Introduction

I used to be a textbook publisher for two multinational companies. And when you’re a book publisher you realise pretty quickly that you either make books for rich people, or you sell cookie-cutter textbooks to government. Most people in the world – perhaps six or seven billion – could never buy the books you make. Most South Africans, we can be fairly sure, live their entire lives without owning a book.

Take all the knowledge and experience in your brain that you got from books, and imagine you’re holding it here like a little package. Now, imagine you just threw it away. Gone. What’s left is a life without books. Maybe six billion people live like that, and that is a frightening waste of human potential.

So why is the world like this?

Traditional publishing

Well, all traditional publishing works like this:

• The publisher develops a finished product, based on their best guess of market needs.
• Then manufactures it.
• Stores it.
• Ships it.
• Then a retailer displays it.
• Sells a few copies.
• And returns or destroys the copies not sold.

This is very expensive: not only are there multiple links in the supply chain adding costs and very little value, but the risk of getting the initial product design wrong is high. Many publishers will tell you that only one in ten books makes money. So, as a result, the industry’s customers must be wealthy to pay for all this, and its retailers must be located close to those wealthy consumers. This is as true online as it is in bricks.

The industry can’t expand beyond these little clusters of wealthy consumers. It’s stuck. And in this form it can’t even live up to its name, ‘publishing’: to make public, and so to spread stories and education and professional knowledge. It’s a problem that, in South Africa, we might call the trap of very exclusive books.

Only a disruptive innovation could solve this problem. And in big publishing companies that would be hard to achieve, because of what Clayton Christensen famously described as the innovator’s dilemma: big companies must meet current customers’ needs, and this prevents them from investing in disruptive innovations, especially in low-margin markets.

And since most of Africa is made of low-margin markets, we need disruptive innovations more than anything.

In 2006 I had left big publishing to start Electric Book Works, a small consultancy that would set examples for innovative publishing, with a focus on technology.

Over the next few years, we failed again and again at creating good examples of inclusive books. It took several years to realise that the innovation we needed would not come from a new, first-world technology. New technologies require disposable income and new behaviours, and human beings are stingy and don’t change quickly. For example, even in the US, fourteen years since ebooks became widely available, and after seven years of massive investment and ebook cost-cutting by Amazon, still fewer than 30% of books purchased there are ebooks.

And given the ecosystem of devices, data, support and credit cards that they require, ebooks are just as exclusive as traditional books.

So I realised we wouldn’t solve the problem in South Africa by throwing ereaders at schoolchildren, or asking everyone to read their textbooks on tiny feature phone screens. We needed something simpler. Something that required no new infrastructure or technology. Something that built on the energy of entrepreneurs and small businesses. It had to work for established publishers, but not rely on them to change much at all about their businesses.

The answer: copy shops

When the answer finally arrived during a research project, it seemed blindingly obvious: there are thousands of photocopy shops around South Africa, printing CVs and flyers and booklets, and photocopying books every day. These shops are in city streets, townships, and rural villages. They’re in schools and churches, at the backs of hair salons and in converted shipping containers. We only needed to harness their power, and make it legal and easy for them to print and sell books.

The key is ‘legal’: copy shops have long had a reputation for copying and selling books illegally. Where that is true, it’s because they are meeting the needs of their communities in ways the formal book industry can’t. So you might say we wanted to turn pirates into partners: to bring an informal market into the formal distribution chain, for everyone’s benefit.

So in 2011, with the Shuttleworth Foundation as our investors, I gathered a team and began building Paperight: a network of independent copy shops that print books out for customers quickly and legally.

Our B2B site, paperight.com, enables any business with a printer and an Internet connection to print out and sell books, paying only a small licence fee per book from a prepaid account. Amazingly, publishers can make the same margins that they do from their fancy editions, and still the total cost to the customer is usually less than a traditional book.

More importantly, the customer just walks to their local copy shop for it: no long trips to the bookstore to discover they’re out of stock, or waiting weeks for a delivery. No need for a credit card.

The copy-printer as intermediate technology

Our innovation is built on what EF Schumacher, over fifty years ago, called an ‘intermediate technology’: a technology that’s more advanced than the poor are used to, but cheaper to set up than the first world’s cutting-edge stuff. Base of pyramid initiatives will always rely on intermediate technologies to be sustainable.

But it takes humility to innovate with intermediate technologies. In this way, ours is a humble innovation. It is not sexy to sell printouts from copy shops. But the power of Paperight is in that simplicity.

Africa as a whole needs more humble innovations using intermediate technologies, or we will continue to limp forward through the rubble of a thousand failed attempts to roll out fancy technology that existing economies can’t support.

Intermediate technologies work today. Our member copy shops across the country have delivered thousands of books, many in places where no bookstores exist, like Peddie in the rural Eastern Cape, and the CBDs of Khayelitsha.

