ICTworks by Inveneo

In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, Haitian citizens and the use of technology, particularly mobile and GIS technologies and social media, proved critical to response and recovery efforts. Ushahidi, NOULA, OpenStreetMap, and other volunteer-based efforts gathered data from multiple sources, including Haitian citizens, to produce timely information on the ground and around the world. Beyond the crisis, however, the work done by the open source software community and volunteer technologists has begun filling gaps in Haiti's outdated and incomplete spatial data infrastructure (SDI) - providing some of the most accurate and current information about Haiti's human and physical geography.

Thus, contrary to popular belief, I, Alexandra Morgan, believe that Haiti has tremendous assets that can be leveraged to rebuild the country. Among these are the aforementioned data gathered in the wake of the earthquake as well as an expanding technological infrastructure and technology-based services - personal computing devices, broadband networks, mobile telephony, etc. - and the Haitian people, the nearly 10 million of them who possess knowledge critical to making decisions about how to reconstruct the country. Unfortunately, to date, these resources - particularly the latter - remain largely untapped, underutilized, mismatched, or marginalized in reconstruction efforts.

Without question, reconstructing Haiti, in part, means restoring and improving education - which involves building schools. Yet, a host of unknowns exist that negatively impact the capacity of the Ministry of National Education and Professional Training (MENFP), or any domestic or international entity, to effectively improve the educational infrastructure. Mobile and open source GIS technologies and VGI present new opportunities for data collection and can play a key role in supplying needed data for school construction, renovations, and investments.

MENFP and partners, for example, could customize a standard questionnaire for schools to complete and submit via SMS or other electronic service, and engage the public to crowdsource information about schools in their areas, surrounding resources, and other types of information that cannot be captured through automated means (e.g. GPS or remote sensing) or due to resource constraints. As a starting point, this VGI can be combined and mapped with more credible i.e. verified sources, such as the breadth of data collected to map urban to rural migration as well as data related to the ever-changing Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) and spontaneous settlements that have reconfigured urban spaces.

Such an approach can at once begin verifying the credibility of the incoming VGI and help the Ministry visually begin to identify types and locations of various educational infrastructure needs. The Ministry and their partners then can use this information, along with other pertinent data, to determine candidate sites for new schools, and use the government's limited human resources, as well as those of their partners, to conduct more manageably in-depth assessments and analyses of sites to determine optimal locations.

The new data gathered and added to the spatial data infrastructure through this process would yield near- and long-term local and national benefits. In a sense, this approach would embed a sort of feedback loop whereby the existing SDI is used to inform the reconstruction process during which more data is created, collected, and added to the SDI, thus broadening it and making it more useful for further reconstruction.

Two years after the January 2010 earthquake, it's time to move beyond the crisis and towards an asset-based approach to reconstruction. GIS and VGI can be used to help establish a research-based framework that guides domestic and international reconstruction decisions and investment.

In the American and European technology space there’s a growing problem. There’s so much funding available for early stage startups that everyone and their college dropout buddy is starting-up, leaving no one out there to hire.

It’s one of those first world problems: "We just raised 4 million dollars for our social network for redheads but we can’t find any developers…frowny face."

If Silicon Valley is having trouble hiring top tech talent, then it means that there’s also a drought in the NGO space. Even the biggest non-profits are suffering from the same lack of technical resources.

If you’re an African developer, this is a huge opportunity. I am Jonathan Gosier, and I say you should focus on acquiring (or maturing) some of the following skills. Talent in these areas is elusive even in the U.S. and Europe, being good at them will make you far more employable (or fundable if you want to start a company), globally as well as locally:

