since february 2008), a 2nd edition, and official translations into spanish, french and arabic, this is one hell of a success for what is essentially a double niche-in-a-niche project. A technology book about wireless networks, targetted specifically at developing world practitioners. Yet the success if unequivocal, impressive, and ultimately has very little to do with my involvement.

I came up with a model that seems to work, found a little bit of funding to try it out, and invited the perfect team of authors. I also used my charm to convince the best technical editor and author i know to spend enormous amounts of time on very little money to help make this book as amazing as it is. Then i stepped back, went off and did some of the other stuff i mentioned above, and watched this idea unfold.

I’m proud of what i helped create, but also well aware of the role i played in it. But I want this success to be replicated, and there are a number of titles i think deserve to be written which could help create a series of pragmatic, hands-on technology books with a focus on the developing world, and free (open source) software. Published under some form of open content license, ensuring they reach their maximum potential as tools for communities around the world.

Not only do i think this is possible, but i also think it’s important in ways that i can’t yet quite describe in simple words, having to do with open content licenses, books as conveyors of learning, and the importance of technology independence.

Unlike other open content publishing business models, there’s a little twist in this one, since the prime source of income won’t be from book sales or advertising, but will come directly from funders, for whom the value-proposition should be pretty clear. Given the book sprint model, we can produce pofessionally edited books at a fraction of the cost of the traditional publishing industry. And we have shown that these books are useful as training materials for workshops, as hands-on guides for individuals and organisations trying to implement these technologies, and as awareness raisers for decision-makers looking at technology solutions to exisiting problems. And the price point for a single title seems to be close to that of a single regional week-long technology workshop. So for the price of a single workshop, a book can be published that can become a tangible input to future workshops, but also can massively expand the reach of a workshop-based training model by reaching an audience far beyond that of the equivalent workshop.

And given some of the fascinating discussions i’ve seen on pricing models for open content books, those costs would be shareable between multiple funders, by collecting bids before initiating the project. A model that could perhaps be combined with a magnatune, pay-what-you-feel-is-right model for downloads. The profits of which could be shared with the authors, and help fund the day-to-day running of the organisation. If the costs of publishing the book has already been covered by non-profit funders, the post-production sales might help fund the difficult overhead that always dogs non-profits between projects.

Somewhere in this model there may even be room for experimenting with Social Business models, in the spirit of Mohammad Yunus. But that’ll be a discussion for another day, and perhaps another blog.

“Free Software in Developing World Projects – Before the OLPC and Beyond”

More info is available at: http://wndw.net/

and: http://dk.wndw.net/ (Danish Mirror)

And the Press Release

In just 24 hours they coded and deployed the dozomo meta-search engine, including a front-end, a mozilla/firefox search plugin and a safari keywords file. So far so good. A good effort, a neat conference event, and a decent hack (although the search front-end is pretty buggy and flawed.
That they extensively (some would say exhaustively) documented the whole thing on-line, and went ahead and offered a pseudo-IPO on ebay was actually quite a clever hack.

UNFORTUNATELY, in a time-honored tradition of young geeks and adolescents, they then preceeded to scream for attention in a rude and obnoxious way, Using the in-conference proxy server they started redirecting http requests to google, msn and other major search engines to their own page . This is sort of like a kid baking bread to impress his/her parents and then proceeding to intentionally plaster the entire kitchen with wet dough, just to be completely certain that they were heard.

That the proxy hack actually managed to break their own brainchild (when clicking on page 2 of a search result page from google, the proxy hack would redirect that httpo request and return you to the dozomo frontpage), just made it even more pathetic.

I’m sorry guys, but there were a lot of people at the conference trying to get some work done, and it’s not ok to force your shite on them against their will, even for the sake of a conference art event. hand out flyers next time, and you’ll probably get a lot more friends.

