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Maker Faire Africa - Ghana, August 2009

Non-feed readers of GMT will recently have seen the badge for Maker Faire Africa in the top right hand corner.

Maker Faire Africa will take place in Accra, Ghana between the 14th and 16th August 2009 at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT. It is being organised by Emeka (Timbuktu Chronicles), Mark (Ned.com), Amy Smith (MIT IDDS), Lars (MIT), Nii (Nubian Cheetah), Erik (AfriGadget), and Juliana (Afromusing): "O’Reilly, along with the guys at Maker Faire, have given us their blessing to use the name."

The aim of a Maker Faire-like event is to create a space on the continent where Afrigadget-type innovations, inventions and initiatives can be sought, identified, brought to life, supported, amplified, propagated, etc. Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

Maker Faire Africa asks the question, “What happens when you put the drivers of ingenious concepts from Mali with those from Ghana and Kenya, and add resources to the mix?”

Maker Faire Africa will engage on-the-ground breakthrough organizations like Ashesi University and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology to sharpen focus on locally-generated, bottom-up prototypes of technologies that solve immediate challenges to development. Specifically, Maker Faire Africa will take an approach that will achieve three principal aims:

• Brighten the light on local examples of the “fabrication” ethos
• Provide mechanisms to incubate these innovators and their products to a point where they can be taken to market
• Connect refined plans to disseminate innovations with venture finance

The aim is to identify, spur and support local innovation. At the same time, Maker Faire Africa would seek to imbue creative types in science and technology with an appreciation of fabrication and by default manufacturing. The long-term interest here is to cultivate an endogenous manufacturing base that supplies innovative products in response to market needs.

The organisers need to raise $25,000 to make this event happen - you can contribute via a Paypal widget on the Maker Faire Africa homepage.

Localisation of MediaWiki

Gerard Meijssen writes:

MediaWiki is best known as the software that runs Wikipedia. Currently there are projects in over 250 languages supported by the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) and new projects are regularly proposed and initiated. The MediaWiki software is continuously under development and there are over 200 extensions to the software.

Both the development and the localisation of MediaWiki software are done by volunteers. Finding volunteers for so many languages is a challenge and once they are found, the most important thing is to retain them. This means that we have to provide the localisers with compelling reasons to work on Betawiki.

No programming skills required
The people that provide the localisation are typically not the people who develop the software. When you insist that localisers submit to CVS or SVN, most potential localisers will find that to much is asked of them and consequently localisation is unlikely to happen.

Daily commits of the newly localised messages to the WMF production systems
When people have worked on the localisation, it is extremely important that they see the benefit of their work. The WMF uses the bleeding edge of MediaWiki for its projects so by committing the latest work, all projects benefit straight away.

Improved functionality for the localisation job
Betawiki is a wiki optimised for working on localisation, this means that many of the screens help people understand the work flow that is being used. The extensions that Betawiki uses are also localised this makes the environment look friendly but business like. Some of the localisers want to use specialised tools like computer assisted translation tools, for them we allow for the export and import of "gettext" or ".po" files.

Provision of information what messages are used for
Often messages are cryptic, it is not immediately clear what they are used for. By providing extra information it is made clear what the messages are used for. This improves the quality of the work done and it tells our localisers that we value their contribution.

Active support for the localisation of MediaWiki extensions
The developers that support Betawiki have a great track record collaborating with the extension developers to make sure that localisation is properly supported. Details like name conventions need to be considered.

Requirement of set levels of localisation before new projects may start
There is circumstantial evidence that shows that a relation between the quality of the localisation of the software and the success of its projects. By requiring localisation prior to the start of new projects, the new projects benefit from this effect but it also helped people find their way to Betawiki to do the localisation.

A localisation project needs the same kind of attention that any project requires. There are always new issues to resolve. With improved awareness, requests will be made like support for the six forms of plural for Welsh. People will ask for the consistent use of terminology in their language...

Betawiki provides a necessary function for the MediaWiki software. Freecol is the second application supported by Betawiki and more applications may follow. What Betawiki offers is localisation independent from projects and distributions. It is there to get a job done.
Thanks,
     Gerard

David Pogue on One Laptop Per Child

The magnificent David Pogue gave a great video breakdown of what exactly is wonderful about the laptops in the One Laptop Per Child Initiative. Unfortunately, the Give One Get One scheme is not available to people outside North America, but if you are in North America, it sounds well worth participating in.

Scenius: South Africa by Dirk Tolken

For our third Scenius interview, Dirk Tolken of Cape Town-based Media Marketing Solutions Providers Peronii to talk us through the tech scene in South Africa:

The computing scene in South Africa is alive and well and growing very fast. As mentioned before, gaming is a good entry point for young people to get introduced and the Internet is accessible throughout most of South Africa. We are pretty much on par with the rest of the world technology wise, but infrastructure tends to be a problem with the monopoly of Telkom, our main telephonics and Internet infrastructure provider. Things are however slowly changing with increased wireless mobile technology and a second telephone operator entering the arena soon.

Tech4Africa

Tech4Africa is a web and technology conference taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa in October. The date and venue are yet to be set. There is a tasty list of confirmed speakers:

Rasmus Lerdorf
Saul Klein
Andy Budd
Andy Clarke
Demian Turner
Derek Featherstone

Some of the things we'd like you to get out of the conference:

Hear international speakers and authors presenting in your own back yard.
Discuss what the global web and technology opportunities are over the next 5 years
Understand what technologies are making the biggest impact
Thrash out how the web can positively play a role in the development of (Southern) Africa
Create a fun, informative event where you can meet and interact with other people like you

Business Week on $100 Laptop

Business Week on Nicholas Negroponte's $100 laptop:

The so-called $100 laptop that's being designed for school children in developing nations is known for its bright green and white plastic shell, its power-generating hand crank, and for Nicholas Negroponte, the technology futurist who dreamed it up and who tirelessly promotes it everywhere from Bangkok to Brasilia. What has not received much attention is the graphical user interface—the software that will be the face of the machine for the millions of children who will own it. In fact, the user interface, called Sugar, may turn out to be one of the more innovative aspects of a project that has already made breakthroughs in mesh networking and battery charging since Negroponte unveiled the concept two years ago.

(Via CityofSound)

South African Government to Migrate to Open Source

From tectonic:

The South African Cabinet today announced that it had approved a free and open source strategy and that government would migrate its current software to free and open source software.

At a Cabinet media briefing government said that it had "approved a policy and strategy for the implementation of free and open source software (FOSS) in government.

(Via O'Reilly Radar)