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!

At the Open Source World Conference in Málaga, Spain, Karsten Gerloff discussed the FLOSSInclude project in a session on EU-sponsored FLOSS research projects. The presentation met with lively interest from the audience, drawing questions in particular from Latin American participants.

The session was chaired by Jesus Villasante, head of unit for the Software Technologies unit in the EU Directorate General Information Society and Media (DG Infso)

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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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

The preview Cape Town Open Education Declaration is live. The document is the result of a 2 day workshop in Cape Town that 27 people spent brainstorming, strategising, discussing, agreeing and disagreeing – and then many more weeks of the same by email. It was drafted by members of the community, for the community – as a foundation that hopefully diverse types of initiatives, projects and people can identify with. If this reminds you of the Budapest Open Access declaration, then that is not a coincidence; we are trying to bring together a similar movement around open education.

The current version is a preview that we want to share with a broader community to get initial feedback and comments. Along with the declaration text we have compiles an extensive list of FAQs, which go into much more detail and allow more flexibility than the declaration.

Please, have a look at both, and if you disagree or you feel we are missing an important aspect, send your feedback here. If you really like it, please tell us as well (and keep you pen ready to sign up when it launches in January).

[UPDATE]

Looks like I could have saved some bits on this post yesterday – but you never know. IPWatch reports that the negotiations have broken down at the last minute. A diplomatic conference to wrap the treaty up in November will not take place.

Apparently, the US’ demand to extend the “broadcasting” treaty to transmissions over the Internet (”webcasting”) prompted other member states to submit lots of demands of their own, leading to a mess that became impossible to reconcile:

The discussion stalled progressively as objections and alternatives to language in the chair’s unofficial draft treaty proposal piled up, sources said. But it turned on a statement by the US delegation late Thursday night that it could not see any way to resolve differences in the time remaining. The US said that in the entire paper under discussion they saw “not a single area of agreement,” whether it was new or years-old proposals, a US official said.

But the meeting continues today, and we’ll have to wait for the final outcome. For now, this is very good news. However, this treaty has been negotiated on and off for ten years, and it’s not out of the question that this Zombie will rise out of its grave again (much like software patents in Europe, by the way).

Looks like WIPO has had a very good two weeks. With the Development Agenda underway and the Broadcast Treaty collapsed, two progressive key issues have turned out well.

I’ll raise a glass tonight to all the NGOs that helped to make this happen. Y’all have a good weekend!

[/UPDATE]

Last week, the heated negotiations on a Development Agenda for WIPO saw the organisation make some progress towards managing knowledge in the best interest of all of us. This week, it seems that the pendulum is swinging the other way.

In the negotiations on a “broadcasting treaty” at WIPO, members are debating whether broadcasters such as TV and radio stations should get a copyright-like monopoly on the things they broadcast. While this is silly enough – it will keep armies of IP lawyers clothed and fed for decades to come, with the rest of us picking up the tab -, the bigger problem is that this will badly hurt the ways in which sound and video can be used on the Internet.

Material that’s in the public domain may be re-monopolised simply because it has been broadcast by a TV or radio station. Another issue arises with sites like YouTube, which often host short clips of movies. Under the proposed treaty, a TV station which has broadcast the movie in question could then demand that the clip be taken down, even if the movie is in the public domain, or the movie’s copyright holder has no objection to seeing the clip on the net.

Who backs this treaty? Owners of TV stations, mostly. They seem to have the US government and the European Union working for them. Opposition is coming from civil society groups and library organisations, but also from some major firms in the US: AT&T, Intel, Dell, Verizon.

If this treaty is adopted in its present form, it would create a new layer of intellectual monopoly powers. Depending on how it turns out precisely, it might require you to get permission before you re-use work that is made available on the Internet in the public domain or under a free licence (such as Creative Commons). A broadcasting treaty may also introduce restrictions that in effect neutralise the exceptions and limitations provided by copyright.

I’m not sure how bad it will get, but it’s definitely a step in the wrong direction.

Here’s a brief explanation of the broadcasting treaty, and here’s the current discussion on the A2K mailing list.

I would like to comment on the interesting take that Andy Updegrove presented and Philippe Schmidt’s view on this perspective.

First, let’s deal with the never ending story of Wikipedia vs. Brittanica. Perhaps we should re-phrase this story and ask ourselves whether Wikipedia should use the –pedia suffix. Is Wikepedia an encyclopedia? An encyclopedia contains historical and/or current factual information. Factual information is absolute. You can interpret it according to your own views, but a good encyclopedia presents its facts in an unbiased way; objective, factual! It is clear that Wikipedia is lacking in this respect. Recently it has tried to remedy this problem by locking the information down and monitoring what goes in.

