Category Archives: My work

Free and open fracas

2014-01-16 09.27.56Once upon a time it was an international trendsetter, leading the field in its thinking about the use of free and open source software. Now, the South African government’s Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Policy 2007 is an also ran, and appears to be being widely disregarded by those tasked with implementing it.

This came to a head with a memorandum sent out by the Department of Basic Education (DoBE) stating that it has decided to “standardise the software tools for implementing and assessing Computer Applications Technology (CAT) and Information Technology (IT) for schools that write the National Senior Certificate (NSC) examinations.”

Starting in 2014 schools must standardise on Microsoft Office and the Delphi programming language for grades 11 and 12. Microsoft Office use kicks in immediately, with the Delphi roll-out to be completed by the November 2016 exams.

The decision sparked an outcry from education experts, business and civil society following a blog post by former professor of botany and FOSS advocate, Derek Keats, which drew wider attention to the decision. Concerns raised by detractors include the wider implications of the government disregarding the principles in its FOSS policy, and that by choosing proprietary software and “an ancient, moribund language” South Africa will be raising a generation of technology consumers, rather than producers.

Keats points to Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Larry Page as technology innovators who cut their teeth on free and open source software. Had they been denied access to it, none of those companies would have been built, Shuttleworth would not have gone to space, Facebook would not have been developed, search engines would not have advanced as fast as they did in the time they did, and the giant that is Google would not have been built, Keats maintains.

The fact that the user has access to the underlying code when software is open source underpins this assertion. “Forcing children to work on proprietary software is like locking them in a dark closet,” says Keats. “By focusing technology in education on non-modifiable software that kids can’t play with and have fun with, means they can only use it as consumers.”

Likewise Keats has a problem with the Delphi programming language. He says: “Learning programming in isolation or with technology that provides you with a GUI that hides the output is the worst way to learn.

“We’re creating better consumers of technology, rather than the next generation of producers,” says Keats. “We’re at serious risk of being a bystander in the knowledge economy.”

Muggie van Staden, MD of Obsidian, a company that implements and supports open source software (OSS) for business users, is also concerned about what this decision means for the future of OSS in any government department. The FOSS policy clearly states that open source principles, open standards and open content be used by government where possible, he says.

Speaking in September at GovTech 2013, the State Information Technology Agency’s (SITA) conference for organisations delivering ICT solutions to the Public Service, Minister in the Presidency Trevor Manuel reiterated government’s policy, which the DoBE memorandum ignores, stating that: “I am a big believer in open source and we haven’t even begun to tap this source yet. We need to write the code, protect the code and use it for government services.”

The risks of not using OSS are manifold, Van Staden argues, especially when it comes to data privacy: with proprietary software users can’t interrogate the code to see if personal information is being shared and users are also locked into a specific format and can’t transfer data easily. With electronic identification being launched in South Africa, Van Staden urges citizens to ask whether the government has full control over the personal information it has stored.

Cost is another concern of Van Staden’s, both from the point of view of the government avoiding vendor lock-in, having more choice and so more buying power; and also from the point of view of bridging the digital divide. OSS suites such as LibreOffice can be freely downloaded and shared with all learners, giving them equal access to technology at school and at home.

“This is simply a bad decision,” he says. “It’s taking capabilities away and not doing what basic education should be doing.”

Unfortunately the Department of Basic Education did not respond to my questions, but it did release a general statement in response to the initial outcry at the decision. Amongst other things, it pointed out that: “The announcement only affects two curriculum subjects in Grades 10 to 12 where these tools are used to implement a national curriculum and asses a national examination. It does not affect other activities the DBE is involved with, such as e-learning/ICT integration in other subjects and grades.”

Alarmingly it then goes on to say that only 0.9 percent of Grade 12 learners take IT and nine percent of Grade 12 learners take CAT.

This response Keats dismisses as proof that South Africa is locked into “administrator-driven education” and that administrative efficiency is being confused with good pedagogy.

“We need to rejuvenate a maker culture and getting excited about technology. We need to let learners run ahead of the teachers, there is nothing wrong with that,” concludes Keats.

Note: This is a piece I wrote at the end of last year (December 2013) about the decision to move away from Open Source Software in South African schools. For various reasons it didn’t get published, but here it is for reading now.

 

 

Set your work free with Creative Commons licenses

When I was setting up this site, I wondered what the best thing to do was in terms of licensing my work as a freelancer. I’d been hearing about Creative Commons licenses, and liked its open approach to things. So, to get the lowdown, I sat down with the new Creative Commons co-lead in South Africa, Kelsey Wiens.

Here’s what you need to know about Creative Commons and its licenses.

profile picWhat is Creative Commons? Give us the elevator pitch.

