Blogs

In the development world, getting a project profiled in The Economist is a bit like a rock band being profiled in Rolling Stone. This week’s Economist has a profile of Dabba. Pretty cool.

So what might the undersea cable environment for sub-Saharan Africa look like by the end of 2010? Perhaps it will look a bit like this:

Last week in Berlin at a Forum on Social Entrepreneurship hosted by German venture capital company Hasso Plattner Ventures, Rael Lissoos and Dabba won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 award. The event, sponsored by Deutsches Bank and MAN brought together 250 social entrepreneurs together with investors.

I have been gradually getting my head around bandwidth purchasing models for undersea cables. In my second contribution to the Mail & Guardian’s innovative Techleader site, I use a real estate metaphor to contrast the various scenarios.

At the Shuttleworth Foundation, the geek factor runs pretty high for a charitable foundation.  However, my colleague Jason and I felt like lightweights at the the Village Telco workshop that we hosted here at the Foundation two weeks ago.

A talk worth watching is Paul Collier’s heartfelt presentation at the TED event earlier this year. He talks a bit about his book The Bottom Billion which, as a non-economist, I am finding both insightful and accessible.

On Wednesday this week, the City of Cape Town made the final approval to launch its ground-breaking municipal Broadband Infrastructure Project.

The Guardian this week published a review of Jonathan Zittrain’s book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The journalist quotes Zittrain as saying

Bill St. Arnaud points out that Pipe International, who are building an undersea cable from Sydney to Guam, have taken a completely transparent approach to communicating about project development and progress. Even to the point of having dynamic online maps of cable development.

Here is a short note on where things stand with Dabba and the Village Telco. The Shuttleworth Foundation is planning to fund the hacking/adaptation/development, to at least alpha version, of an Open Source “Village Telco” integrated suite of applications.

In an earlier post, I wrote about a very cool publishing model used by a bible publishing company in the U.S.

On the 27th of February 2008, the Department of Communications published a notice inviting comments on Proposed Guidelines For Rapid Deployment of Electronic Communications Facilities in Terms of the Electronic Communications ACT, 2005 (ACT NO.

File this one under thinking out loud but why isn’t there a commons for ideas? For example, if I came up with a useful workshop facilitation methodology, I would share it. However, if I knew that I was likely to be given credit anytime anyone used it, I would probably share more enthusiastically and maybe even put more effort into polishing the methodology for use by others.

I lurk on one of the more interesting mailinglists in the world. act-KM, originally an Australian but now global community of practice on Knowledge Management or since I abhor the term Knowledge Management, let’s say on the nature of knowledge in general and how to make it grow and flow in and across organisations. It is a high traffic list and not a very peaceful one. The debate rages (I choose the adjective carefully) between academics, practitioners, corporate hacks, and grass-roots types. It is not always kind and at times I find some of the sniping simply unpleasant. However, that is substantially outweighed by the calibre of discussion. It is a privilege to hear the likes of Dave Snowden, Steve Denning, Patrick Lambe (to name just a few) hashing issues out in a community space.

Having decided to help Dabba explore the replication of their Orange Farm success down here in the Western Cape, it was not immediately clear to me how to go about finding the right place for such a project. Alan Levine of Vanilla (Dabba’s partner in the Cape) initially provided a connection to a local NGO working with schools to provide support services to children affected by HIV to enter formal schooling with the necessary skills. However, after visiting the NGO sites, it was evident that while there was interest in the Village Telco concept, technology and entrepreneurship were not their sweet spot. They could see the value and would make great clients but were not the sort of organisation to drive an idea like this.

The Economic Value of Taking Things Apart

In the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Paul Romer writes:

Dabba relies on a variety of Open Source software application to enable their network. Here is a profile of some of those applications.

Business Day Africa profiles the Communications Commission of Kenya’s decision to offer ISM-band spectrum to non-profits:

Reading the tech news in South Africa, you get the impression that WiMax is going to very shortly solve all of the country’s broadband issues. Articles like this one give the impression that WiMax will shortly be available in every major city in South Africa. Municipal WiMax enthusiasts argue that this is “no business case for WiFi”

The conventional wisdom in the ICT4D community is that people in developing countries spend a higher percentage of their income on communications than the global average. For South Africa, this notion became is widely accepted (I think) thanks to the Vodafone study on mobile usage, in which Diane Coyle of Enlighenment Economics says:

Meet Rael Lissoos, a economist turned geek entrepreneur. While I have been talking about Village Telcos, Rael has been out building one in Orange Farm, a township about an hour south of Johannesburg.

Earlier this week I came across this wonderful master’s thesis entitled Generation of Complex Diagrams: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti by Noah Iliinsky. We have all at various times had our minds numbed by needlessly complex diagrams that did more to obscure the issue than explain it. This is the first insightful analysis I have seen about what makes a good or bad diagram. Well written and with many excellent examples of great and awful diagrams.

Seacom has emerged as a clear front runner in the African undersea cable stakes. They are the first initiative to declare a completion date, 17 June 2009 (after which cable company Tyco will incur performance penalties). More impressively they have revealed their wholesale pricing scheme which looks like this:

Tim O’Reilly points out some very cool publishing models being used by Logos Bible Software. The have a pre-publishing service in which clients commit to order at a discount in exchange for placing a pre-order for a specific product and Logos can guarantee that there costs are covered. Each potential pre-publish book has a meter which displays the current level of pre-orders.

In the spirit of the previous post consolidating information on African undersea cables, I compiled the image at the right to create a consolidated picture of existing and future cable initiatives around the continent. The relative cable sizes are roughly to scale according to the advertised capacity of the cables. There is certainly a contrast between the various initiatives.

As Mark Twain once said, “reports of my death were great exaggerated”. This could be very aptly applied to the optimistic perception that the Internet and cheap telecommunications meant that it didn’t matter where you were, the so-called “death of geography”. The future was in telework and invisible global supply chains. While there is truth to the flat world notion popularised by Thomas Friedman, it is equally true that “local” has become more important than ever. Strangely the more connected we become, the more local seems to matter.

“…broadband thrives on a mix of competition and active regulation, to ensure an open context.” This succinct summation comes from an Economist article from a couple of weeks ago entitled “Open up those highways“.

Having funded and watched and occasionally participated in the wireless hacker space in Africa for the last few years, I have the sense of “waiting for the next leap forward”. Wireless hackers have been successfully building cantennas, woktennas, and waterbottletennas, to name a few. They’ve been flashing Linksys Routers with a variety of free firmware replacements and in general tinkering with WiFi in a very cool way. I say cool because I think tinkering is one of the best ways of learning about something and also because taking something apart is a way of demystifying technology and ultimately making it something that serves you as opposed to the other way around.

Mostly in order to keep them all straight in my head, I have compiled a list of African undersea cable initiatives and their features, investors, etc.