Institute For The Future

Unleashing Open Source for Development in Africa

A few members of the Tech Horizons team are in Johannesburg, South Africa this week, launching a new IFTF program (Science In Place) at the XXV World Conference of the International Association of Science Parks.

I have been taking the opportunity to meet with a number of people who are trying to leverage open source technology to bridge the "digital divide" and spread computing and communications tools throughout the country and the entire continent.

While Gilberto Gil, the cultural minister of Brazil who famously committed that emerging economy to open source a few years back, is often seen as the ambassador of open source for developing nations... I think that it won't belong before some African or more likely group of Africans picks up that mantle of leadership. You might argue that Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Thwaite (security certificates), the first African in space (bought a ride to Mir), and creator of Ubuntu Linux (one of the most popularLinux distributions) is that ambassador.

Indeed, Shuttleworth's foundation is doing some great projects to spread open source technology and content. I had the pleasure of speaking with Brett Simpson who is one of the founders of Breadbin Interactive, and creator of the FreedomToaster. The FreedomToaster is a distribution point for open source content of all kinds - software, media and education and reference materials. You simply put in a blank media (CD, DVD or USB stick, make your content choices and remove the burned media. It's meant to be a standalone, rugged vending unit that can operate in a remote village or a busy urban transit station. The content can be updated by an administrator from the same media , and eventually it will be remotely kept updated by 3G backhaul.

Freedom Toaster Open Source Media Kiosk

However, Shuttleworth is white and now lives in London, so the search goes on for that open source champion for black Africa. He or she might be lurking nearby in the city of Tshwane (formerly Pretoria), which is the intellectual center of Africa with four univerisities and the most highly-educated labor force in Africa. Tshwane is investing heavily in e-government which could create a built-in market for young open source wanna-bes.

But to find a truly grassroots hotbed of hacker energy, Kenya's capital Nairobi is the place to be. The Skunkworks blog is the place to plug-in, and as the New York Times reported recently, the first African BarCamp took place in Nairobi, a birds-of-a-feather meetup or "un-conference" of geeks modelled after the O'Rielly FoO (friends of O'Reilly) and mocking Bar camps in Palo Alto (get it... "foo"+"bar"=FUBAR).

Alone, these stories don't mean much, especially when you look at them in the context of broad infrastructure and governmental failures. (During my time here, the president was ousted by his own party, and our hotel - one of the city's best - lost power for 4 hours in the middle of the business day)

But together, and over time, these are the kind of signals that tell me something is happening in big African cities worth tracking. The One Laptop Per Child is a top-down project that -might- trigger a wave of innovation and developmental leapfrogging. But this stuff is organic and coming from the bottom up, and in that sense, both more powerful and inevitable.