Kelsey: Creative Commons is a legal license that provides a standard way for creators to grant someone else permission to use their work. Attribution is automatic under the CC licenses, meaning that anything you create using Creative Commons you retain your copyright and allow users to reuse your work.

Who should care about it?

Kelsey: Everyone. Creative Commons is ultimately about innovation. Science, art, culture are all  about remixing others work and building on top of it. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb; his first patent was for “improvement in electric lamps” but he did create the first commercially viable one. Academics build their work on the grounding of others. Photographers, artists, videographers, writer all find inspiration somewhere.

What do you plan to tackle as co-lead in South Africa?

Kelsey: Because of the hard work of the leads that came before me we have a strong base and we just want to capture everyone and build. My co-lead Mark Horner is with Siyavula and he’s been killing it with OER (Open Educational Resources) for a few years now. I’m very lucky to have such a strong pilot.

I have a passion for Nelson Mandela’s Archives & the District 6 Museum. These rich pieces of history are too valuable for education and for the nation to lose.

What’s already happening in South Africa, and the rest of Africa?

Kelsey: South Africa is very lucky that the Shuttleworth Foundation is based here in Cape Town. The Shuttleworth Foundation actively gives to ideas and companies  with open business models. Which means that projects like Mark’s Siyavula, P2P University, and LiveSA Magazine all license their content under a CC license. WikiAfrica is also based here in Cape Town: Wikipedia is based on a CC-BY-SA licence and WikiAfrica’s mandate is to allow Africa to tell its story to the world through Wikipedia.

In Africa  projects like OER Africa provide Open Education tools to learners & educators. JamLab in Kenya is a school for learners in their gap year where they can upskill themselves by using open creative collaboration. Open licenses are essential in Africa in open access publishing: oftentimes research conducted in Africa is written up in expensive European academic journals which makes them unaffordable to most African institutions and libraries. Our research, our needs and we’re being locked out of it?

Collaboration remains the key to unlocking open resources. We work closely alongside other open movements including WikiAfrica. Last year we threw our weight behind a campaign, started by high school learners, with the WikiMedia Foundation & WikiAfrica to get cellphone companies to zero-rate or provide access to Wikipedia for free.  MTN showed us their love. While not a perfect step, it’s a big one for SA cellphone providers and access to information.

How does this compare to the rest of the world?

Kelsey: Because of the work of previous leads Heather Ford & Andrew Reins — who started iCommons — South Africa is in may ways ahead of the curve. Our challenge isn’t to explain what CC licenses are, our challenge is to further grow the community of open and to work alongside other excellent movements including Open Data, Open Journalism, Open Science. We need to go far, so we have to work together.

South Africa is typically not the most open country. Keeping information locked down was a powerful tool during apartheid, and the current government is steadily eating away at information freedoms. Philosophically, what will openness bring us?

Kelsey: I’m working with the Western Cape Province & City of Cape Town on their Open Data Policy. It was a need brought from Silicon Cape whose membership was seeing the access and solutions that other governments worldwide were offering and wanted to provide similar solutions.

We’re working with CodeforSA to run a weekend session to workshop the policy with members of parliament. Open Knowledge Foundation is running a five-day session on Open Journalism at the end of February in Cape Town in the run up to the election.

They say history is written by those who won, well tools like Wikipedia let the whole picture be told by anyone who wants to tell it.

I’m a writer. I make my living by being paid for what I write. Why on earth should I give away my livelihood?

Kelsey: Creative Commons isn’t about giving away everything for free. It’s about Open Business Models which allow for further amplification of your work. You like TED talks? The reason you can see TED talks is because they are licensed under a CC-BY licence. Prior to opening up their videos TED conferences struggled to get bums into seats (if you can imagine). Now the talks are viral, the speakers demand the videos ASAP and those of us too poor (or lacking in awesome innovation) can’t wait for the videos.

It’s about coming up some aspect of your work that you can give away for the gain of amplification. Budding photographer? Give away low-res images for free under CC-BY-NC (see details below on licenses), then sell your high res images side by side. The British National Portrait Gallery saw a 35% increase in profits from people gaining access to the images and then deciding to purchase for use.

As a writer you probably blog to increase you web presence. Licensing your work under a CC-BY-SA license would mean that your work could be used by anyone with attribution, and require them to also do the same. Adding to your web presence, increasing your viewership and adding to the Commons. Who loses in this?

Best example I can give is Cory Doctorow. He regularly licenses his works under cc, even his books. Download a kinda ugly pdf for free? Or buy the pretty hardback or kindle edition for a small fee? What’s good enough for a New York Times bestselling author should be good enough for you too!