While we’re still small, the potential impact is immense. We’ve just signed an MOU with copier manufacturer Riso, whose low-power, high-volume machines are perfect for schools. Any school that leases a Riso machine will be able to print books from as needed, and Riso will contribute to the licence fees. This could change the face of schoolbook distribution forever, completely sidestepping the problems of textbook shortfalls in classrooms.

And it can all be done with good old photocopiers.

How we innovate

We believe that when innovation is humble, it becomes very straightforward: you simply focus on finding the real problem and solving it today. You can waste a lot of time innovating around the wrong problems, or on tomorrow’s problems, sticking glamorous technology where it isn’t appropriate.

We also believe wholeheartedly in the value of openness: transparency and sharing is built into our team’s DNA. The company is fully transparent internally, right down to knowing each others’ salaries. We’re open-sourcing our code. We love sharing stories of failure as much as success.

This openness many benefits: we waste no resources trying to keep secrets; we are forced to confront our failures bravely; and others share with us and trust us.

Openness helped us overcome our first big challenge: getting traditional publishers on board and willing to work with copy shops that they’d always mistrusted.

Challenges and bright spots

We’ve won a bunch of awards and accolades around the world over the last year. But quite frankly, what really matters is whether our model is delivering books. Which it is, of course, but we’re impatient, and we want to deliver far more books much faster.

So we’re continually looking for partners, specifically organisations ready to invest CSR or enterprise-development money in getting books to needy schools and early-childhood-development programmes, and in supporting small printing businesses.

It’s still early days for us and for truly accessible books, but as more and more partners join us on the journey, the better the chances are that we’ll look back in ten years and say that together we fixed a dent in the universe, and put books within walking distance of every home.

Thank you.

The post On transformative innovation with Yellowwood appeared first on Arthur Attwell.

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When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.

I’ve heard this sort of thing from folk in the international development world for years, mostly older folk still dictating their emails to their secretaries.  ”Yeah, but how is this going to help the poor farmer in rural Tanzania?”  It is frankly surprising to hear it from it from Bill Gates.  Erik Hersman responded to Gates’ comments by pointing out two things:  1) that Gates is perpetuating a narrative about Africa which portrays Africans as helpless; and 2) that development is of course multi-dimensional and it is not an either-or question.

I agree with Erik on both points but I want to go farther in saying that Gates is just flat-out wrong.  Communication infrastructure has everything to do with Malaria according to this 2007 study on the “Role of information and communication networks in malaria survival“.  The researchers claim that up to 82% of all malaria episodes in sub-Saharan Africa are treated outside the formal health sector and that 70% of the malaria cases that are treated at home are mismanaged.  As a result, access to a resource or a person that can assist in diagnosis and treatment is key to reducing morbidity and mortality.

In a study carried out across 70 countries, the researchers found that intensity of communication infrastructure is strongly correlated with reduced probability of death from malaria.  They conclude by saying:

In preventing malaria, ICN [Information and Communication Networks] may not have a direct impact similar to malaria drugs but it can certainly increase the effectiveness of the intervention strategies and resources indirectly. ICN can speed up the delivery of services and provide access to crucial health information. Access to information and knowledge allows the community members to participate in opportunities and activities related to their own development.

This reinforces Erik’s point that constructing the argument as a choice of one or the other is disingenuous.  It also points out that basic communication infrastructure does in fact have a critical role to play in malaria prevention.  Note also that there is no direct causal line here.  No malaria hotline or mobile app.  No philanthropic initiative that can claim victory for their intervention, just access to communication infrastructure generally.

So what about Project Loon?  Is it going to revolutionise the world of connectivity?  I seriously doubt it.  That said, I also doubted YouTube and Twitter in their infancy.  Project Loon is a very high-risk idea, so risky its sounds a bit “loony”, a fact that is obviously not lost on the the project founders.  Is pursuing high risk projects like Project Loon a bad idea?  No, it is a pretty smart approach.  They are pursuing what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls a barbell strategy which promotes a combination of investment in extremes kept separate, with avoidance of the middle.  Thus Google can continue to milk the ad revenue cow they have reared but also take chances on risky bets that have very high upsides if they succeed but low comparative cost to Google if they fail.

Finally, what appeals most to me about the role of communication infrastructure is that it ultimately promotes self-reliance, increased social capital, and local innovation.  Initiatives that focus on lowering the cost of access and making it more ubiquitous will indirectly (and perhaps directly) contribute to African countries shrugging off the vestiges of dependency they have on the largesse of plutocrats of any flavour.

-
Mosquito image courtesy of Gerald Yuvallos CC 2005 BY-ND

read original post on Steve Song's Site

Let me start by saying that the ideals of the Open Data movement: transparency; accountability; and, citizen innovation, are ones that I hold near to my heart.  Further, I admire and respect many of the leaders of the Open Data movement.  However, and it may simply be my own myopia, I have yet to see many voices for caution with respect to Open Data.  In particular, what concerns me most at the moment is the air of euphoria in which Open Government Data in particular is being pitched to the public.  The recent series of articles around the proposed G8 Open Data Charter such as this one by Martin Tisné and this by Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt create an expectation about data that will, at best, be very hard to fulfil and, at worst, actually shift the attention from where it ought to be.  Here are some of the things I worry about.

