Recent blog entries

Last month, we sat down to have another How We Work conversation at Shuttleworth Foundation. Under the microscope this time: our Fellowships Program. We're all pretty happy with this program. So, the aim was to reflect on why it seems to be working ... and to find ways to tweak and improve it.

Last week, David Eavesblogged about the potential for Mozilla to energize -- and maybe even lead -- a mass movement for the open web.

Today I attended the Information for Change II workshop held at the Cape Town Book Fair. It is still a little unclear exactly how I came to be there, apart from driving I mean. Bill Carman and Steve Song arranged it so that I got to present a poster on our latest pet idea, the print aggregator.

Writing up Open Everything Torontodebrief notes, I realized that striking the right yin-yang between impressive and surprising examples of 'open' will be one of the most critical factors for future events.

A putative bill which creates a system require patenting of tax payer funded research will be published today.

May 2008 was a really great month at the Foundation. We went through what seemed like a spring clean of our thoughts, processes and communications.

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.

Anyone living in a consumer society is likely to benefit from reading this book, finding it an insightful if disturbing expose of manipulation techniques employed by marketers, media and politicians. You will never trust a salesman again.

With Open Everything Toronto a week behind us, blog reflections, notes and photos are starting to trickle online. One of the highlights so far:Amanda Yilmaz's write up of the Seneca Open Source Course session.

According to a press release the International Standards Organisation has suspended publication of OOXML as an ISO standard during the appeal process.

Last week was the 5th annual Games for Change conference in New York. An interesting blog post to come out of that discusses the need to localise social issue games.

I’ve posted a round-up of the eLearning Africa conference on Tech Leader. Helpful input to the pie

Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open. We've got 60 amazing people registered who come from computer programming, community development and everywhere in between. It's gonna rock.

I have been hearing a lot lately about ACTA, a treaty which is being drafted at the behest of a handful of old economy monopolies. IPJustice has a useful anaylsis. ACTA is an accroym for Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Who could be against measures to prevent counterfieting? No doubt the name was chosen for exactly that reason, to imply that anyone who wishes to debate the provisions or even the necessity for the agreement. Its also sold as a trade agreement, which in some of the countries taking part in negociations means that executive sign-off is suffecient to bind that country, and the treaty need not pass scrutiny by the legislature.

I have recently returned from Uganda. From 27 to 29 May 2008 I participated in the PALM Africa Workshop on alternative publishing models in Africa, which was hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda (NABOTU). The participants in the workshop represented a wide range of types of organisations, including public and private sector publishers, and an equally wide range of competences, and attitudes toward alternative publishing models. The organisers of the workshop are to be congratulated on patiently and persistently explaining the potential benefits of alternative licensing. Experimenting with alternative publishing models offers a low cost, low risk way of testing the opportunities available to developing country publishers.

My presentation at eLearning Africa was Digital storytelling for Africa: Case study of an international digital media project.

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

Below are notes from the eLearning Africa session titled mobile phones offering a lifeline to learners.

I am in Kampala at a workshop hosted by the National Book Trust of Uganda on alternative publishing models, PALM Africa. The air is full of new ideas, emerging business models…change.
There is considerable promise that local publishers will be able to find new sources of sustainability and increase access to knowledge. These are important benefits of open access publishing models. There is another, often overlooked benefit of open access publishing models.

Ok, the title is probably not worded very precisely but it's in the right ballpark. During the meeting today, one of the people from the University of Michigan mentioned that there are only 128 symptoms (is this the right word) a patient can present, it was a talk about health faculties sharing OERs. This had never occurred to me, but, in my defence, I had never ever even thought about it.

I just wanted to capture a concern and some thoughts around it. Today I heard it said in a meeting that available OERs are of low quality, irrespective of their cost. This was used to justify the statement that we should not expect OERs to be cheap, we should focus on their quality even if that means that they are expensive. This certainly doesn't sound like something I should be concerned about but it is. It can be used to justify spending vast sums of money to have a few experts write material which is released under an open licence.

During my recent trip to Cape Town, the Foundation held a 'messaging meeting'. This is basically a communications group therapy session. Everyone has two or three minutes to deliver a pitch on their work and projects. After watching a video playback of each pitch, the group offers constructive criticism.

Last week, I had a rare 45 mins withMark Shuttleworth. He asked: what do you think the Foundation has achieved in the last year? I answered that it had 'stabilized and grown strong'. Which is true. After a few rocky years, the Foundation is now in a position to actually pursue big ideas like free textbooks and learning analytical skills p2p-style in a serious way. Yet, I knew my answer wasn't quite right. The Foundation hasn't just stabilized, its, well, this sounds silly, but ...

Here is the full text of the South African Appeal iro the ISO OOXML process.

“Appeal from the South African national body regarding the outcome of the fast-track processing of DIS 29500 Office open XML

In the midst of grim and troubling news about outbreaks of violence against Zimbabweans and Mozambicans, there is a good reason to be proud of being South African today.