Briefly explain the licensing options and why you should choose one over the other. Which one is your favourite?

Kelsey: The Creative Commons copyright licenses work alongside  “all rights reserved” copyright law. It gives everyone a simple and legal way to grant copyright permissions to works. This is creating a vast and growing digital commons, a pool of content that can be copied, distributed, edited, remixed, and built upon, all within the boundaries of copyright law.

There are six CC licenses:

CC-BY (Attribution) The most open of all licenses. Simply requires the creator of the work to be credited.

CC-BY-SA (Attribution-Share Alike) This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial purposes, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

CC-BY-ND (Attribution NoDerivs) This license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms.

CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial) This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

CC BY-NC (Attribution-NonCommercial)  This license is the most restrictive of our six main licenses, only allowing others to download your works and share them with others as long as they credit you, but they can’t change them in any way or use them commercially.

My favourite licence is a CC-BY-SA. I feel like it’s a sneaky way of forcing anyone who may take from you for commercial use to also have to share their work. I feel like it evens the playing field and helps expand the commons. This is the license used by Wikipedia, and is recommended for materials that would benefit from incorporating content from Wikipedia and similarly licensed projects.

There is a nifty Creative Commons license chooser which can help you make a decision and then give you the html code needed.

Pro Tip: you can also C licence your Instagram stream: i-am-cc.org

How can people get in touch, find out more and license their work?

Kelsey: Visit za.creativecommons.org, which we’re just in the process of reworking.

Otherwise find us on twitter @ccsa, and me at @bella_velo

South African social media trends

While I believe that many marketing fundamentals remain the same, there is no denying that in the fast-paced social media marketing world, you need to keep your wits about you to stay on top of the game.

Here are my top five social media trends from the past couple of months:

1. Social is mobile

For some time Facebook has been saying that it is fast becoming a mobile company. And the latest stats show that more than half of its 900 million odd users access the network with a mobile device. In South Africa, according to Social Bakers, 80.5 percent of 4.6 million SA Facebookers are mobile, while in Nigeria slightly more, 81.5 percent of 4.3 million users, are mobile. This is hardly surprising, seeing as we are such a mobile-only continent.

Indeed, according to the latest stats from research house World Wide Worx, 7.9 million of South Africa’s 8.5 million internet users go online using their cellphones. 2.48 Million only ever use a cellphone. Smartphone users are forecast to rise to 11 million + in 2012, from 8.5 million today.

What is surprising though, is that according to its IPO documents, Facebook has not earned any revenue from mobile. To be sure, the mobile Facebook user experience is not the best, and has no advertising or application integration. But it is likely, especially after a raft of acquisitions in the mobile space – notably Instagram earlier this year – that Facebook will be upping the ante when it comes to mobile and making money from mobile.

2. Business links up

Businesses have discovered LinkedIn – especially the financial services, recruitment and property sectors, based on the requests I have received to link up. But they could do better. While pretty much all connections on LinkedIn have some sort of professional networking element to them, I usually have met the person or it is very clear why they are wanting to connect: we’re in the same industry, for instance. More recently, there seems to be a very passive trend emerging, where the estate agent, finance advisor or recruitment agent doesn’t bother to explain why they are wanting to connect and never engages again, which seems like a bit of a waste of time. I’d suggest these online networkers would do better to browse the Q&A section of LinkedIn, where they can actively engage with a potential customer by answering a question or providing information and so building a relationship. Another good resource is Quora, a dedicated question and answer site, is starting to be used more often in South Africa.

3. Brands get pinning

Thanks to its integration into Facebook, Pinterest has grown by leaps and bounds this year. And where there is a gathering of consumers sharing their likes and preferences – as they are doing on this social network organised around shared online pinboards – brands following very soon. Some brands, such as Yuppie Chef in South Africa, are getting this right. But others, based on the communal groans that seem to be coming from the Pinterest fan corner, too many are getting it wrong.

4. Brands are slowly starting to close the loop

Social media campaigns are starting to move beyond generating “likes” and retweets for their own sake, to actually generating sales in the real world. One competition which has just started using the Evly platform on Facebook asks customers to enter by sharing a recipe using a certain type of Spekko rice, along with a photo of the dish and the rice. Unfortunately however, there seems to be little integration across the marketing teams – my local supermarket didn’t have the specific rice in stock, and there was no point of sale tie in to the Facebook competition. It will be interesting to see the results of the campaign, but one suspects these could be improved with some real world tie in.

5. QR codes and location services

The trend here is that we continue to see little take up of either of these services, which seem to fit so well with both social and mobile. There was a brief flurry of excitement amongst SA social media commentators in May around a clever QR code campaign launched by Guinness, but it doesn’t seem likely this will be launched locally any time soon, if at all. To be fair, QR codes are starting to creep onto the backs of wine labels and other consumables, but really as little more than a clever way to provide more information about the product. I’m hoping there is more to come from both these technologies.

