GLOBELICS 2009, Dakar, Senegal

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), to a large extent, transcends geographical and cultural boundaries to usher in a ‘new’ software development paradigm where volunteers collaboratively create software for the commons. As some of the early myths – it’s all about Linux and hackers, it’s not reliable, you can’t make money from software which is free, you can’t educate generations with FOSS methodology, organizations can’t rely on FOSS for their mission critical infrastructure, thousands of people with babbling agendas can’t make good software – are begin demystified, FOSS is making an impact and changing the way we develop, distribute, use, maintain, and support software. The global trend in the diffusion and adoption of FOSS is a testimony that something really interesting is happening and the opportunity to innovate is only limited by the extent to which one is willing to explore and utilize the benefits inherent in FOSS.

According to the African Economic Outlook, 2009 Report (AEO), Africa is making strides in technological and scientific development and innovation. The giant leap in ICT is driven by the availability of Bazaar of untapped ideas and talents, the motivation to experiment with new technologies, and the fact that nearly every African wants a “virtual handshake” – desire for integration, connectivity and reaching-out. During the past few years, we continue to witness ICT innovation across various sectors and in many countries throughout the African continent.

However, the contribution and participation of Africa on the FOSS global scene remains hidden and undocumented in many respects. This special session on “ICT Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Africa with Free and Open Source Software” looks at the move by individuals, educational institutions, public and private sectors, initiatives by Governments and NGOs, and FOSS projects around the continent. Discussants and presenters from experts in the domain will discuss the FOSS African landscape by exchanging ideas on the innovative aspect of FOSS, and look at what is specific to FOSS in the African context.

The session hopes to leverage expert contributions from a diverse and multidisciplinary audience to discuss various FOSS initiatives which can be used to promote inclusive and sustainable ICT growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The session wants to explore themes which can be used to drive technological change based of Free and open source software. Themes are not limited but may fall under the following major headings;

1. How can FOSS fuel ICT innovation in Africa?
2. Challenges, limitations, and possible solutions to FOSS-based innovation in Africa
3. Regional FOSS lessons, case studies, and initiatives
4. Sectoral (education, health, e-government, Agriculture) FOSS lessons and strategies, case studies, and initiatives which others can learn from.

Invited Speakers:

• Rishab A. Ghosh (TBC), Head of Collaborative Creativity Group (CCG), UNU-MERIT. Netherlands
• Dr. Katim S. Touray, FOSSFA council and Resource person FOSSWAY project of West Africa. The Gambia
• Silvia Aimasso, FOSSFA council and FOSSWAY Project Coordinator.
• Modou Fall, Centre de Calcul / Academie Régionale CISCO. Universite Cheikh Anta Diop. Senegal
• Ms. Alfelt M. Abio, Managing Director, Enigma Technologies and Gender in ICT activist. Kenya
• Ben Akoh, ICT Program Manager, Open Society Initiative for West Africa. Dakar, Senegal

You can post your comments here to further discuss and brainstorm the session themes or send comments and suggestions to the session chair: sowe@merit.unu.edu

Come and dance FOSS Mbalax with us!

UNU-MERIT’s Collaborative Creativity Group has organised a panel on “Technologies for Access” at Yale Law Schools Third Access to Knowledge Global Conference (A2K3). The conference will take place in Geneva, Switzerland, on September 8-10. UNU-MERIT researchers Rishab Ghosh and Karsten Gerloff will be attending the event.

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After Stiglitz and Sulston last week, now the Wall Street Journal has an article about the problem that the patent system has become. It’s US-focused, but it pretty neatly outlines how the debate on a mild patent reform there sets the pharmaceutical industry against technology companies:

Yet the fault line over patent reform signals the deeper problems. Many pharmaceutical companies lobbied against the proposals, fearful of reduced value in their key intellectual property. In contrast, most technology firms supported the reforms, worried more about uncertainty in the law than about the value of their patents.

Both sides may be right. New empirical research by Boston University law professors James Bessen and Michael Meurer, reported in their book, “Patent Failure,” found that the value of pharmaceutical patents outweighed the costs of pharmaceutical-patent litigation. But for all other industries combined, they estimate that since the mid-1990s, the cost of U.S. patent litigation to alleged infringers ($12 billion in legal and business costs in 1999) is greater than the global profits that companies earn from patents (less than $4 billion in 1999). Since the 1980s, patent litigation has tripled and the probability that a particular patent is litigated within four years has more than doubled. Small inventors feel the brunt of the uncertainty costs, since bigger companies only pay for rights they think the system will protect.