Data as Fetish

Children’s charity organiser Benita Refson is recently quoted in the Guardian as saying: “If you’re not using data, you’re just another person with an opinion”. Somehow this quotation sums up all of my pent up apprehension about the Open Data movement. Implicit in the above is the assumption that “data”, “facts”, and “truth” are roughly equivalent.  We see this in common expressions like “The data just doesn’t back it up”.  This amounts to a kind of fetishisation of data as having some mystical, immutable truth quality, a quality which of course does not exist.  Data is collected by people.  Even when it is collected by machines, it is collected by machines designed by people.  And this means that data is vulnerable to all of the vagaries that humans are prey to, bias, laziness, hidden purpose, myopia, etc.  We choose what data to collect and how often and where.  We choose what level of quality we would like.  We choose how to represent that data and what story we think the data is backing up.

As more data accumulates our ability to see whatever we want to see increases.  Researcher Kate Crawford and author Nassim Taleb have both eloquently pointed out that with larger amounts of data the ease of coming to a false conclusion only increases.  Taleb says:

big data means anyone can find fake statistical relationships, since the spurious rises to the surface. This is because in large data sets, large deviations are vastly more attributable to variance (or noise) than to information (or signal). It’s a property of sampling: In real life there is no cherry-picking, but on the researcher’s computer, there is.

Researchers ranging from Duncan Watts to Daniel Kahneman have documented our human tendency to apply our expectations and biases to what we see.  The image at the left, which recently became a popular meme on the Internet, illustrates the dangers of what can be done with too much data.

If we allow “data” to retain this mystical aura of “fact”, we run the risk of allowing ourselves to be swayed by the truthiness of the data sources we happen to like.  Far more reassuring for me is the Open Science Data movement which seeks to expose these very issues by allowing other scientists to corroborate or contradict the findings of other researchers using the same data.  The next Open movement I would like to see is one about Open Corroboration where we come up with better means for assessing the validity and meaning of data, news, research, etc.

Not to mention the fact that the very representation of data can influence how it is interpreted.  The rise of infographics has made data even more difficult to interrogate and can be used to skew the interpretation of data.  See this article on how the venerable pie chart can be used more to confuse and mislead than inform.

Data and Privacy

Also a key issue for me are the privacy implications of Open Government Data policies.  If the new default for all government data is to be open, then it is inevitable that at some point the Mosaic Effect will come into play.  The Mosaic Effect occurs when the information in an individual dataset, in isolation, may not pose a risk of identifying an individual (or threatening some other important interest such as security), but when combined with other available information, could pose such risk.  A recent US Government policy memo instructed agencies to they must  account for the “mosaic effect” of data aggregation.  This can be quite hard to do and there is concern among the Open Government Data community that such a requirement could be used as an excuse to block the publication of data. A better strategy would be for the Open Government Data community to move towards a more demand-driven approach.  Indeed this is the recommendation of UK researcher Kieran O’Hara in his paper, Transparent Government, Not Transparent Citizens: A Report on Privacy and Transparency for the Cabinet Office, where he suggests:

In a demand-driven regime, information entrepreneurs would ask for the datasets they felt they needed, or felt that they could use to create value, whether social value or commercial value (profit) for their own firms. This suggests two requirements.
1. Entrepreneurs must know what datasets there are.
2. There must be a screening process to ensure that privacy-threatening releases (and other problematic releases, such as ones which might threaten national security) could be challenged and blocked.

The issue of privacy is not limited to that of personal information.  For instance, what right does an endangered species have to not have its location disclosed.  The impact of making datasets public is hard to predict.  Martin and Prof Shadbolt have done a great job in highlighting the positive but there are negative outcomes as well.  Consider the saga of the map of registered gun owners that was published in the wake of the Newtown shooting.  Patrick Meier has a thoughtful analysis of what happened and its implications.  He ends by drawing on a basic principle from the hippocratic oath, do no harm.  Addressing the “do no harm” standard in some way should be an essential pre-requisite for publishing any dataset.

Data and Complexity

Yet another concern for me is the danger of looking a complex systems in an overly simplistic way.  The fact that we can measure one aspect of a complex system may give us the temptation to intervene without fully understanding the systemic role of the thing we measure.  It may give us a false sense of understanding.  If we have complete scrutiny of government, will that affect the way civil servants and politicians behave in an entirely positive way?  Or will it simply move existing bad behaviour into areas beyond scrutiny.