This article was first published on African Business Review

What marketers can learn from Kony 2012

Kony 2012, the campaign started by US-based NGO Invisible Children to stop Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, serves as a reminder that in the bright and shiny new social media world, we shouldn’t forget the basics.

Kony 2012. Depending on your point of view, anything from the most skillfully executed viral campaign in history, mobilising people across the planet to demand governments do something about the world’s most wanted man; to a dangerous example of modern-day internet-powered colonialism, perpetuating the helpless African myth to further self-serving ambitions and arrogantly disregarding the voice of the people supposedly being helped.

This has already been discussed very eloquently by people far more qualified than me to comment on the complexities and dynamics of the Kony 2012 campaign. Writing in the week after “Cover the Night” – the culmination of the campaign – it strikes me that there are a number of important lessons that marketers can learn from this online sensation. And, ironically, most of them are to do with not forgetting good marketing and communication practices, irrespective of the medium you are using.

1.       Audio-visual is the key to something going viral.

But, this applies primarily to developed markets with fast, affordable bandwidth. Ironically, only around 2 percent of Ugandans have internet access, so viewed the video en masse in makeshift cinemas, and certainly were unable to forward it.

2.       Viral doesn’t come from nowhere

There seems to be a perception that the holy grail of a campaign going viral springs from nowhere. In fact, as Kony 2012 demonstrates, an awful lot of planning, budget and an already mobilised community goes into creating an “overnight success”. Reports put the production budget for the first Kony 2012 video – at the time of writing seen almost 88.5 million times on YouTube alone – at $1 million. In addition, this video was seeded into a US-wide community of church and college-goers, who had been primed to be receptive to the message.

3.       Viral goes nowhere without real-life organisation

By all accounts the “Cover the Night” event, which was intended to make Kony famous by plastering posters of him all over major cities, was at best a damp squib according to most news reports. While personally I only saw a single Kony banner in Cape Town, the Mother City event was singled out by Invisible Children as a success – possibly thanks to 18-year-old Michel Comitis picking up the baton and running with it – at his own expense.

4.       Do your homework

As any events organiser can tell you – check out the date you have chosen for any potential conflicts. In Invisible Children’s case, “Cover the Night” fell on the anniversary of the Atiak massacre in northern Uganda by Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA); the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday; and the informal celebration of “Weed Day”. If this was intentional it was an insensitive, problematic and bizarre choice; if unintentional it was arrogant and sloppy.

5.       You only get 15 minutes of fame

Invisible Children’s idea was to make Joseph Kony famous. They probably meant infamous or notorious – but the differences between these are becoming increasingly blurred in today’s celebrity culture. Nonetheless, fame is a fickle mistress and quickly moves on to the next big thing – the follow up Kony video has only received just under two million views on YouTube. In an unfortunate double whammy Jason Russell of Invisible Children, the director and “star” of Kony 2012, exacerbated the situation by becoming the next big thing with his peculiar and very public breakdown.

6.       If you start a conversation, you need to finish it

Even if it doesn’t go the way you planned. Invisible Children started off handling questions and critiques well, especially when it came to funding, with a dedicated web page and some slick infographics. Unfortunately however some of the feedback became ranty and emotional, which is neither helpful nor attractive.

7.       Be humble

From Russell single-handedly saving the world on behalf of his little boy, to Invisible Children’s lack of acknowledgement of other organisations’ efforts to stop Kony and improve the lives of those affected, to an arrogant assumption that a military solution was the only option – the Kony campaign displayed very little humility. Marketers can learn that humbleness at the outset can stand you in good stead when things start to wobble.

8.       Don’t only have one ace up your sleeve

So “Cover the Night” wasn’t the success it set out to be. However a campaign is seldom a slam-dunk affair and usually the whole is worth more than the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, apart from sketchy details about a pledge event at the United Nations in June and no details at all about something happening in November, there is not much left to hold people’s attentions.

9.       The internet is global

The general response to the Kony 2012 campaign in Uganda seems to be unease, offence and anger. While Invisible Children might have set out to create a campaign aimed at mobilising people in the developed world it was inevitably going to reach the people of Uganda – despite the limited access to the internet in the country. The arrogance of Invisible Children speaking on the behalf of Ugandans aside, several commentators have pointed out that Kony 2012 was perceived by the people it was supposed to help in the same way a campaign encouraging New Yorkers to wear t-shirts emblazoned with Osama bin Laden’s face would be.

This article was first published by African Business Review