Personally, like Wendy Seltzer [Wendy's Blog: Legal Tags: WOS: Dozomo], I was lucky enough to be running the Tor anonymizing proxy, and wasn’t affected by this particular hack. (thanks to robert guerra, roger dingledine and their hands-on privacy workshop.

It’s saturday evening, and i’m looking forward to an evening of whisky and dinner with good friends. So far WOS3 has not dissapointed, although compared to a typical US (O’Reilly?) conference this is an amateurs fest. The peculiar blend of high-brow academia, low-cost activists, and a handful of free (as in speach) lawyers, has been interesting.

I love the fact that Volker Grassmuck has dared put people on the stands from small projects around the world. Activists, hackers, and wireless weirdo’s (amongst them myself). The collection of bright minds, and the breadth of perspectives makes this a much more interesting, but much less efficient and elegant conference than something like Emerging Tech.

Unfortunately this breadth of presence and the slightly chaotic hue that has been an ever-present companion during the last 3 days, has resulted in a number of sadly silent, or at least completely uninspiring panels. But let’s get to the hihlights, here’s a prioritized list of my favoourite moments:

1. seeing old friends, ethan zuckerman, the tactical tech collective, zviad and taya from georgia, asim (tajikistan), guido (african hacker extraordinaire), gunner and katreen (asprationtech.org), joris komen (schoolnet namibia), vera, janet and darius (open society institute) and the wireless dudes and dudettes from berlin and london (armin, juergen, cven, james, adam, elektra, bruno and a few more…)

2. meeting new people and being inspired. People like dewayne endricks of extreme wireless fame, sunir shah of meatball wiki, roger dinkledine (developer of tor -wonderful anonymising proxy), heather from creative commons south africa and a large number of others, who’s names slip my mind temporarily.

3. the wireless discussion with dewayne hendricks. eye-opening, exciting, colourful, if a little unrealistic at times.

3. eben moglen. this man is the best skaespearean actor i have ever seen. the drama, the diction, the eloquence…. priceless

4. lawrence lessig. almost as fluid as eben moglen, but makes up for it ith a great sense of humour. brilliant.

5. the mesh network. the first time i have seen and partaken of a duýnamic mesh that would let me roam seemlessly through a impressive part of berin (c-base to alexanderplatz). go mesh go.

perhaps i’ll be changing this list after tonight. here’s a guess at what might make it to number 3 or perhaps even 2 (come tomorrow)

#. Glennfiddich 21 year Havanna Reserve

Eben Moglen, just finished his keynote. This guy is the real deal, the preacher of the Free Culture/Information movement. So eloquent it is almost embarassing to all of us light-weights, and and so concise and optimistic (yet realistic) that it really moved me. This is probably the first time i have heard a believable and moving call to arms that effectively ties together and unite the various free movements, i.e. the Free Culture movement, th Free Software Movement, The Free Spectrum Movement and the Free Hardware, or anti-copyright control movement.

Right now, Armin Medosch s introducing the main issues, including low-cost antenna’s, mesh networks, the concept of line-of-sight, etc. H’s showing picture of various rooftop-scenes, small pieces of hardware, such as the MeshCube, and various wild renditions of the socialist dream.

Also showing off the awesome mesh network constructed between the Berlin Congress Center (our current location) and the c-base hacklab news Jannowtzbruecke. Using the unik-olsrd mesh protocol, and a series of these MeshCube’s . Using this tech, we can now roam the streets of berlin, knowing that we aren’t just using the network, but are actively contributing to the network, by being on-line.
Armin, just passed the bar over to Dewayne Hendricks, who’se giving us a historical perspective on radio tech and free communications.

*commercial wireless since 1903
*spectrum was an open commons
*until titanic

So I said my bit, and here are my unstructured notes.

one of the relizations i have come to working in the fringes of the international development community for the past 3 years is that if pressed to name one semi-”mythical” success of international development , many people will start talking about micro-finance.

Micro Finance is the practice of giving small (even tiny) loans to individuals and small busineses, letting them invest in a small business of their own, and later repaying the loan. It is in effect a bank that specializes in handing out loans to entrepreneurs that are so small, no traditional bank would touch them. The definition of small varies from community to community, but might start with money enough to buy a chicken, and start selling the eggs, and go all the way up to a few thousand dollars to start a small telecenter. The bottom-line is that most people seem to consider this form of development, a good example of sustainable, scalable aid which reaches some of the hardest hit orners of a society. It is also a type of project that has proven it’s worth in many different forms, in many countries around the world.

And for people like me who work with ICT’s (Information and Communication Technologies) for development it is fascinating because it is an obvious place to target for implementation of computer systems. After all keeping tabs on thousands of tiny loans is a daunting task without a computer system. One of the problems has long been that most software packages fro Micro Finance come from the traditional banking and finance software market, and are most often prohibitively expensive, or have been hacked together by a smal ngo somewher in the world as they gradually expanded their own microfinance services, and is hence anything but stable, adaptable and well documented.

This has lead me, and many others to the inevitable conclusion that there would be a interesting market for an Open Source, Free (as in beer and probably also as in speech) microfinance package with a well-designed, stable architecture, and good documentation. The problem, which is also the reason why good Open Source financial packages in general have been few and far between, is that most geeks like to work on software that interests them, especially when doing this work in their spare time. And few real geeks (at least ones that I know) supplement their interest in computers with an intense fascination of finance and bookkeeping.

So while I have spent some time agreeing ith other people in the ict4d space that a good open source microfinance package would eb a great boon, a serious development effort has yet to emerge.
But, acting either as yet another confirmation that the idea is sound, or (hopefully) as a starting place for actually developing this package, a project has showed up on Sourceforge.

From the Microbanking Open Architecture Project website:
The Mo-Ap Project is conceived as an open source effort to develop standards, tools, libraries and solutions for the international micro-finance and micro-credit communities. We are just getting started, please click on the links below to read our documentation and subscribe to our mailing list to find out how you can get involved.

OK, I guess it’s official now. The wonderful people at the SummerSource Camp. This time we’re off to Namibia for AfricaSource, and it will be a blast (again).

The work these guys do, is amazing, the events are really worthwhile and the idea of facilitating cooperation between the ‘traditional’ non-profit sectors in developing countries, and the open-source community is as good as it’s simple. (Simple in concept, by no means simple in implementation!).

During the five day event, participants and facilitators will share technical skills and experiences, discuss key challenges in realising F/OSS projects, and develop concrete strategies for strengthening the nascent community of F/OSS technologists working in African contexts.

This event is organized by the Tactical Technology Collective, the AllAfrica Foundation, and SchoolNet Namibia, in cooperation with the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa.

Reuters reports on the, by now, well-known story that China is putting it’s money and mouth behind Open Source software, in a bid to become independent of US software companies.

This seems to be a general trend throughout Asia, as Silicon Valley reports that the Vietnamese government is supporting a plan that would require all state-owned companies and governemtn ministries to use Open Source software by 2005. Also, it would require all computers manufactured in Vietnam to be sold with open-source products installed on them.
“We are trying step by step to eliminate Microsoft,” said Nguyen Trung Quynh of Vietnam’s Ministry of Science and Technology. Quynh and other government tech officials want Vietnam to be on the cutting edge of an international movement to embrace open-source software — products that can be downloaded from the Internet for free and perform the same tasks as Microsoft Windows or Office.
Ironically, this seems to be a plan which main target is to stem the widespread pirating of software, to comply with a trade agreement with the United States (and the World Trade Organisation). So the US forces them to not use US products.

Meanwhile, the MAlaysian governement has created a fund of USD 36 million, to support start-ups developing Open Source software.

While, according to this article,
The South African government and the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research recently launched Project Meraka (a Sotho word for shared grazing), a resource centre where government departments, companies and individuals will be able to obtain neutral open source information, such as where to find products and support.

It’s busy times for the Free Software movement around the world. And it makes me happy.