A top-down, data-driven, supply-side approach to Open Government is also likely to mean a focus on what is available as opposed to what is needed.  As Einstein (and others) famously said, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”

Open Data as Symptom or Cause of an Open Government

Finally, real Open Government is a cultural issue not a data issue.  I worry that the disproportionate focus on datasets will distract from the harder challenge of building a culture of openness.  I can’t help but wonder whether Open Government Data is a symptom of Open Government and not the other way around.  Of course it is a bidirectional relationship but perhaps it only becomes bidirectional when there is a sufficient level of cultural openness in government.

This may be less of a worry in the G8 nations where there is a reasonably robust civil society to advocate for openness but for countries without that luxury, a focus on Open Government Data may not bring about the desired results.

A move towards a more demand-driven approach would have the benefit, not only of allowing due consideration of the merits and impact of releasing specific datasets but would also hopefully catalyse more of a dialogue (as I have argued for previously) between civil society and government.  To paraphrase JFK, ask not what your Open Government can do for you, ask what you can do to open your government!

read original post on Steve Song's Site

I have more questions than answers. Some of these are things I wish I’d done better at P2PU. Some of this applies to tech projects more than other types of projects.

Change is good – It’s also frustrating, it’s hard, it drains your motivation and enthusiasm, and people don’t like it. But if you are building something new, dealing with change really is the one thing you need to be good at. Very few things will work they way you thought they would. When the ground under your feet moves – don’t panic, enjoy the ride!

What is the problem you are solving? – Never forget to ask this question. Never forget your answer. And make sure it’s a problem you care about.

Outsource the “plumbing” – Find people who will do your accounting, legal, HR for free (pro bono support is easier for non-profits) or pay for it. It’s a gigantic distraction.

Learn how to prototype and test – No matter how smart you are, or how well you understand your users, try out a new idea before you dedicate huge resources. And embrace the fact that you will always throw away the first version (unless you are ridiculously lucky, in which case you don’t need good advice anyway).

Be smart about your tech – Unless technology is the core of your business, use existing off-the-shelf platforms and solutions. Do NOT build anything yourself. You will regret it.

Update (thanks to the excellent Helen Turvey, and Steve Song). Added one more:

Bring a friend (or more) – Starting something new is stressful. Rarely do things go according to plan. Having someone who is in it with you is key. Not just for the days when you need a kind word, a kick in the butt, or someone to make a joke – but also for the days when you’re on top of the world. Cause it’s more fun to share! (hint -> sharing nicely!)

Update 2:

Chris has turned all the feedback she received into a collection of 64 Tips to Blossom and Thrive.

read original post on Philipp Schmidt's Site

Inspired by the recent successful launch of the Television White Spaces pilot in South Africa, I am once again tempted to engage in providing  mostly unsolicited advice about what Google’s strategy in Africa ought to be.  What I want to propose today is the launching of a Netflix-like streaming television service aimed at African markets and serving African and international content.  In this I take a more radical point of view than I did in my recent post about the Digital Dividend. This idea is borne of two recent experiences, one, some work I did recently looking at the migration process from analogue to digital broadcasting in Africa; and, two, my personal experience with Netflix.

Digital Migration

Most of the industrialised world has made a transition from analogue to digital broadcasting of terrestrial television.  The process in most African countries is much slower.  Because digital broadcasting requires a fraction of the spectrum needed for analogue broadcasting, a transition to digital television broadcasting:

1. creates space for more television channels;
2. allows the possibility of broadcasting in High Definition (HD);
3. makes some spectrum available for other purposes such as broadband; and,
4. allows broadcasters to keep pace with changes in broadcast technology.

Of the above benefits, I question whether a. and b. are relevant in Africa.  There has always been plenty of space for television channels.  The majority of African countries have four or fewer terrestrial broadcast channels.  As for High Definition broadcasting, it is hard to make either the social or economic case for HD broadcasting.  You could make the argument about Africa not being left behind or given second class technology but frankly I have trouble seeing the real market demand for HD television in the industrialised world, perhaps for sports broadcasting.  HD television feels like the upgrade that manufacturers tell you you want.  Which of course doesn’t rule out HD television via other means such as satellite.  So the real benefit of the switch-over to digital terrestrial broadcasting is the spectrum that is freed up for other purposes such as mobile broadband or TV White Spaces technology, etc.  And if that’s true, then does there really need to be a switch-over to digital broadcasting at all?

Across the continent, the switchover process is not going very well at all.  Very few countries seem to have come up with an effective strategy of how to manage the switch-over let alone finance it.  Few countries have an effective strategy of even how provide everyone with the Set Top Boxes (STBs) that are required to view digital broadcasts if you don’t happen to have a shiny new digital television set.  In South Africa, unspent funds from the Universal Service Agency are being re-purposed for the purchase of STBs for the masses.  The bottom line is that the economics of the transition to digital broadcasting simply don’t make sense.  It is an extremely expensive process for an, as yet, undetermined benefit.  Digital broadcasting is being treated as a giant “build it and they will come” project that will hopefully create both supply and demand at the same time.  And if you don’t buy that, there is always the argument that one must embrace the digital switch-over because it is inevitable.