Here I come to Andy Updegrove’s perception, and I agree. It is a mistake to lock the information down in an effort to emulate reference works. Wikipedia transcends the utilitarian scope of an encyclopedia. It gives us a chance to indeed look at ourselves and at other peoples’ interpretation of the facts which we look at in one way, as others might see them in a wholly different light. And it is this other way of looking at factual information that is increasingly important in today’s world. Proof of this is in all the factual information presented on the news…

However I do not agree completely with the culture part. Wikipedia at this point doesn’t have anything to do with popular culture or whatever culture. It misses the coherence that belongs to the structure of culture. This is were Philippe Schmidt’s comment comes in, in which he rightly says that only a minority uses Wikipedia, which then subsequently makes it a representation of a sub-culture at the most. For a, virtual, community to display culture it needs to have (virtual) social relationships, rules and norms and an identity. These rules and norms are of high importance as they make clear which common ground can be found between different (sub-)communities. Wikipedia is not that sort of a community at the moment (although the Community Portal displays similar characteritics, these are much more technical and superficial). Wikipedia is not a simple forum either as it has evolved way beyond the concept of forum.

It could however be seen as, or evolve further into a “platform”, a global “virtual arena” or global virtual learning locale (learner’s community) where people can learn from each other and each other’s view of the (factual) information presented on Wikipedia. For this to happen, deeper social relationships within Wikipedia will need to be created or at least it should be able to display shared values and norms (beyond the technical) to which people can adhere while interacting which each other and which will then give in-depth meaning to the different views presented.

As a bit of a mix-up of Philipp’s post on educational e-resources and the Nature/Brittanica dispute, I would like to draw attention to an article in a Dutch daily (Algemeen Dagblad, Tuesday 18 April).

The article cites a research report by consultancy firm Motivaction which states that 82% of young students (12-17 year olds) in the Netherlands do not double-check any of the information they find on the net and use in their school assignments. 87% of the students interviewed uses the internet when searching for information. Only, a shocking (for me in any case) 4% uses library materials and only 5% of the internet users double-checks the information they found for accuracy.

More and more information is coming onto the net, and so it should, free to use for everyone. However two main issues still need to be tackled: the right to use and the value of the information provided. It seems that nothing but radical change to the way we view and value information will achieve this universal access to quality information.

Hal Varian in his short article in the Communications of the ACM (Oct. 2005, vol. 48, No. 10) comments on the right to universal access and the change needed to achieve this.
As for quality the same goes for the internet as it has for libraries in the past (and present). Without user input and vocal user criticism the internet will remain a largely low quality resource. Google Book Search, Wikipedia and the like are at the moment just a drop in the ocean.

Technorati tags: access2knowledge, education, quality of information, internet

For a number of reasons, I decided to post a short note on open education resources: I have been following the discussions at UNESCO’s open education resources forum with much interest. A participant at the recent UNU-MERIT symposium on open standards and open source asked a very simple (and very difficult to address) question why educational resources should not be available “freely”. Finally, I read this post on David Weinberger’s blog (Disclaimers seem to be the latest rage on blogs, so in lack of other things, I will disclose that I am a big fan of his blog).

Back to the topic of OERs. UNESCO has been hosting an active and inspiring email discussion on open educational resources. The group was initially invitation only (a bit ironic), but is now open for anyone to participate. I would recommend reading the reports from the initial phase — as many good points were raised during these weeks. Currently, the group is trying to define a research agenda for OERs, which is proving (maybe surprisingly) hard. I think that two reasons are that participants come from vastly different backgrounds and that the field is moving so quickly – it almost seems difficult to stop for research. Should you have thoughts on economics related research on open educational resources, please do comment here or write an email to a2k@merit.unu.edu.

I am always flabbergasted how and why publicly funded organisations are able to not make the educational materials they develop freely available. It just shows that there are significant institutional and motivational challenges that still need to be overcome. David Weinberger mentions his colleague’s work that explains another barrier to making educational resources available. Bill McGeveran, who is David’s fellow fellow at the Berkman Center found that there are four general categories of problems in how IPR restricts open educational resources:

1. The law is unclear. 2. DRM. 3. It’s hard and expensive to clear rights. 4. The gatekeepers — e.g., school systems — are very cautious about digital rights, primarily because of the first three problems.

We have reported on some of the issues with IPR before, but DRM adds a scary aspect in that it allows rights holders protect their works around and beyond existing law. Needless to say that the processes in which these limitations are created are not democratic. However, it is also important to mention that no consumer wants more limitations on how she can use her rightfully owned works of art — and DRM does exactly that.

Technorati Tags: access2knowledge, IPR, oer, education

We released this policy brief a few weeks ago in prepration for the Symposium on Open Standards and the new intellectual property rights paradigms that are coming out of the various ‘open’ movements (open science, open source software, open medicine, etc.).

Because the policy brief is a bit hidden away on the merit website, I thought it made sense to post a link to it from the A2K blog. Please note that to get a list of relevant UNU publications that we have mentioned on the blog, you can select the “publications” category link in the navigation menu.

The policy brief is here (http://www.merit.unu.edu/publications/pb/unu_pb_2006_01.pdf)