African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR)
Tweet
787 days ago
I often get asked what is AVOIR, so here is a brief explanation, which is taken from our new booklet that is inserted with the marketing CD that contains presentations, talks, source code and documentation. It is also included here as an excuse to test out the AVOIR map in Google Maps, which uses Chisimba's simple map module to display the map.
African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) builds capacity in software engineering in Africa using Free Software (Open Source) as the vehicle. A partnership of 13 African Universities in an alliance that includes partners in North America, Europe, and Kabul, Afghanistan, AVOIR is a network with a node in each member institution. Each node participates in the development, deployment and support of software, seeks business and partnership opportunities that lead to sustainability, implements software in support of their institutional requirements, participates actively in communication and collaboration activities, and helps to market the network, and its products and services. AVOIR has created the Chisimba framework and applications based on it, and will be offering a masters in Free and Open Source Software starting in early 2009. AVOIR has been made possible thanks to grants from the IDRC, USAID, Sun Microsystems, Department of Science and Technology (South Africa), and InWent/GTZ as well as the efforts of the participating institutions.
[SIMPLEMAP_LOCAL]gen13Srv30Nme10_9655_1215945939[/SIMPLEMAP_LOCAL]
Key:
AVOIR core members
AVOIR supporting partners
AVOIR implementation partners
AVOIR research and development partners
You can watch a video of my Google talk about AVOIR below.
There are some pics of recent AVOIR activity available in the AVOIR group on Flickr
avoir open source free software africa map talk
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | 
|
Pictures from our visit to Open Source Lab at OSU
Tweet
779 days ago
Just before OSCON2008, six of use went to Oregon State University to visit the Open Source Lab. Present were Derek Keats, Madiny Darries, Anver Natha, Ernie Smart, Paul Scott and David Wafula. Here are some pictures from Flickr that are tagged with this visit.
osuosl avoir ics-uwc
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
The value of being in AVOIR
Tweet
778 days ago
This morning I received an email from one of the AVOIR board members that raised the issue that his university could not see the value in collaboration. Participation in the network seems to be implicitly assumed to be "wasted funds with no direct returns." This struck me as if I was hit by a hammer, because to me the value of collaboration, though often implicit, is completely obvious. If value of collaboration is null, then how do so many companies generate wealth out of people networks?
I received this email just before the start of a workshop at OSCON08 called Particiate08, which is sponsored by Microsoft Open Source. We start with a case study of a community-based T-shirt business, which is similar to "open source" in some aspects of how it builds on community. The business is called Threadless (http://www.threadless.com/), which produces millions of T-shirts. Designers submit designs, they get community ranked, and get $2500 if their design is used. The task is to decide whether this community driven business should open to sales to a major clothing chain. It is necessary to consider the community in all decisions, and there is a high degree of involvement in the community. They use blogging and other social networking techniques to consult the community, and this gives them agility. What Threadless do is aggregate deisgns from the community, and prodice T-shirts out of a tiny fraction of the aggregated designs.
What is interesting is that the Threadless community who submit designs have a probability of winning of 0.006, which is not enough on its own to explain participation. Thus, even in a commercial operation such as this, participation in the community must have emergent value beyond the probability of scoring a winning design. But these are individuals, not institutions. With individuals, there is a direct biological basis - a behavioural chemistry - between participation in communities and our sense of well being and perhaps even a direct relationship to the release of pleasure inducing chemicals in the brain, in much the same way as learning stimulates the brain to produce chemicals that generate a pleasurable sensation. Institutions do not have this experience, and when the decision making power lies with people who are not inherently networkers, the individual value does not result in opening up the intellectual processes that lead to the other kinds of implicit value being made obvious. Perhaps thats why the value of collaboration is completely obvious to people who participate in it, but is often argued against by people who do not.
So one of the challenges we face in AVOIR is how to create value for both individuals and institutions. The issue raised by the AVOIR board member was that the institution was not seeing the value of collaboration, of participating in a network, out of which it could gain benefit. This contrasts with a business which has figured out how to make use of community partipation as the core of their business model. The case study showed the emergent value of collaboration in communty, and that it could in fact be monetized.
Within AVOIR, many of our partners get it, and understand the value to their institution of participating in the network. One of the keys is to understand what challenges we are up against as higher education institutions in Africa. On this Continent, we do not have the critical mass in any area of human endeavour in any single institution to be able succeed in the globalized world of higher education without collaboration. There is simply not enough money in Africa to build critical mass without first growing the economy, but to address the challenges of Africa, we need more critical mass than we have in any single institution or even in any single country. Without collaboration, in another 50 yeras, Africa will be in the same or worse situation it is in now. Thats why AVOIR is important, not just for the software or even the capacity building.
AVOIR is important because we are creating a model for collaboration and it is a more of a grassroots kind of collaboration, not a massive structural collaboration. The massive structural collaborations tend to eat money with a very high burn rate, and deliver little of value. Indeed, structural approaches may not really be collaboration at all. With massive amounts of money, any form of organized activity can be sustained, but with AVOIR we must create a kind of non-structural collaboration that has minimal overhead.
Sure, we are making fantastic software in Africa as a result of having AVOIR, which is pretty amazing. But more importantly is the process of non-structural collaboration within which value is an emergent property. But not everyone is mature enough to benefit from community, and we need to understand that they may leave the community - or even be encouraged to leave, but welcome them back with open arms as they mature.
The issue of AVOIR as a metaphor for the lack of critical mass is the subject of my talk at OSCON, which happens on Wednesday.
oscon08 oscon AVOIR collaboration
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources: a knowledge network for building capacity in software engineering
Tweet
666 days ago
This is a talk I gave at Stellenbosch University a few minutes ago. It was at a workshop on African Knowledge Networks, held the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies.
The presentation from Chameleon ( http://chameleon.uwc.ac.za is below. Note that there is no synchronization between audio and slides. If I manage to do that, I will make a new blog post with the sync.
You can download the presentation from Chameleon.
AVOIR collaboration africa
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post |
|
FLOSSInclude workshop concludes in Brussels
Tweet
29 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
|
|
Trackback URL No trackbacks were found for this post | Comments 1 |
|