In many countries a basic monthly telephone subscription entitles the subscriber to free local calls. In other words, a subscriber pays a flat fee, and can make any number of phone calls within that area without paying any additional amount.

Microsoft has announced that it intends future versions of Office to support Open Document Format, the international open XML document format used by other developers.

Today I got to have breakfast at the Mount Nelson. It was quite disappointing from a food perspective but we, Steve Vosloo and myself, were there for the Breakfast Club as Naledi Pandor, Minister of Education, was the guest speaker.

Siyavula is a project focused on the development of educational materials. These materials will ultimately be hosted on a website with the primary authors being teachers. The question needs to be asked (and answered) as to who will (or should) own the copyright to the material on the website? Some initial thoughts relating to this question are below although every time I discuss it I want to explain it completely different so expect many follow-up postings!

I'm switching to Wordpress. Ukubuza is now officially laid to rest. All of the postings from here have been transferred to my new blog: innovating education.

Grand Theft Morals, or ultimate role model? is a piece written for Tech Leader, the M&G’s new offering in the Thought Leader stable.

Today, Diane Grayson gave a talk at UCT on the new Physical Science curriculum being delivered in South African schools. Diane discussed the curriculum, its structure, features, teacher's complaints and gave some of her views on the various topics and issues.

Mark Surman has written about an interesting new business model: Noank. You have to read his post to understand this one.

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.

At the Foundation, we aim to drive innovation, we pilot projects, we comment and cajole in policy discussions and we slowly move forward to a better, more connected, more educated and prosperous South Africa (and Africa and the world).

The Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Science and Technology, (National Assembly), will receive a briefing by the Department of Science and Technology on the Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research Bill (IPR Bill)], Venue to be confirmed, 10:00, Tuesday 3 June, 2008.

Today was CopyCamp2 in Toronto: a conversation about art, copyright and the Internet. Lots of fun examples of remix art. More Linux stickers and Internet savvy artists than last year. And a few boring culture bureaucrats playing broken records. Not a bad cocktail, all told.

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.

I love watching snowballs roll downhill. The whole unconference meme is certainly one such snowball. In many ways, geeks have taken open space meetings further and wider in the last three years than mainstream facilitators have in the last 20. Which, as someone who has tented in both camps, has been amazing to watch.

Every year the Constitution of South Africa requires that the provisions of the constitution should be reviewed. A parliamentary committee reviews the provisions of the constitution. This year an invitation for public submissions (details below) has been sent out, submissions due by the end of May.

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.

Being Canadian, I've spent a great deal of time recently explaining what's at stake with net neutrality. Everyone gets the huge importance of keeping the Internet open, but many find it hard to believe that there really is a threat.

At the Foundation, we want to drive innovation in education and technology. How we get there is not such a simple statement.

Salad makes a perfect open source project. While most people think it's a drag to produce a whole salad, it's not so hard to get them to cough up one or two ingredients. The ingredients people contribute automagically turn out to be complimentary, most of the time. And, as more people contribute ingredients, the salad gets better and better. Yum.

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.

I spent the weekend mulling over Mike Edwards' essay Philanthrocapitalism: After the gold rush.
The basic argument is this: there is a movement afoot to harness the
power of business for social change. This includes newly-minted
foundations like Gates, corporate social responsibility programs and
social entrepreneurs. These philanthrocapitalists are undermining the
independence and social mission of civil society. As a result, we are
missing out on real social transformation, and maybe even risking our
democracy.

Normally when I tell someone about my personal project, Free High School Science Texts (FHSST), or my day job, Siyavula, the average response includes the following elements:

Mark Horner launched his Siyavula blog this week! Yay! It'll be a great way for people to track this ambitious and important open education project. For those of you who don't know:

I recently (Oct 2007) changed jobs and am now working for the Shuttleworth Foundation managing an initiative called Siyavula. Siyavula is the Nguni word meaning we are opening.

The Open Everything  idea I've been talking about for a while has started to pick up steam. There is now a tiny web site up. And, there are events planned for London, Cape Town, Toronto, Singapore and a small, wonderful island off the coast of British Columbia.

The most populous countries in the world have rejected the OOXML as an international standard but its been pushed through anyway. China, India, Brazil and South Africa have all firmly rejected OOXML as an international standard, in a re-visit of the voting process which took place during September 2007.
Although ISO has yet to officially release the result, early reports suggest that extensive lobbying has engineered a vote change in a sufficiently large number of countries so that the specification will be pushed through.

As I blogged previously, I'm doing a series of short pieces that look under the hood at the day to day work of the Shuttleworth Foundation. As the opening blurb to my first article says:

The Economic Value of Taking Things Apart

In the Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Paul Romer writes:

Whatever it is that I do for a living today, it all started with community video. Five years as a portapak toting video activist in the early 90s gave me deep roots. It sparked DIY entrepreneurship and hacking. It taught me that media is conversation. It fascinated me with the power of fluid, open, participatory ways of working. In so many ways, community video made me me.