Link

This is a joint initiative by some of the UNU institutes. For the UNU MERIT courses on innovation and development we linked lecture recordings with slides via slideshare, and also posted some papers written by PhD students who were taking the course last year.

United Nations University
Public Announcement
4 February 2008
MR/E03/08

United Nations University Launches Online OpenCourseWare Portal

New initiative offers free online access to training courses

Today, 4 February, United Nations University launches the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal, accessible at http://ocw.unu.edu. Initially, the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal offers open access to about a dozen courses developed by three of UNU’s Research and Training Centres and Programmes (RTC/Ps) and the Tokyo-based UNU Media Studio.

The intent of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to make the course materials used by UNU RTC/Ps available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. The initiative is not meant to replace degree-granting higher education or for-credit courses, but rather to provide content that can be used by educators for curriculum development, by students to augment their current learning resources, and by individuals for independent self-study.

The long-term goal of the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal is to promote the development, use and distribution of training materials under Creative Commons licenses. The initiative is part of the Global OpenCourseWare Consortium (http://ocwconsortium.org), a collaboration of more than 100 higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world with a common mission of advancing education and empowering people worldwide through OpenCourseWare.

Expressing his support for this initiative, UNU Rector Konrad Osterwalder said, “This signifies our commitment to broadening access to high-quality educational materials and will contribute to the United Nations University’s core mission, which seeks to further the generation and sharing of knowledge in order to strengthen individual and institutional capacities to resolve pressing global problems.”

Resources available in the initial phase of the UNU OpenCourseWware Portal include six courses on electronic governance, developed by the UNU International Institute for Software Technology (UNU-IIST, Macao); five Ph.D. training courses on the economics of technical change, innovation and development, developed by the UNU Maastricht Economic and Social Research and Training Centre on Innovation and Technology (UNU-MERIT, the Netherlands); and two courses on mangrove biodiversity and integrated water resources management developed by the UNU International Network on Water and Health (UNU-INWEH, Canada). Several more UNU system units are currently preparing course materials for inclusion in the portal later this year.

Project coordinator Brendan Barrett notes that UNU is committed to sharing the expertise developed through this initiative by offering support and guidance to universities in the developing world that are seeking to open up their courses.

Philipp Schmidt, who is responsible for the project at UNU-MERIT and who recently participated in drafting the Cape Town Open Education Declaration, said, “So far, the OpenCourseWare movement has focused on distributing content from the developed to developing countries. Through our partnership with institutions like the University of the Western Cape in South Africa, we are trying to reverse this trend and make locally created content more accessible.”

In the Asia–Pacific, UNU is collaborating with several Japanese universities, including Keio University, Waseda University, the University of the Ryukyus and the Tokyo Institute of Technology, to jointly run open courses on such important topics as climate change, sustainable energy and disaster management. Many of these universities are members of the Japan Opencoursware Consortium (http://www.jocw.jp). UNU is very pleased to take this opportunity to announce its intention to officially join JOCW in March 2008.

For more information, visit the UNU OpenCourseWare Portal (http://ocw.unu.edu) or contact:

Brendan Barrett
UNU Media Studio
United Nations University Centre
53-70, Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-ku
Tokyo 150-8925, Japan
Tel: +81-3-5647-1318
Email: barrett@hq.unu.edu
Web: http://www.unu.edu; http://www.mediastudio.unu.edu

What happens to your data if your experiment fails? If the results turn out different than you thought? If there’s nothing to publish?

Don’t throw it away. Your dead end might be another person’s missing link.

Wired Magazine has an essay by Thomas Goetz on this “dark data”.

He says that while storing huge amounts of data can be an issue, the real problem is the culture of science:

More and more, research is funded by commercial entities, which deem any results proprietary. And even among fair-minded academics, the pressures of time, tender, and tenure can make openness an afterthought. If their research is successful, many academics guard their data like Gollum, wringing all the publication opportunities they can out of it over years. If the research doesn’t pan out, there’s a strong incentive to move on, ASAP, and a disincentive to linger in eddies that may not advance one’s job prospects.