For Technical People

1. Ruby on Rails A lot of web startups use RoR because it’s a great language and it also impresses investors. However, they quickly realize that it impresses because Rails developers regularly command high salaries due to such high demand.
2. Python and or Django The Jan Brady to Ruby’s Macia. Actually, Python is probably more in demand these days simply because more developers are competent in it. It’s also great for mobile app development which makes it useful for all those SMS apps local firms are dying to build.
3. iOS – the iPhone continues to dominate the smart phone arena. It’s less relevant if you’re targeting a local audience (there go with Android or stick with Java), but if you are building apps that you want to sell internationally then there’s no app store with a richer economy for developers than Apple’s.
4. Data visualization All that ‘open data’ out there is irrelevant. What’s relevant is data that can be used by anyone at any organization, with minimal fuss. Visualization makes it easy to relate complex datasets to those too busy (or too lazy) to analyze them. Data vis goes beyond any specific programing language, but it is a skill and it’s one that Africans can find a great deal of opportunity in.
5. Math/Statistics Before one can visualize anything they need the components to visualize. If you’ve got a strong grasp of statistics and analysis, distilling information so that it’s actionable for others (who usually don’t share this skill) is a highly lucrative path to pursue.
6. Semantic Analysis Despite what everyone thought, the semantic web is here to stay. It hasn’t become a ‘new web’ like some once thought it might, but semantic technologies (sentiment analysis, natural language processing, text parsing) have become the methods that are routinely used to power some of the web’s most popular applications. These skills are incredibly lucrative. The growth of the ‘Big Data’ industry is fueled by them.
7. NoSQL & NewSQL Modern web apps require a great deal of backend engineering to deal with and keep track of all the byproducts of social, sharing, and content creation. There’s two schools of thoughts on this: one is that by doing more of the work on the application side (on request), applications can scale faster while handling more operations from more users. That’s the non-relational approach. The other school of thought is that there was nothing wrong with the old way of doing things, which stores data with the values the application uses for retrieving them later. The challenge was that this created a bottleneck at the database level which often lead to slow or stagnant apps. The new thinking around NewSQL is to keep the relational model and simply build better database software that allows for more throughput. Entire companies are being built of each type of database (see: Cloudera, Vertica, 10Gen), pick the one that makes sense for you. Also, this is the fuel for the Big Data/Open Data rocket ship.
8. jQuery/Javascript/Ajax Modern web apps do most of their processing on the front-end. As I mention above, this often means the application side is where most of the logic for the web app lives, while the database becomes a place to store and retrieve. For these types of web apps, front end logic is critical. Given the rise of the Jquery framework this is probably obvious, yet solid front-end developers are few and far between.
9. Hardware Engineering The ‘maker’ movement amplified by Afrigadget and Maker Faire Africa highlights another opportunity on the continent, the localization of manufacturing. Whether it’s bicycles or mobile devices, companies local to the continent that design and build things are scarce.

For Less Technical People

1. Design Look at the majority of African websites. Most websites made by African developers still look like they were made in 1999 using the GeoCities default templates (translation: Fugly). Blegh. There is a bounty out for good African designers. The mistake a lot of programmers make is they assume design is about technical know-how. It’s not – it’s about a sense of aesthetic and attention to detail. If you are a lazy designer, you’re not a designer. If you are a programmer who thinks design is superfluous to your application, then you’re doing it wrong. There’s also a dearth of design talent in the U.S. and Europe and a good designer can command the salary of a top programmer. Where are the African designers?
2. Writing You would be surprised at the number of people who can’t string together a well-written, cohesive, consistant thought in written form. Coupled with the rapid proliferation of social media (which, by the way, consists of mostly written messaging) the ability to write and write well has become incredibly important. I say this because you are not at a disadvantage if you are a non-native speaker. Example: Ariana Huffington is a non-native english speaker and she built a highly influential and powerful new media outlet that rivals old-school powerhouses like CNN and FOX on the web. It’s about being able to convey your thoughts cohesively and convincingly. It takes practice, so keep blogging!
3. Project Management Being the person who can cultivate the best traits from your team of peers is a huge asset that has always been rare. Many people manage, few excel at it.
4. Videography – We’ve all heard that there isn’t enough local content being produced for African audiences. One of the reasons is the lack of local producers. However, this is changing. More countries are becoming home to an African creative class who are producing film, television, and web shows locally. Can this be lucrative? I think so. As bandwidth falls in cost, eventually the demand for local content may not come from international viewers but the pan-African audience.
5. Critical Thinking/Problem Solving Deductive reasoning. The ability to deduce conclusions and the reasons why they have occurred. To do this, you have to be able to consider all sides and all aspects of a problem…even the ones that you don’t like. You have to be able to challenge assumptions, this includes your own. It is a skill to be able to analyze the intricacies of why things happen or if someone’s argument isn’t grounded in reality, and to be able to explain your conclusions to others. This will make you a better anything.

