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A challenge to African institutions and governments (#Chisimba, #AVOIR)
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4 days ago
It is not unusual for governments and institutions to make use of their own processes to help foster development, despite the fact that this may create some risks that have to be managed. One of the reasons the USA is so strong on innovation and innovation-based industries such as ICT is that it takes managed risks that lead to development, sometimes explicitly and sometimes implicitly.
When it comes to Africa, however, it seems that we are often unwilling to believe in ourselves sufficiently to take some calculated risks for our own development. There are two kinds of capital that leave Africa every time we make a choice about software where the bulk of activity in its production and extension is outside: money, and ideas. The least important of these, and the easiest to understand, is money. When idea capital flows elsewhere, and when local ideas are prevented from finding their way into the economy, then development opportunities are moved elsewhere.
One of the reasons for this idea outflow is this concept of 'risk', which is probably the most misunderstood concept that we have in our lexicon. Someone actually said to me the other day, 'you are creating risks'! I should put a double explanation point there. Of course I am, we all do; the only way to not create risks is to be dead and post cremation. Risk in the abstract is a meaningless concept, and often confused with hazard, and used as a stick to beat something to death. The perception of risk is a major impediment to development, and to institutions taking part in activities that lead to their own strengthening.
In the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project we have brought together African software engineers in higher education institutions across a number of African countries. We have created a world class software product, and a talented group of young people who are building and extending it every day.
We have the capacity in this network to create Africa-led innovation. The only thing that is slowing us down is the failure of institutions to play a leadership role in fostering and promoting African software development. The perception of risk plays a major role.
AVOIR was started in 2004 by a number of senior academics, IT people, and university managers from African universities. I was the first chair of the AVOIR board, but handed this over to Dr Elijah Omwenga my counterpart at the University of Nairobi just before I moved to Wits University. Members of AVOIR believe passionately that if we collaborate in Africa, we can produce software and other innovations that are as good or better than anything produced anywhere, and that the hope for the future lies with the young people and ensuring that they are able to create world class products and solutions. For that reason, I still participate in the mentoring of young African developers in my personal time despite having a rather busy day job. Many of them have gone on to careers in industry in their country, taking with them the skills that they acquire in the AVOIR network.
I consider my participation in this network my way of giving something back and helping create hope for young people. The only gain I get out of this is the satisfaction of making a difference. I have found the level of talent in this network to be truly magnificent. For African institutions to reject that talent and its output, in favour of the development of talent elsewhere, would be a tragedy, and a complete failure of the role of institutions in fostering development.
Some of our institutions understand this, and take calculated and managed risks to foster this kind of local development. The University of Nairobi has implemented Chisimba for its eLearning platform, and a couple of other uses. It manages the risk by participating in the AVOIR network, having a local team to support and manage the application, and it participates in the software development. The University of Dar es Salaam Computer Centre have developed business opportunities around both eLearning and othere applications of Chisimba. For example, they developed the national higher education application system on Chisimba. The University of the Western Cape employ the products of AVOIR, and have both development and support capacity in the institution, deploying eLearning, mobile advice services, portal, electronic thesis and dissertation, and other Chisimba applications. Wits University went live in May with the eLearning application, has deployed an online presentation system, created its onine applications system on Chisimba and is going live with its portal/website in October. The latter is based on a combination of Chisimba and some internally developed tools that really demonstrate the kind of excellence that we have in our institutions. We have created capacity to do this kind of deployment and development for less than the cost of a single proprietary application.
If we look at the products, proprietary and open source, that compete with Chisimba, almost all of them had an institutional origin, and one or more institutions who took the earliest and most difficult to manage risks. From that institutional base they expanded, and became global products.
So my challenge to African institutions and governments is join us in this one small aspect of African development. Help us build African software, and more importantly, young African engineers and implementers, into a global industry that we help create. Are we ready for it? Or do we prefer dependence?