Most African countries signed an agreement in 2006 that they would commit to the digital switch-over.  The general sense is that you simply have to get on board because analogue broadcasting will soon be obsolete.  It reminds me a bit of the furore a few years ago about the need to move to IPv6 because all the IPv4 addresses were about to run out.  Strangely the sun has yet to set on the IPv4 address space.

So what if there were another option, an option that didn’t exist or seem credible in the near future in 2006 when the switch-over policy decision was taken?  I am referring to Over The Top (OTT) broadcasting or the delivery of what was traditionally broadcast content over the Internet.

The Success of Netflix

Netflix is the most successful example of OTT service delivery.  As of the end of 2012, they claim over 33 million subscribers worldwide, most in the United States.  Not too long after moving to Canada from South Africa last year, I signed our family up for Netflix.  I was unprepared for how cheap and how efficient their service is.  $7.99 per month for all-you-can-eat television is pretty good, by any standard.  In fact, $7.99 looks roughly like mobile ARPU in Africa. People complain about the choice and how up-to-date their offering is but for our family it is the right blend of price and service.  What was even more impressive is how well it works.  We have a single 6Mb/s dry-DSL link that provides all of our household communication including VoIP phone service and Internet.  I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my kids watching Netflix did not affect the quality of my VoIP phone calls.

Last month, I attended an event at which Netflix’s Director of Cloud Infrastructure, Adrian Cockcroft, spoke.  He further impressed me with just how far and how fast Netflix has come.  One of the first things he said was that Netflix expects to become the largest Content Distribution Network (CDN) in the world some time this year.  That may or may not turn out to be true but just the fact that he thinks it likely is saying something given the likes of Akamai, Level 3 and others.  If you know anything about the distribution of video and other big media on the Internet, you know that it is dependent on CDNs which are gigantic local caches of content.  So when you request that YouTube video in Cape Town, it appears to stream internationally at high speed but actually you’re just getting a local copy from Google’s Global Cache CDN in South Africa.  This makes for much more efficient use of the main arteries of the Internet although how CDNs should be implemented and by who is a subject of much debate.  Netflix have built their infrastructure entirely on Amazon’s cloud infrastructure which makes them a completely virtual organisation.   It impressive just how flexible and efficient at content delivery Netflix are.  No doubt the competition is not far behind them but just to say that remarkable things have been achieved in the last 6 years in both video compression and content distribution.

An Opportunity for Google?

So, a bold move for an African country would be to scrap the digital switch-over entirely and invest all that money planned for a digital broadcast network into broadband fibre and wireless infrastructure to support OTT service provision.  Bold but inconceivable.  I think we all know that that is never going to happen.  The digital switch-over ship has sailed and there is too much money already committed to it.  It is officially too big to fail.  However, that wouldn’t stop a smart company from doing the right thing.

Google already operates its own CDN network in Africa.  There are Google Global Caches in South Africa and Kenya and doubtless other countries on the continent.  It is well-positioned to manage the delivery of content on the continent.  Arguably, as a company, Google understands African media markets better than most international Internet companies having invested significantly over the last 4-5 years in local offices and local talent in Africa.

An African digital television service could be a low-barrier opportunity for new content-makers and a great way to promote thriving national industries like Nollywood to the rest of the continent.  It would be an opportunity to innovate service delivery perhaps creating new super-low-bandwidth options or perhaps overnight updates or local WiFi-based mini-caches of television content.

Are Google the best company to do this?  They certainly have all it takes although it doesn’t mean that someone else might not do it faster and better.  The three takeaway points I want to leave you with are these:

1. The switch-over to digital broadcasting in Africa is a slow-moving train wreck.
2. OTT television services are growing faster and more efficiently than you might have imagined.
3. The combination of 1 and 2 could mean a different television future for Africa.

read original post on Steve Song's Site

Just then the phone rings.  You answer and the person on the other end says “Hi, this is Jo-Philipp Wich calling from Germany.  I am the designer of that stove and I couldn’t help but notice you were having trouble installing the stove I designed.   The problem you’re having is that the manual actually says ‘sprocket’ not ‘socket’.”  Dumbfounded you hang up the phone, turn back to your stove and low and behold you have it installed in about 5 minutes.

Sounds a bit crazy doesn’t it?  Except that on the Internet, this happens every day.

It happened yesterday in the Village Telco community.  Terry Gillett, who has been doing amazing work in developing a drop-dead easy-to-use firmware for the Mesh Potato (and increasingly for some other OpenWRT-based devices) was stuck on the implementation of a secure interface to the web configuration page.  Without the ability to offer a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to the configuration interface on a Mesh Potato, potentially anyone could eavesdrop on the configuration of the device and take it over.   Unfortunately the webserver (uhttpd – a lightweight http server for OpenWRT) crashed every time it was launched in secure mode.  Terry, Keith Williamson, and Elektra traded ideas on debugging it and started developing some workarounds for the problem.

