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Africa Source 2004 Wrap-ups
Douglas Hunter writes "Africa Source 2004 has wrapped up and the last of the stragglers
have packed their bags and headed home. Africa Source 2004 was a gathering of pan-African Free and Open Source software developers held in Okahandja, Namibia. Organized by Tactical Tech,
All Africa and Free Software and Open
Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), Africa Source was a
mixture of structured and semi-structured discussions with loads
of good 'ole hacking thrown in to boot.
With workshops ranging from i18n to wireless hacks to running a
MOSIX cluster, there were plenty of hands-on sessions for folks to
attend. The first ever
Kiswahili spell checker was developed and released during the
conference, a testament to the activity of those involved.
For more information about Africa Source 2004, visit one of the blogs."
Malaria kills more people than HIV/AIDS in Africa, so how about some cheap anti-Malarial treatments too? Please?
One thing I would love to see being developed out of OSS would be some software comms stack work to develop a low-bandwidth, high-latency stack that can shift service and data load as required.
Some architectural and design patterns that could be published on this would also help. I know from my experience of doing a global system for a large logicistics company it was a seperate system for Africa due to the restricted networks. Thus rather than shipments from South America to the Southern Middle East stopping in central africa they went to Europe as it was easier to track. Cost wise it would be better to use Africa, but without a decent infrastructure... or better yet a standard approach to poor infrastructure, it wasn't business effective.
Africa has a real reason to concentrate on the wireless and mobile sectors. It could already be ahead of the US, and by coping with its infrastructure issues OSS could provide a real platform for new tech companies to come from Africa.
The cluster stuff is cool... the dictionary is neat... but what here is going to make life better for people, and start bridging the gaps ?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
http://efil.blogspot.com/
Africa has easily the most complex localisation problem of any market, with more languages than the rest of the world combined but a market that can hardly afford traditional localization costs (e.g. the top down model used by commercial vendors).
Open source makes it possible to build entire packages - OS, Office, Web - for groups that are not even on the commercial software radar.
It's true that for many educated Africans, a European language is a necessary skill - French, English, Portuguese. But for a schoolkid in Kasai, it has to be Chiluba or Lingala.
Long after the problems of internetworking and materials have been resolved, open source will be the basis for widespread adoption of software in African society.
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None of these are peculiar to Africa. They are all, however, made worse by a lack of access to reliable information. Open source is the key to delivering the Internet to African civil society, and on the back of the Internet, the reliable information people need to combat famine, civil wars, AIDS, and dictatorships.
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I'm surprised that the spell checking code in Open Office is flexible enough to cope with Swahili spell checking, given how different the european languages it was designed to handle are from the bantu languages (eg swahili) in structure. European languages generally have rather poor derivational morphology, and nouns and verbs inflect by taking a single suffix only. Compare this to Swahili, where verbal derivational morphology is quite rich, and the verb takes a tense prefix along with subject and object concord prefixes, and a mood suffix... I would have expected the spell checking code to choke when they tried to specify which prefixes a verb can take in which order, etc. An example to prove my point, with the english and swahili sentences broken down into their constituent parts: English: I read it (the book) Cannot be broken down Swahili: nakisoma ni-a-ki-som-a I:subj-simple:present-it:ki:class-read-indicative English: He who leaves He who leave-s Swahili: anayetoka a-na-ye-tok-a 3p:subj-present-3p:relative-leave-indicative And so on. There are very few english, french or spanish (languages I speak a little of as well) words which approach this level of agglutination, the obvious example being antidisestablishmentarianism.
+4 insightful? comeon! This post is crap. AIDS in africa is not about lack of contraceptives. there is plenty. since long ago. oh, and africa is many different places with little in common sometimes. Lack of education? most casualties of AIDS are the educated elite, engineers, teachers, professors... There is no simple explanation to AIDS in eastern and southern africa actually. some of the poorest countries in africa have few aids cases, niger, CAR... no slashdot poster can articulate this topic well, so watch your moderation.
"particularly in cultures where morality doesn't hold much sway"
Umm, hello? Small communities are the places where morality is VERY important and often strictly enforced.
Don't confuse "no morality" with "their morality has nothing against copyright infringement" (as most probably the latter is the case and that's no suprise as copyrigth is a concept that is far disconnected from the everyday realities of many Africans).
Real life is overrated.
Everytime the topic of Africa crops up I always realise how many people are ignorant of Africa. To borrow a line from this site which I would recommend for anyone who wants to know something about africa to read first,
"By concentrating on Africa, we hope to correct the predominant image of a uniform, monolithic landmass wholly lacking in perspectives. We want to help break down prejudices and to show the positive developments in Africa. At the same time, however, we do not intend to remain silent about the problems facing the continent."So please guys, Africa is NOT a country but a continent!
There are conflicts at the moment I only know of 3 actual ones being covered by the media: Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ivory Coast. The interesting fact is that you can travel to the capital cities of this countries (for example Khartoum in Sudan) with the same risk involved as travelling to Tel Aviv in Israel.
There are other places with a history of ongoing conflict mostly natural resources propagated or land and border disputes and at the moment are enjoying some sought of peace: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ethiopia-Eritrea and the Central African Republic, Angola, Mauritania and Algeria. Then there is the politically motivated violence here at the moment only Zimbabwe is experiencing this. Then there is the lawless Somali. All this countries add up to 11... Africa has 50 countries and a little math leaves 39 countries WITHOUT conflict. Are we now to say that this countries are not safe to visit or invest in?
There are 300 million Swahili speakers in the world. That is far more than the German speakers. Swahili qualifies as an International language. It makes sense to create Swahili software translations.
Instead of shouting about the conflicts, famines and drought we should be looking at Africa the Indian way. India has an ongoing conflicts; border disputes and religious tensions, has a huge poor population, but is able to send satelites to space and create software solutions that are recougnised worldwide. This is so because no one keeps on rubbing their noses and holding huge placards infront of their faces with the conflicts and poverty problems everytime they want to try developing technical solutions!
You make a good point: Morality is relative to the culture in which you live.
And that is the reason that westerners can not impose solutions on the third world. The best that the west can do is to provide the tools for the third world to come up with their own solutions.
Internet connectivity is a tool. It does not come with moral baggage or western decision making. The users have to make their own choices. They can participate in a forum on agricultural practices, they can accept one-sided advice on just about anything, or they can look at porn.
And if parts of africa could develop more technical expertise and infrastructure, it would be another building block in the world economy.