- AVOIR
- Chisimba
- Chisimba used as a portal
- Chisimba used as an online presentation system
- Chisimba used in eLearning
- And of course, used as a blog on this site
chisimba Africa policy innovation
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Previous Posts
How to return data for Ajax in Chisimba
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8 days ago
In any Chisimba module, based on the MVC architectural paradigm, you will have a controller and templates, and of course you might have models and a variety of helper classes. Here, we are only concerned about the controller and templates.
The controller is in the root of the module, and is named controller.php. Templates may be of three kinds: content, layout, and page. In general, we do not need to touch page or layout templates, only the content templates.
Use case: You want to return some data for an Ajax call, so you can do something with it in Javascript and insert it into the page. You need to return only the required data without any of the user interface components or webpage components that Chisimba normally renders.
Lets say that you have a module called dosomething. You are calling for a user name through an Ajax call. The URL you are calling from within your Ajax code might be something like:
http://localhost/index.php?module=dosomething&action=getname
which you expect to return just the name, say Derek Keats.
Using the standard appoach, without suppressing all the user interface elements, you will get data that are unusable in Ajax. You need to suppress all that using a custom page template.
The Controller for your module would have a method __getname()
which would do something like:
public function __getname()
{
$str = "Derek Keats";
$this->setVarByRef("str", $name);
$this->setPageTemplate('ajax_template.php');
return "ajax_tpl.php";
}
Note that there are two templates used here, the custom page template, ajax_template.php and the content template ajax_tpl.php. Within your module, you must have a templates directory, and inside it you must have one called page, and one called content. That is,
dosomething/templates/page/ajax_template.php
dosomething/templates/content/ajax_tpl.php
The file ajax_template.php should contain only
<?php
echo $this->getLayoutContent();
?>
The file ajax_tpl.php should contain only
<?php
echo $str;
?>
That is it. Any data can be returned for use by Ajax calls in this way.
chisimba templates Ajax
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FLOSSInclude workshop concludes in Brussels
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30 days ago
The FLOSSInclude project’s final workshop was recently held in Brussels (7th to 8th June 2010). All of the consortium members attended the workshop and gave a presentation on their pilots and case studies of FLOSS projects within their institution or region.
The FLOSSInclude project http://www.flossinclude.org/ is a European commission (EC) funded project and aimed to build on the corpus of FLOSS research that the EC had built up. The study also built on the highly successful FP5 FLOSSPols project http://www.flosspols.org/ and the FP6 FLOSSWORLD project http://www.flossworld.org/. The FLOSSInclude study was a more focused study than its predecessors and focused more on regional FLOSS initiatives and FLOSS needs within the target regions. The reports and data collected on the project will be used to be a European Commission roadmap on FLOSS research and possibly shape future FLOSS policy in Europe and elsewhere.
The major areas addressed by the FLOSSInclude study were the following:
- Analysis of available data to identify key problem areas and areas of blocked potential for FLOSS in the target regions. Dissemination and networking, to identify and federate local and regional initiatives
- Requirements analysis, to show with concrete cases the specific technical, business and socio-political needs for the growth of FLOSS use, deployment and development in target regions
- Validation and pilots, to ensure that FLOSS solutions, tools and services can be cost-effective and practical
- Prepare a cooperation roadmap, supported by regional initiatives, concrete cases for clearly identified requirements, with solution areas proposed that have been validated through pilots.
FLOSSInclude in Africa was represented by the University of the Western Cape (UWC) and the India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT in Ghana. Both Nic Appleby and Enver Ravat gave presentations on the case study “e-learning and Kewl 3.0: the implementation of web 3.0 advanced technologies”). The case study explored e-learning at UWC and included a range of issues from e-learning structures to development problems of the world class, locally developed e-learning platform (Kewl 3.0) to the challenges faced by the e-learning team at implementing a sound e-learning policy at UWC and placing University of the Western Cape at the vanguard of e-learning innovation in South Africa. It also documented the use of e-learning outside of the University within the regional context. For more information on the case study and project please mail Enver Ravat (at eravat2@gmail.com).
FLOSSInclude AVOIR Chisimba
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