There are companies all over the world looking to hire people with aptitude in these areas, but being in Africa puts you in a position of power because there will be as great a demand for you at home as there is abroad. Does this mean you’d have to relocate to another country? Not necessarily, many of these skills can be outsourced to you or your company.

In 2012 learn the things that are in demand so you can build firms (or offer services) that capitalize on these global trends.

Jon originally published The Lucrative Skills African Talent Should Acquire in 2012 on Appfrica

EVOKE trailer for the World Bank game teaching crash course in changing the world

I am "Haridas Maruthur Sreelakshmi and I am studying the considerable interest and debate over the past decade on the role of games in education and on using educational games to complement and sometimes even substitute classroom learning. Some of these percepts have found their way into development, giving rise to a new ‘Games for Development’ (G4D) subset, for want of a better name.

The G4D landscape can be broadly divided into games designed for the developed world and those designed for the developing world. This isn’t a hard division and nearly all of these games are accessible to anyone with Internet and/or the right device. However, there are often patterns in their game-play, plot, design and medium that indicate a clear targeting of one market over the other.

The former set comprise games that seek to raise awareness and sensitivity among people of the developed world on various development goals and issues in the developing world. These games cover a wide spectrum of topics such as environment, population, poverty, health, disaster-relief, trafficking, sweatshops and citizen activism. Some interesting experiments in this market include ‘Raise the Village‘, which leverages social gaming to raise funds for developing world villages and ‘Evoke’ which brought together people from all over the world to solve problems that affect specific regions in Africa.

Games for the developing world try to bring about positive behavioral changes among developing populations on such issues as hygiene, maternal health, prostitution and gender biases. Some others enhance literacy, by helping improve reading and math skills. Game design for this space comes involves working with a number of unique constraints and nuances.

The following are some factors that merit consideration in designing better game-based ICTD solutions for the developing world.

1. Platform: As with any ICTD project, platform is key in determining popularity of games. In essence this is akin to the right hardware debate in ICTD – a choice between the OLPCs, $35 laptops or (even better?) the $10 computer built specially for gaming. An alternative is to make Flash or Java based games. While being tied to a particular platform is obviously limiting, browser based games are at an equal disadvantage in low-connectivity areas.
2. Culture: An oft-ignored aspect of game design is cultural fit. Simply localising the audio track or adding subtitles won’t cut it when we’re trying to get someone – be it a kid or an adult – hooked on or even interested in a game. Ideally, games need to be designed specifically for the target population with characters and plot derived from familiar folklore. This is all the more true for games that seek to erode well-grounded prejudices or bring about a certain behavioral change; casting a local hue on game stories, play, goals and rewards will help produce games that just work better at their intent than those designed without such context and insight. Half the Sky project’s partnerships with various ground organizations including Breakthrough and Apne Aap is a good example here.
3. Cost System and developer time is important as well. The USAID $16,000 per player game is as good a mistake to learn from as any.
4. Distribution A push-based approach through partnerships at Government or local levels is likely to help the games permeate better than a discovery model via the Internet or Appstores – the latter is still to catch on in the developing world anyway.
5. ImpactFinally - in the case of educational games, one question to consider at the outset would be whether a model is sufficiently proven in the developed world to be extended to the developing.

Despite various experiments - including schools like Quest to Learn where the entire learning system is game-based - there isn’t conclusive evidence to prove that learning through games is any better than traditional learning models or learning from the real world – an opportunity that is perhaps more abundant in the developing world than anywhere else.

In the global market for personal computers, 2010 was a watershed year. For the first time PC shipments to emerging economies outpaced those mature markets, 174 million to 173 million. The Business Software Alliance celebrated this milestone by reporting that emerging economies now account for more than half the global value of PC software theft, $31.9 billion by their count.

In their 8th Annual Software Piracy Study, BSA found that:

The commercial value of the unlicensed software installed on personal computers in Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA), which excludes South Africa, reached $109 million in 2010. The figure stands at almost double the global piracy rate for PC software, which is around 42 percent. BSA also notes that the figures have risen by 3.6 points on the previous five-year average.