But Goetz says that the dark data phenomenon isn’t limited to science:

Getting science comfortable with exposing its dark data is really just the beginning. Once you start looking for it, dark data is everywhere: It’s locked away in out-of-print books and orphaned art, the stuff that Creative Commons and Google Book Search have been bringing to light. Speaking of which: Hey, Google! Know all those research projects your employees do that the company will never green-light? How about letting the rest of the world take a crack at them?

The challenge is to find a way to share the data. How about the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network I blogged earlier?

Rufus Pollock must have had a busy week. A few days after the Open Knowledge Foundation he’s involved in launched the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, Rufus (who is a PhD candidate at Cambridge) has published a paper. From an economist’s perspective, he is looking at the optimal term for copyright:

Abstract
The optimal level for copyright has been a matter for extensive debate over the last decade. This paper contributes several new results on this issue divided into two parts. In the first, a parsimonious theoretical model is used to prove several novel propositions about the optimal level of protection. Specifically, we demonstrate that (a) optimal copyright falls as the costs of production go down (for example as a result of digitization) and that (b) the optimal level of copyright will, in general, fall over time. The second part of the paper focuses on the specific case of copyright term. Using a simple model we characterise optimal term as a function of a few key parameters. We estimate this function using a combination of new and existing data on recordings and books and find an optimal term of around fourteen years. This is substantially shorter than any current copyright term and implies that existing copyright terms are too long.

This sounds very interesting. Go get the paper here (pdf), read it, pick holes in it, and see if it holds up!

via BoingBoing, netzpolitik.org

Today, the UK-based Open Knowledge Foundation has launched the “Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network” (CKAN). What this is?

CKAN is a registry of open knowledge packages and projects — be that a set of Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

CKAN is the place to search for open knowledge resources as well as register your own. Those familiar with freshmeat (a registry of open source software), CPAN (Perl) or PyPI (python package index) can think of CKAN as providing an analogous service for open knowledge.

[...]

we are looking for people to register ‘packages’ that is collections with some kind of structure rather than individual items. So a substantial set of photos, a datasets of all kinds, the writings of Shakespeare but not an individual blog, or your flickr photo collection (unless it is really big!).

“Open” meaning here that anyone is free to use, enhance, modify and distribute the things in this archive, similar to Free Software. The data and information contained in this archive network either has to be in the public domain (not subject to copyright), or distributed under a free licence (e.g. Wikipedia articles, which use the GNU Free Documentation Licence, or works under a free Creative Commons licence).

The discussion on how to organise knowledge best is far from ended, so this is just a basic infrastructure. Yet it already contains a few things of value:

Shakespeare’s works, a global population density database, the voting records of MPs, or 30 years of US patents.

I’m really looking forward to how this will develop. Like any self-respecting Internet innovation these days, it is a public beta, to be improved over time. But looking at how valuable similar archive networks have become as a resource – for example, the Comprehensive Tex Archive Network (CTAN) for the TeX typesetting system -, this could become really, really good.

Knowledge Ecology International (formerly CPTech), a Washington DC-based NGO that is a real hub in the debate on Access to Knowledge, is doing the right thing and putting out a journal, Knowledge Ecology Studies. Sounds promising:

KE Studies is an online publication that focuses on the creation, dissemination and access to knowledge goods. It is a multidisciplinary journal that draws on a number of specialties: sciences, technologies, public policies, the laws of intellectual property, business, free speech and privacy, telecommunications and other related knowledge disciplines.KE Studies strives to be a publication in the classic sense of the word, but with new opportunities for authors and readers. The papers and other forms of published materials examine new developments, alternatives and social implications. We also review policy proposals as well as books, articles, media, and any other type of knowledge good.

Unlike traditional journals, which focus primarily on lengthy scholarly articles on specific fields, KE Studies focuses on pieces of different format –articles, short research papers, commentaries written by experts in various fields about production, dissemination and access to knowledge goods broadly defined including medical innovation policies, legal issues, educational issues among others.

In addition, KE Studies strives to be a publication with a fast turn around and inclusive to non-published authors from all over the world. We publish pieces on unscheduled timing with an end of the year compilation volume.

Sisule Musungu finally has a blog; about time, too. His first post is on the WIPO Development Agenda. Though it’s a bit on the long side, it’s definitely worth a read.