It was after about five days of back and forth looking for the root of the problem, when this message appeared on the development list:

Hi,

I'm the author of uhttpd and stumbled over this thread by accident.
The libssl issues you see seem to be the result of a miscompilation

The current uhttpd-mod-tls package in OpenWrt lets you choose between
either libopenssl or libcyassl as crypto backend, default is cyassl.
If uhttpd-mod-tls depends on libcyassl but demands libssl.so then it
was linked against the wrong library during compilation, so the most
clean solution would be to rebuild it.

I am afraid that the symlink workaround does no good as cyassl and
openssl have different abis, so any attempt to use such a "faked"
library most likely results in a segmentation fault.

Regards,
Jow

The message was from Jo-Philipp Wich, the author of the uhttpd server.  He was able to suggest the correct solution immediately when in retrospect is fairly straightforward but everything looks straightforward in retrospect.  Had the Village Telco development community not been an open and transparent one with searchable archives on the Internet, this would never have happened.

This may seem like trivial example but in fact I think it is one of the most significant illustrations of the power of the Internet and the what the birthday paradox really means.  Someone out there has the key to what you need to do next.  It might be the answer or just a clue to think about things differently but chances of someone out there having the key to your next step, whatever you happen to be working on, are pretty good.

That’s why it is so important to live out loud on the Internet, to leave a breadcrumb trail while you work, because you just never know who is going to find your work valuable or who is going to have the answer to your problem.

Interestingly, this is surprisingly hard.  Bill Tucker is a computer science professor at the University of the Western Cape.  I was chatting with him and some of his grad students last week who are working on some mesh networking projects related to Village Telco.  They are doing some really excellent work and I urged them to share what they were doing in the online development communities they were working in.  They acknowledged it as a good idea but I could tell they weren’t completely convinced it was a good idea.  I mean who wants to look like an idiot?  Worse what if someone calls you an idiot?  The Internet is not without its share of trolls.

It dawned on me then that I still find it hard to live out loud.  I founded Village Telco and I often feel intimidated suggesting things within the community that fall on the edge of or fully outside my area of expertise.  The same goes for this blog.  Every post I write, I have to overcome a sensation that this post might be so obvious, so trivial or so wrong that I will be subject to abject humiliation by posting it.  It’s irrational as that has never happened in four years of blogging but there it is.

If I feel intimidated as the founder, it must be much harder for newcomers.  Not for everyone of course.  Some people are lucky enough to have grown up fully confident in themselves and some are just natural extroverts.  That’s great but if we are going to solve the challenges that face world today whether poverty, injustice, or climate change… we need everyone.  We need to leverage the power of the birthday paradox and get everyone leaving breadcrumbs on the Internet that will create non-linear innovation such as we have never seen.

So get out there.  Share your idea, your problem, your expertise.  We need all of us.

read original post on Steve Song's Site

Lots of innovation is happening totally under the radar – in people’s garages, in backyards, in shacks – but these are all pretty small-scale and the lessons aren’t really communicated out. If you can provide a network to connect these people – help them research what others are doing, find that someone down the street who is working on the same thing – then good ideas can be amplifi ed and businesses scaled up. The glue of it all is cheap, reliable internet access.

The whole edition is dedicated to connectivity and creativity in Cape Town — it’s worth a read.

read original post on Steve Vosloo's Site

Superficial, childish and possibly dangerous?

Negative uses of the word tinkering tend to fall into two camps. The first camp sees tinkering as a childish pastime that is possibly dangerous.  Take this article by Larry Downes on the U.S. Protect IP Act of 2011 in which he says:

The real danger is that by tinkering desperately with the fundamental machinery of both the Internet and the legal system, the unintended consequences that result could prove catastrophic.

The implication is that tinkerers are like little children playing with things they don’t understand are are likely to break.

The second camp sees tinkering not so much as bad but as insufficient, as a kind of playing around at the edges of something, trying ineffectually to fix it, rather than boldly thinking about building a brand new something. Internet economy guru, Don Tapscott takes this perspective. In his book of last year,  Macrowikieconomics, he argues that tinkering is insufficient. He says,

“But among other things, we need to rethink transportation, adopt new manufacturing and shipping practices, pull off a dramatic shift toward greener products and lifestyles, and retool our energy system, all while devoting enormous intellectual and financial resources to protecting the world’s most vulnerable peoples and locations from the effects of rising sea levels and other consequences. Surely a little bit of political tinkering will be insufficient to achieve all of this.”

He goes on to say

“Most world leaders – indeed, most leaders of business and government anywhere – harbour the same old tired set of assumptions about how to solve the world’s problems. And more often than not, they seem focused on tinkering with old models rather than moving to something new and viable. Consider the dysfunctional financial services industry. Conventional policy wisdom demands more regulation over financial markets. But no one stops to ask whether the current models of regulatory oversight and enforcement are truly equipped for the job.”

