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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."
In a region where artificial scarcity of AIDS drugs (patents) kills--any sort of stand against "intellectual property" is a good thing.
-I am an elective eunuch.
That's one of the I like about open source. Where a megalo-corporation would do it's best to stay away from a possible African market... people that have the resources the can work together to produce their own products.
If only open source could produce food... hmm.
Like Teddy with an elephant gun.
No, it won't "solve the problem", but it's a lot easier to learn about democracy, modern agriculture, and AIDS prevention if you have access to a knowledge base.
Or maybe this has nothing to do with Africa's problems. Just like every piece of code from the States is not concerned with narrowing the rich/poor divide or correcting the problems with a two-party system.
Africa is a large continent; not everything that happens here is directly related to the CNN special you saw on it.
Unfortunately, I am not Wil Wheaton
If only open source could produce food... hmm.
Because as we all know, Namibia is suffering a huge food shortage. I have lived in the Southern African region for a long time (South Africa, Namibia, Botswana) and know of no such food shortage. (Ok, Zimbabwe is now an exception, but that is a man-made problem and also a fairly recent problem, historically Zimbabwe/Rhodesia has always had a large food surplus).
Damn you and your Open Source Kiswahili spell checker. Five years ago I poured my entire life savings into secretly building just such a spell checker. It was due to be released tomorrow and I was set to make my fortune by selling a copy to each of the 50 million Kiswahili speakers for $100.
Damn you Open Source scoundrels!
John.
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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Off course it won't. But by learning to work together, people may stop having civil wars, which means peole have more time to grow food (and not having it stolen by "freedom fighters") and get an education, which in turn leads to (hopefully) a cure for AIDS and a democracy that grows from the bottom up.
When you're trying to bring the better part of a continent out of the dark ages and into the bright new future, you has to start somewhere - and learning to work together seems like a bloody good place to start for me. But, hey, thats my point of view, right?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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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"Africa is just war and famine"
"Africans can't even stop killing each other, WTF do they need software for"
"Clean water first, then software!"
Even in 2004, some people still don't realize that humanity is largely identical, everywhere. There are tens of millions of African nerds who simply dream of getting their hands on PCs, software, Internet links, hundreds of millions of businessmen who are frustrated by the lack of modern communications, hundreds of millions of students who could contribute seriously to the world economy if they had even minimal access to the online libraries. If it wasn't for the curse of mineral wealth that encouraged local and foreign politicians to treat the continent like a slash-and-burn buffet, Africa would be stable and prosperous.
To a large extent the population of Africa has been held hostage by war and violence waged by those who profit from the rape of the continent. Look at Congo, which until recently was occupied by the armies of no less than 11 different countries. These wars are sustained by keeping the populations intimidated, ignorant, and poor. No-one cares about the locals when the ground is rich with diamonds, oil, and other minerals.
Technology like GSMs and open source are possibly the best chance that African civil society has of creating communities that can escaping and resist the trap of bad local and international politics.
Kiswahili and Lingala are vital starting points because these two languages join the whole belt of central Africa from Congo to Kenya.
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" Africa is a big country. "
No, it's a continent with quite a number of quite different countries.
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.
We actually played with ClusterKnoppix and CHAOS. I have made my presentation and other notes available at itfirms.co.za for those interested.
I just want to say thanks to everyone for making it a great experience. I made a lot of new friends, and I look forward to the next event.
Need an ISP in South Africa?
We Africans do not "have civil wars" like Americans have barbeques. We are for the most part victims of well-funded acts of violence and looting orchestrated by evil men with their eyes on the money. Look at Ghadaffi's 10 year plan to destabilize West Africa and his support for Zimbabwe today. No-one in Sierra Leone chose to get their arms chopped off at the elbows - this was the work of a small band of well-financed hooligans who's mission it was to turn the place into a hell-hole so that it would be easier to install a compliant government and steal the diamonds.
What we Africans need are ways to resist this kind of terrorism, i.e. our strong traditional society and support from the outside world. It has to be asked whether open source would support this, and I think that yes, if we can get computers running in our tribal languages, we will be able to reinfirce the traditional lifestyles that are our heritage and strength.
If I sound angry about this it's because I lost several relatives in Sierra Leone. It is so unfair to imply that we asked for this war. Most wars in Africa hve been over resources, with heavy support from external parties who want control over the wealth.
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!