He has accompanied the Development Agenda struggle at WIPO from the beginning, from his former position at the South Centre, and there are very few people on this earth who know more about it than him. He’s certainly more qualified than me when it comes to judging the process, so I’m glad we’re roughly on the same page.
Sisule recounts the beginnings of the Development Agenda process in 2004, when the initiative was received with some hostility by a WIPO that was dedicated to, in the words of Jamie Love, “mindless expansions of intellectual property rights”. He summarises the results, and ponders whether the Development Agenda is really more than hot air. Luckily, he thinks that the answer to that is no:

From the very beginning of this process, however, sceptics have argued that the proposal for the establishment of a development agenda amounted to nothing more than hot air, ideology and empty rhetoric. So far the sceptics have been proven wrong. The range of reforms and new frameworks envisaged under the now established development agenda are anything but hot air, ideology and empty rhetoric. Although like everything else implementation might entail significant challenges and failure could visit the agenda, as the dust settles, it is becoming clear that the development agenda for WIPO has the potential to significantly transform the organisation in major ways resulting in not only improvements in the attention paid to development issues and the composition of its staff but also to deliver the organisation into the 21st Century. For this reason, the development agenda is already a success. The challenge that remains is to build on this success and ensure that the opportunity is not squandered in implementation.

The European Commission (Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry) has published a research study prepared by Rishab Ghosh and his team at UNU-MERIT.

Study on the economic impact of open source software on innovation and the competitiveness of the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector in the EU

The study looks at direct as well as indirect impact and finds that FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) could help Europe reach its goal of becoming the most competitive knowledge economy by 2010.
The findings include:

• FLOSS applications are top rung products in terms of market share in several markets.
• The existing base of quality FLOSS applications with reasonable quality control and distribution would cost firms almost Euro 12 billion to reproduce internally. This code base has been doubling every 18 to 24 months over the past eight years.
• The notional value of Europe’s investment in FLOSS software today is Euro 22 billion (36 billion in the US) representing 20.5% of total software investment (20% in the US)
• While the US has an edge in large FLOSS-related businesses, Europe is the leading region in terms of globally active FLOSS software developers, and leads in terms of global project leaders, followed closely by North America. Asia and Latin America face disadvantages at least partly due to language barriers, but may have an increasing share of developers active in local communities.
• By providing a skills development environment valued by employers and retaining a greater share of value addition locally, FLOSS can encourage the creation of SMEs and jobs.
• Defined broadly, FLOSSrelated services could reach a 32% share of all IT services by 2010, and the FLOSS-related share of the economy could reach 4% of European GDP by 2010.
• Though FLOSS provides ample opportunities for Europe, it is threatened by increasing moves in some policy circles to support regulation that seeks to protect old business models of creative industries, making it harder to develop new ways of doing business.
• Firms have invested an estimated Euro 1.2 billion in developing FLOSS software. Such firms represent in total at least 565 000 jobs and Euro 263 billion in annual revenue.

Download a pdf copy of the report from here. You can find current press coverage here.

[Update by Karsten Gerloff:]
When these results were first presented at a Brussels workshop at the end of September 2006, they caused quite a stir. A letter to the European Commission by lobbyist Hugo Lueders of the “Initiative for Software Choice” argued that any move by the European Commission to open the market to stronger competition by Free Software would “disrupt the entire software ecosystem”. Other than that, the reception was rather positive.

While said ecosystem remains very much undisrupted in places such as Extremadura or Andalucia, despite stronger pro-Free Software policies than the EU could dream of, the “Initiative for Software Choice” appears to be an exercise in astroturfing. Apparently, becoming a member does not take anything more than pledging allegiance to the group’s mission and statement of principles; no fees in sight, so this commitment comes rather cheap. I would also appreciate if someone could give me some background on a software company called “Jackrabbit Microwave“; if no information is forthcoming, I’ll have to assume that the group is not above accepting non-existing entities into its ranks.

MORE UPDATE:

CompTIA, the association of proprietary software makers which manages ISC, has apparently been successful in pressuring the European Commission to state that it is not favouring Free Software over proprietary programs. Richard Thurston over at ZDNet has put together a short, informative timeline.

Please note that noone has alleged that the EC favours Free Software. It has merely commissioned a study about the effects of Free Software in the European market, and this study arrived at a number of conclusions, most of them favourable towards Free Software. The EC has not distanced itself from that study, but rather pointed out that it is “technology neutral”, not favouring one software model over the other.

Rishab Ghosh, lead author of the study, has posted a detailed comment on the matter in response to the ZDNet story.