Tapscott is not alone.  Take this comment from Daniel Veniez on the Canadian health system:

We have underinvested in people, technology, research, innovation and public health. We must modernize our health-care system, including the Canada Health Act, and this will require more than tinkering.

Or this from David Cunliffe on the New Zealand budget:

If, however, the Budget is simply more of the same tinkering from John Key, and if it pins all our economic hopes on rose-tinted forecasts of economic growth, while refusing to specify where within each department or service cuts will be made, it will not be a success.

All of them are arguing in their cases that structural issues at stake that mere tinkering with existing models will not address.  So there you have it. Superficial, childish and possibly dangerous.

What is a tinker?

Before unpacking the above, it is worth taking a step back in history to understand where the word tinker came from.  A tinker was someone who moved from town to town earning an income by fixing broken metal things, pots, pans, etc. Not perhaps a pillar of society, in fact tinkers didn’t get much respect back then either, but they played an essential if unglamorous role, someone who knew how to fix things. And how did they fix things? The modern connotation of the word tinker would have you believe that a tinker would fix a broken utensil by casually rapping away at it with a overweight hammer. That sort of tinker would probably not have lasted very long.

A successful tinker, given the modest tools he might have in his possession, would require a deep knowledge of metals and their properties and how they interacted with each other. He might not know the atomic structure of copper but he would have a profound sense of its malleability, durability, melting point, and how it might be combined with other metals. He would understand how pots are made and how to take them apart without breaking them. Consequently, he would be in a position to improve a badly made pot. Or he might be able to take his deep knowledge of metals and utensils and craft new utensils.

Beware of enterprises requiring new clothes

The notion that we need to “re-think” things and create new models and that gently experimenting with things is bad is a dangerous meme.  If we are asking leaders to take bolder steps to implement change, what confidence do we have that they know the answer to the problems they are trying to solve?  Actually we already KNOW that they don’t know. Economies are complex adaptive systems that consistently defy prediction.

Even the notion of models is a largely a case of retrospective coherence. We use models to explain things but the generally model comes AFTER things have changed not before. Of course there are exceptions to that, visions of how the world ought to be like the Communist Manifesto but history has had something to say about the viability of that approach. Retrospective coherence and the models we build from it is how we make sense of the world and how we spread good ideas but it is not how innovation and change comes about.

So really it is the kind of sweeping change that Mr. Tapscott proposes that is dangerous, that could have catastrophic repercussions that might take a generation of more to repaid.  A great example of this is California’s wholesale importation of  direct democracy from Switzerland, the disastrous consequences of which may actually be undoable.  That is exactly the kind of bold idea that Mr. Tapscott is proposing.

That makes me sound quite conservative but I am actually proposing something radical.  A million small changes.  We need to unleash the power to do many small experiments in our social, economic, political and regulatory systems and we need the means to learn from successes and failures and nurture those small successes.

The modern Tinkerer

What we need is to give people with deep local knowledge the freedom to experiment with systems.  And why am I on about this now?  It’s not just the bold punditry of Don Tapscott that has me up in arms.  More locally, Vodacom CEO Pieter Uys has proposed an open access network for rural access, an idea which in principle sounds great.  Infrastructure sharing is overdue in South Africa, however, the devil is in the details.  He argues that ICASA shouldn’t experiment with untested models.

“It should develop a plan with input from regulators in the rest of the world, from suppliers and other experts, to say what is the best for SA in the long term based on the country’s goals.”

So what confidence do we have that we will get it right this time?  We need adaptive policies that open up freedom for innovation and more importantly allow us to recover gracefully from mistakes.  Our previous record with importing “tested” regulatory models from the rest of the world is hardly a success story.  We are saddled with a rich-world regulatory environment that demands a strong, well-trained and well-resourced regulator to implement.

I fear that Mr. Uys’  idea of an ‘open access’ is one where Vodacom, MTN, Cell C, and Telkom share the cost of rural infrastructure and extend their cosy and largely uncompetitive club into rural areas.  And if this turns out to be true, how will we recover from it?  If we have learned one thing from South African telcos it is that once their interests are entrenched they extremely difficult to change.  We need a system that encourages flexible market-based innovation in service delivery.

An idea whose time has come

This notion that we more of an evolutionary approach to change is not my own.  It has been championed by many distinguished writers from Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Eric Beinhocker.  More recently, author Peter Sims makes the case for this in his book Little Bets. He says:

“Little bets are a way to explore and develop new possibilities. Specifically, a little bet is a low-risk action taken to discover, develop, and test an idea. Chris Rock develops new comedy routines by making little bets with small audiences; Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos makes small bets to identify opportunities in new markets like cloud computing. Little bets are at the center of an approach to get to the right idea without getting stymied by perfectionism, risk-aversion, or excessive planning.”