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:

Over the past week, I've been reflecting on the ideas of two people: Jonathan Zittrain (a professor) and Matt Mason (a pirate, or at least a fan of pirates). This has got me thinking about the 'political compass question' again, which goes something like this ...

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:

Social innovation (or any kind of innovation for that matter) can be a lonely gig. There you are, focused intensely on an issue or problem that you are passionate about, trying to invent / evolve / evangelize an approach that will really make a difference. Poverty. Hunger. Education.  Democracy. Knowledge. Whatever the issue, that's all that matters. One day, you'll have time to connect to other innovators to share what you know ... and learn about what they're working on. But not now. One day. 

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.

A little late, but below are my notes from the Integrated Education Program (IEP) Conference in Pretoria (6-7 February 2008).

John Moravec of Education Futures posted today on the Cape Town Declaration, worrying that open course materials will do little to change education. He asks:

A number of people have been asking me lately: what happened with the open philanthropy work that you posted about last September?

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.

As I posted way back when, I have been reflecting a great deal on the question: why are so many people attracted to the word 'open'?

We often hear educators complain that when their learners use the internet to find information for projects they simply copy and paste from the first reference that comes up on Google.

Microsoft’s well publicised release of its “Citizen Service Platform” claims to introduce easy e-government. The basis of that claim is the use “templates”.

I was just reading on the Doors of Perception blog that Collaborative Innovation is this year's theme at the World Economic Forum. Maybe this is a good thing (Jimmy Wales got to talk), and maybe it's not (Don Tapscott got to talk). In either case, the really sad thing is the continued trend events about mass collaboration that are as uncollaborative as possible. Davos is just one long-lecture-fest, with most people zoned out in the audience in passive listening mode. It's not collaboration, it's television.

In YouTube’s OK for scholars, non-profits and the queen (Thought Leader) I give examples of academia, international organisations and monarchs using YouTube to share content and engage their constituents.

On this trip, I've started doing my open philanthropy work at the Shuttleworth Foundation. The biggest piece of this is developing the Foundation's theory of change and an accompanying open philanthropy manifesto (will post on this soon). The other bit is developing a series of 'how we work' papers.

David Wiley came back with a Cape Town Declaration Spoof Both Funny and Depressing retort last night. Making the Linux / open content comparison, he writes:

I wrote Fan fiction: Improving youth literacy to introduce fan fiction and a study that showed it as a legitimate way for youth to improve their literacy skills.

While imitation is truly the form of flattery, mockery is also right up there. So, it was with a huge smile that I read the Swansea Declaration on Open Edutainment on the iCommons list. This spoof of the Cape Town Declaration press release includes humdingers like:

The conversation about open education picked up some steam yesterday with the official launch of the Cape Town Declaration yesterday. There was lots of good coverage including a nice piece on ZDNet UK and an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle by Jimmy and Rich. I just posted the following to Slashdot:

Today the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education is formally launched.

You can read the Declaration and sign it at capetowndeclaration.org.

When I first encountered the Southern African word ubuntu a few years ago, it instantly resonated with me. A person is only a person through other people…. the suffering of one person diminishes all of us. Or as Archbishop Desmond Tutu puts it, “a solitary human being is a contradiction in terms”. A notion that the English language doesn’t seem to have quite the right colours to paint. It takes a lot of mixing of English words to express that one African word. It resonated with me as a human being as an acknowledgment of our connectedness of our human responsibility to each other, even to all living things.

Using MXit to learn is a short piece I wrote for Thought Leader that highlights potential and real uses of MXit in the learning process, based on much-needed research.

Over the holidays, Tonya, the boys and I felt a huge debt of gratitude to Helen Carmichael and John Dash who let us use their house while they rode the rails in Wales. This gratitude was in part for the warm and beautiful nest from which we could explore Hackney (loved it soooo much) and enjoy a London Christmas (truly as romantic as it sounds). But we also felt grateful for the ideas and inspiration that inspiration that Helen and John shared through their wonderful collection of books.

A new study from Nokia and The Future Laboratory predicts that by 2012, a quarter of all entertainment will be "circular", that is created, edited, and shared within peer groups rather than being generated by traditional media. The bulk of the study was based on interviews with trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors and lifestyles.

Over the past couple of months, I have been working with an amazing group of people committed to the idea of open education. The group ranged from university lecturers from South Africa to a woman managing a free textbook project in Uganda to America open education pioneers to a free culture activist from Poland to the founder of Wikipedia. Coming from a dozen countries, it was one of the most diverse, productive and creative groups I have worked with in a long time.

“We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

ICT4Champions is a Google group concerned with the use of web 2.0 in South African schools. Today Maggie Verster, founder of the group, lead a workshop on blogging in the classroom. It was attended by 10 educators, all from private schools, who were shown how to create and customise a class blog using Edublogs. I attended to meet Maggie and the others in the group and to pick their brains on the state of Web 2.0 in our schools. The bottom line: basic use of ICTs, let alone for connected, creative, collaborative web 2.0 activities, is limited and problematic in South African schools. According to the attendees of the workshop, reasons for this include: