TWiki . Moap . WebHome

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.
Continue reading →

Africa Source: African Free and Open Source Software Developers Meeting

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.

This weeks newsletter from the ICT for Development section of the Development Gateway is shock full of Open Source news related to the developing world. (And I’ve added a few extra tidbits of my findings from other sources):

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.

Breaking the Word Processor Curve

Bruce Byfiled makes a compelling case for OpenOffice, as more than just a replacement for word. I’m a long-time OpenOffice user, but to be honest I mostly use it to open office files and do most of my writing in vim or on my PalmPilot, so I may not be the best judge. But this article explores a few features of OpenOfccie that are superior or just more stable than their m****s*** Office equivalents.

When you first switch to Writer, this claim that Writer beats Words may seem hard to swallow. And no wonder; you’re too busy learning the new menus to get beyond the fact that everything’s only half-familiar. And if you’re an unsophisticated user who has yet to learn (to steal the title of Robin Williams’ book) that the PC is not a typewriter, you might never notice. However, if you’re an advanced user for whom style, structured text and long documents are all part of word processing, then the claim soon becomes self-evident.

Understand that I’m not talking features here. True, with its PDF and Docbook export filters alone, version 1.1 of Writer leaves MS Word playing catch up. However, features are an arms race in which superiority rarely lasts for more than one version. When I say that Writer is the superior piece of software, I’m talking about the basics, the everyday functionality that can’t be improved without massively rewriting the code.

So I’m back from the incredible adventure that was SummerSource. I have a truckload of impressions in my mind to deal with, scores of new friends, dozens of ideas, and in general a very busy and exciting time ahead (optimism rocks).
Dureing the weeks mad camp, I practically carried my PalmPilot around with me all the time. I used it to jot notes of the actual sessions, but even more importantly to jot down words, thoughts and ideas throughout the week.

On the plane journey home, having slept only about 5 hours total in the last 2 nights, I put myself in stream-of.consciousness mode and merged my on-the-spot emotions with these obscure notes from the week. This is the result:

source code
code is free
free to hack

hack hack hack
secure
the hangover.

gunner gunner wojtek wojtek
wojtek wojtek gunner gunner over

low connection, slow connection, no connection. I ping, I ping, I ping, but noone answers. The world is empty.
luckily. Right here, next to me, a hive of inquiring minds. Probing, pinging, hacking.
My mind.

my mind this morning
i’m feeling
dynamic, diabolic
dyne:bolic
AND WHY IS THAT? I ask. Again and again, as morning becomes circle, becomes session. Why is that? you ask. What came before?

wakeup call,
stumble to the bathroom.
Suddenly remember that croatian army toilets are non-intuitive interfaces. Stumble back.
Again. Like an ancient screensaver. Again.
shower. A failed attempt to dampen the pain of my thundering frontal lobe. but then. Breakfast. Chit chat, morning circle. Colors. Groove. Energy disperses and recollects in another plane of being.

What a week. Who are these people with such extreme inquisitive minds. These heroes from all over the world? Who are they?
I hand them a little nugget of my knowledge. They leap at it. Tear at it. Expose it’s faults. Shine on it’s strengths. Remix. Reinforce. Rethink.

As morning becomes circle and reenacts the previous day. As session flows into freeform, and training is replaced by learning, i absorb. It is the nature of this beast. It will pry open the fortress of the mind, and force a retreat. Never before. Never in so few days have i reconsidered so many assumptions. And reinforced so many beliefs.

how? Why? And why here?
Routing
dynamic routing
dynamic routing of minds, conversations, relationships. A gently coaxed dynamic routing protocol.
coaxed, nudged, guided into new paths. Always trying to find the optimal path between minds.
A geeky metaphor but so appropriate for this place outside of time.

in retrospect i find it hard.
Hard to focus. Sleep deprivation will do that.
As i remember 4am discussions. Lack of mental faculties apty replaced by ample volume. Remember exhaustion from answering questions. Asking questions. Questioning both questions and answers.
remember the healing properties of an adriatic backcrawl. Remind myself of the beginning of the week. So far away now. so remote. as i think back to sessions. Skillshare. Screwdriver drills and the bizarre. I taste again the salty yoghurt, the pivo and the soy. I hear again the voices of fifty new friends. Kind words, warm hearts, amazing people.
The quiet excitement of the moment. The infinitely less quiet excitement of some of the other moments. My face is tired from smiling for a week. My mind is tired from being open. My body is tired from being attached to this beer drinking machine at the end of my neck. I am exhausted. excited. exstatic. explosive.

O’Reilly Network: Linux on the Linksys [July 21, 2003]

So, we’ve known for a while that Linksys 802.11g unit (the WRT54G) runs linux underneath the hood, and O’Reilly Network: Rob Flickenger [July 21, 2003]
Rob FLickenger from Seattle wireless, and Author of the excellent Building Wireless Community Networks, 2nd Edition, talks about the struggle to get a custom linux onto this box.

If they succeed, this box, which is cheap, reasonably stable, and handles external antennas, could become the de facto standard for building low-cost wireless networks. Especially in the developing world, where a cheap embedded solution with no mechanical parts should, in most cases, outlast the P-based approach for complex access points.

Of course there have been wireless devices from a number of vendors which have been ‘flashable’ with linux for years, but the current market offering is kind of limited, and Linksys is the number one distributor of WiFi hardware in terms of units shipped, so let’s hope the guys at SeattleWireless succeed in this mission.

A number of SeattleWireless geeks and I have been working on getting a shell on the Linksys WRT54G access point. It is in fact running Linux 2.4.5 with a number of interesting bits in the filesystem (namely full iptables support, zebra, bridging, and even a Rendezvous responder).