Tim Harford of Undercover Economist fame, makes a similar case in his new book Adapt.  He argues that

“today’s challenges simply cannot be tackled with ready-made solutions and expert opinions; the world has become far too unpredictable and profoundly complex. Instead, we must adapt—improvise rather than plan, work from the bottom up rather than the top down, and take baby steps rather than great leaps forward.”

So, please let’s not have another “best practice” that hasn’t actually yet stood the test of time, rolled out wholesale in South Africa.  Let’s create an environment where Pieter Uys can experiment with his model but allow others to flourish as well.  What about community-owned towers where communities invite service providers to bid to offer services on their infrastructure.  Would that work?  Maybe.  Let’s have a small experiment to find out. And Television White Spaces spectrum?  One might argue that this is simply another untested idea being imported into South Africa.  That’s a fair call but the cost of failure is minuscule.  If TV White Spaces spectrum fails, we won’t even have had to re-allocate any spectrum as it is designed for secondary, serendipitous use.   On the other hand, give all the 700-800 megahertz spectrum to the incumbents and that will take a generation or more to fix.

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Setting “smart defaults” is a key to masking complexity and lowering the barrier to uptake.  Think of Google’s search minimalism after Altavista et al or Apple’s simplification of so many applications that were filled with twiddly knobs, checkboxes, and radio buttons in other operating systems that shall remain nameless.    Wordpress is another great example of an application that is capable of impressive sophistication for “blogging software” yet pretty much “just works” after completely a bare minimum of setup information. Terry has taken us one giant step closer towards WordPress-like usability with his Small Enterprise – Campus Network (SECN) setup for Mesh Potatoes.

His goal to be able to serve a local network of modest size offering seamless voice and data.  He wanted any Mesh Potato to pick up Internet connectivity via the ethernet port, if it could find it, and for each Mesh Potato to offer a local WiFi access point.  After experimenting a little bit, he chose to install the BATMAN-ADV mesh protocol instead of BATMAN protocol we currently use.  The big difference between the two protocols is that BATMAN-ADV runs at Layer 2 and BATMAN at Layer 3 of the OSI layer model.  What does that mean?  Well the simplest explanation is that BATMAN-ADV makes Mesh Potatoes behave as if they were all part of one big network switch which means that IP addressing and routing for the network is dramatically simplified as each Mesh Potato is effectively transparent to the IP network.  This effectively removes the hassle of figuring out network addressing and Network Address Translation for Mesh Potatoes.  Everything is just one flat network which means that devices can easily communicate with each other on the network.  The flip side of this is that you have to be careful about what you put on the network because a poorly configured or worse infected computer can generate a lot of local network traffic.  This is something we’re exploring but for a small network, BATMAN-ADV seems to work exceedingly well.

With Terry’s modifications, an SECN configured Mesh Potato network will now:

• offer an encrypted, WPA-enabled, wireless access point as well as a peer-to-peer wireless connection on each mesh Potato.  This is done by creating a Virtual Access Point (VAP) on the same radio interface as the mesh.  Initially we chose not to enable this by default on the core Mesh Potato distribution because we were concerned about network data load have an impact on voice quality but Terry’s work makes me think that this was a mistake.  Much better to encourage use and solve the problem of over-use rather than ensure a functional but underused network;
• pick up a network connection from any DHCP-enabled Internet-connected device it is connected to the ethernet port on the Mesh Potato;
• transparently carry DHCP requests over the network to devices connected to Mesh Potatoes whether by ethernet or WiFi; and,
• offer simple on-network and also VoIP service provider configurable phone calling.  Local phones can be dialed simply by entering the last 3 digits of the IP address of the Mesh Potato you want to call or the Mesh Potatoes can be registered with any VoIP service provider.

The long and short of this is that if you plug in a bunch of SECN-configured Mesh Potatoes and make sure at least one is connected to something simple like a DHCP-enabled ADSL router, then you have a transparent, highly-adaptable technology for creating a robust local telephone and data network with no wires.

So, did Terry do this all by himself?  Without Terry’s interest and hard work at testing, reconfiguring, debugging the SECN version might never have happened but one of the great things about Open Source is that one is rarely starting from scratch.  He was able to build on the configuration that Elektra built for the Mesh Potato which in turn built on great Open Source initiatives like OpenWRT, Asterisk, and others.  And at least a dozen people in the Village Telco community were there to help him solve problems and answer questions.  Better still his work inspired others to try out new configurations with the Mesh Potato and Elektra was inspired to take the set of instructions that he had developed and embed them in a new Mesh Potato firmware distribution that people can use to set up smaller Village Telco networks to serve both voice and data.

If you’re interested in trying this out yourself, you’ll need a few Mesh Potatoes to start and then you’ll want to download the latest SECN firmware and flash the Mesh Potatoes with this new firmware.  Terry has been developing the documentation for the SECN, the latest version of which is here.  Because this is still at an early stage, that URL may change.  Best to check in with the Village Telco google group to find the latest version.

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