My new friend Aslam Rafee (CTO of the DST) has been hanging out in our office this morning before Open Everything this afternoon. He has pointed out one of the most incredible pieces of democracy I have ever seen. The so called ‘Independent Electoral Commission’ do not allow you to access information through their site if you do not have propriety software.
I met with The Amazing Philipp Schmidt over the weekend to prep for Open Everything Cape Town. The event is happening this Friday at Bird's Boutique Cafe. It's an amazing venue. High ceilings and tons of light. And scrumptious homemade everything.
We have an internal Shuttleworth Foundation IRC channel which mainly consists of comments, banter, understanding where people are, soliciting opinions and, most importantly, links to interesting things we are reading. These readings inform our current thinking and shape our ideas. To share them at large, we have tagged them in deli.icio.us under SFreads (what the Shuttleworth Foundation reads). The RSS feed is to the left of this post, and will be on the front page of our website.
This week, the team went on an Insights training course, which whilst a lot of it can be taken with a pinch of salt (how you can fill out 25 questions and define the exact characteristics of each complex individual I will never know) there was a lot of truth found.
Danese Cooper has organized what promises to be an excellent conversation about open education at OSCON in Portland. Mark Shuttleworth will be part of the mix. Karien and I prepared some quick background notes for Mark re: what think is exciting in this space and the specific work we're doing. I figured it would be useful to share here:
We are not afraid to take risks on new ideas or projects and we are not afraid to tell the world when they have gone wrong and failed. The Kusasa project has failed. Essentially we could not reconcile the original vision of the project with the practical realities we faced in South Africa.
We are finally starting to get under the hood of the foundation. We have published the first in our ‘How we work’ series on Open Licensing and have been getting some great feedback. As we know, we are not perfect, but we do have a clear policy on what we want to do and very real ideas and opportunities to get there. Every agreement we enter into, be it with a service provider or in the form of a donation ensures all material and resources are open and will remain so, they are also free from technical protection measures.
Very excitingly, we hosted the first Village Telco workshop. It exceeded all expectations both in the calibre of the people attending and the very concrete outcomes that emerged. Details of the workshop and its results are on the newly hosted website. One key result of the workshop is a plan to create a new device that merges the functionality of a low-cost mesh access point and an analogue telephony adaptor (ATA).
The Teachable Agents (TA) project is under way. In June two training sessions were held with natural science teachers as well as computer lab teachers from all of the participating schools. The teachers learned how to create concept maps using the Betty’s Brain TA software. The software has also been implemented at all of the schools.
During June the Foundation made detailed submissions on two draft Bills. As 2009 is an election year, South African government departments are attempting to put all their pending Bills through Parliament in the next term. As a result the next few months will be a very busy period of responding to legislation which affects access to knowledge.
June was Cape Town Book Fair month. Mark Horner participated in a poster session where he presented some of our ideas on print aggregation. The presentation was very well received, with some saying the poster ’stood out for its sheer gumption’. We’ll keep you posted on how this plan unfolds.
Writing up Open Everything Toronto debrief notes, I realized that striking the right yin-yang between impressive and surprising examples of 'open' will be one of the most critical factors for future events.
May 2008 was a really great month at the Foundation. We went through what seemed like a spring clean of our thoughts, processes and communications.
We continued working towards democratisation of the telecommunication infrastructure by defining and organising the key players and stakeholders in the Village Telco initiative together. We will have a workshop next month and have commitment from all to participate fully. This will be the first time they have all been together and we are very much looking forward to shaping the project further.
With Open Everything Toronto a week behind us, blog reflections, notes and photos are starting to trickle online. One of the highlights so far: Amanda Yilmaz's write up of the Seneca Open Source Course session.
Today, Toronto kicks off Open Everything: a global series of six (or more?) events about the art, science and spirit of open. We've got 60 amazing people registered who come from computer programming, community development and everywhere in between. It's gonna rock.
At the Foundation, we aim to drive innovation, we pilot projects, we comment and cajole in policy discussions and we slowly move forward to a better, more connected, more educated and prosperous South Africa (and Africa and the world).
At the Foundation, we want to drive innovation in education and technology.
Structure:
What we do in this area:
What we do in this area:
What we do in this area:
The Shuttleworth Foundation’s mission is to drive innovation in education and technology. Philosophically, we do that by: accelerating great ideas and removing barriers. Practically that means we pilot projects and pedagogies, and back excellent people to drive help drive our agenda.