Janet Haven

I've been posting over the past few days about my experiences in Uganda at Africa Source II, but haven't given a very good overview of what the event actually is. So:

You wouldn't normally expect to learn about open source software, organizational technology needs, or the finer points of information strategies for advocacy groups while sitting on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Nor would you normally hope to bring 140 people from all over Africa to Ssese Island, a spot known for its natural beauty, curving white beaches, warm afternoons, and slow pace of life, and expect them to remain excited about those topics for seven days running. But it happened, and this, in a nutshell, is the magic of the Source Camp series that the Tactical Technology Collective has led over the past three years.

The recipe involves a remote and beautiful locale, a group of dedicated and time-tested facilitators, a bunch of refurbished computers running Ubuntu (a Debian-based Linux distribution), and a crush of “technology intermediaries” there to improve their skills. These are not the hard-core geek types that scare users away when they earnestly and helpfully try to explain why Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is really going to rock their world; rather, these are the peacemakers who spend much of their professional (and often personal) lives brokering a gentle understanding between entirely non-technical end users and the technology tools that they either need to use to get their jobs done, or the technology tools they should use to do their jobs better. Africa Source II's intermediaries work in civil society and education, and so their target users tend to be students, teachers, activists, and non-profit staff.

The recipe for a Source Camp is surprisingly successful, and seems to resist derailment by adverse conditions. At Africa Source II, participants traveled over rough roads from Kampala to the island, slept in tents through equatorial rainstorms, and suffered a tragic few days without Nescafe. At the end of the week, the participants left regretfully, hugging each other goodbye, planning to stay in touch, collaborate on projects, post to the mailing list. While people looked forward to returning to their families, comfortable beds, and daily routine, the palpable enthusiasm for their experience was the overriding emotion.

The theory behind the Source Camps' anti-conference approach focuses on building community – that is, on making tangible in a real-time setting the values espoused both by open source software communities and civil society networks. The Source Camps operate on the principle that everyone has something to contribute, and that knowledge is best arrived at through group exploration. Where open source software can be produced in the virtual commons, the Source Camps bring the commons to life as a method of learning.

Jamais Cascio pondered on Worldchanging earlier this week whether the lack of good usability in much open source software would trump its potential as a leap-frog technology for the developing world. I think there is much to be done in terms of usability on OSS (and more on that in a later post), but for the present, events like Africa Source seem to be the best solution for pushing useage forward. These key intermediaries leave with two very important assets: the confidence that comes with hands-on familiarity and a network of other practioners to whom they can turn for advice. The beauty of the Source Camp model is that is brings out each person's strengths -- participants leave knowing who in the group to turn to for expertise on wireless set-ups, on managing bandwidth, on configuring a server.

In terms of nuts and bolts, Africa Source II runs on a split schedule. Mornings were given over to one of three tracks that participants had signed up for on registering. These were:

• NGO Migration: how to migrate an NGO office using proprietary software over to an entirely open source set-up. This involves desktop applications, OSS operating systems, and server software.


• Education Migration: this is similar to NGO migration, but focused on schools and resource centers –so there was an emphasis on linux distributions aimed at education, like OpenLabs (used by the model SchoolNet Namibia project) and the forthcoming Edubuntu, an Ubuntu distro coming out of Mark Shuttleworth's Cannonical.


• Information Handling and Advocacy: this track focused on using open source software within the context of an advocacy campaign. They looked at blogs, wikis, content management systems, and communications technologies like cellphones, podcasts, and community radio management systems.

Morning sessions were followed by a group lunch, and then by a two-hour break. After the break, the group reconvened most days for skillshares. Marek Tuszynski of Tactical Tech descibes them on the Africa Source II wiki like this:

The Africa Source 2 Skillshare will provide a setting for participants to teach their peers, drawing from their areas of expertise and passion. "Skill" will be broadly interpreted, spanning not only systems and software but also strategic know-how, from fundrising to process models to all manner of production techniques. The focus will be on demonstrating "how to" and "how it works" in 30-minute to 1-hour time slots, with audiences ranging from 1 to 10 people.

The afternoon ended fairly late each day (between 7 and 8), and was followed by a group dinner, and an evening activity: music, dancing, talent show, and so on. The best evening activity, by my count, was provided by the staff of the resort: each evening they hauled a pile of firewood down to the beach for a bonfire, which burned late into the night. After dinner, many people brought their chairs down to the circle on the sand, and sat chatting late into the night, nursing bottles Uganda's home-brewed Bell lager.

The Africa Source II blog, a day-by-day account of the camp by Frederick Noronha and others, is here.