Here is a real question to ask: Does this piracy matter?

I don't ask this question to be flippant. In economies where a majority of the population lives on less than $2 a day, every dollar counts. The cost of commercial software can be a major barrier to ICT adoption. Even Microsoft recognized it when they discounted Windows XP to less than $5 per license before they discontinued it in 2010.

At the same time, software developers need to be paid if we want them to develop new and exciting software. And without a robust credit card payment system, developers cannot offer subscription or pay-per-use systems for their efforts. They must expect to be paid fully at the time the software is purchased in a physical retail outlet, which adds friction and cost to the transaction.

So I can see where there is a demand for free and a supply that is anything but. So in the middle there is much software piracy. Should we be overly concerned about it? Does it matter that many people are stealing intellectual property? Or should hackers continue to be modern-day Robin Hoods freeing us from the corporate overlords? Or does piracy hurt everyone - from the foreign multinational to the neighborhood coder?

What are your thoughts?

When I was in elementary school, there was one computer game that trumped all of the others: Math Blaster. In it, players would try to answer all of the math problems as quickly and accurately as possible in order to complete the space mission. Classmates and I would beg to play this game in the computer lab, and teachers were typically inclined to allot time for it, mostly because it was a productive and educational use of technology.

When monitoring and evaluating the use of technology in developing countries, many ICT4D professionals describe how, after a while, technology in the classroom sits untouched or is used only for games that are not necessarily educational.

So why not send over copies of Math Blaster?

When considering the best use of software for students in developing countries, it is important to consider their background and culture. The significance of a mathematics education comes from the fact that it is applicable to so many aspects of daily life. While students in Western countries may be able to relate to space battles and aliens based on its presence in the media, students in developing countries will not find this application as applicable to them. In essence, by providing them with software representative of Western culture, they may come to believe that mathematics does not apply to their own lives and culture.

In a research project funded by the National Science Foundation, Dr. Ron Eglash and a group of professors and students from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) are attempting to dispel this tendency by designing software based on ethnomathematics, a study of the relationship between math and culture. The software, referred to as Culturally Situated Design Tools, imparts mathematical concepts to students by having them create virtual designs based on original artifacts in their culture.

One application, for instance, considers Native American culture, which uses a great deal of four-fold symmetry in beadwork. The “Virtual Bead Loom” software, developed by Computer Science students at RPI, introduces students to Cartesian coordinates by having them enter x and y coordinates to place “beads” on a grid. The end goal is to produce a bead design representative of Native American culture. To students of Native American descent, mathematics becomes much more meaningful and applicable to their lives by using this software. It also enforces a sense of pride in the students’ heritage.

While the application above provides the simplest example of how culturally situated software can enhance a student’s understanding of mathematical concepts, there are several other software applications being designed to impart mathematics concepts to students in developing regions of Africa.

Math, African style

The design of this software began with determining the types of designs represented in African culture. While viewing aerial-photos taken of African communities, Dr. Eglash noticed how houses in African villages were laid out in patterns representing perfect fractals. Further research on the ground proved that fractals appear everywhere in African design, from architecture to textiles. According to Dr. Eglash, “"When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganized and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn't even discovered yet." To hear more about Dr. Eglash’s discovery of fractals, view his TED talk.

The software developed for teaching African students math through the virtual design of original African artifacts was thus primarily based on fractal and transformational geometry. Students using this software could see the application of mathematics to their everyday lives, and it made them appreciate math and their heritage to a much greater extent.

The value of this approach to software in ICT4E lies in the methodology behind the design of its content. Careful consideration was taken to ensure that the approach to delivering education through technology was based on a thorough understanding of the background of the users. In essence, the software was designed for the students, not altered from existing software to accommodate them.

This is the best way to approach software design for education in the developing world. It is not about finding a piece of software that worked in Western culture and making it work worldwide. Anthropological research is required to design software based on the specific and unique needs, abilities, and thought patterns of the students that will be using it. Without this, students can become disinterested in not only the technology but also the topics that it is attempting to convey.