albatross meeting, Cambridge 2013

A place marker for ideas which I carried out of the Albatross Task Force meeting in Cambridge, 15-20 April 2013

BOFFFF* you!

Fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly and economist Ussif Rashid Sumaila have examined subsidies paid to bottom trawl fleets around the world.

They found that US$152 million per year are paid to deep-sea fisheries. Without these subsidies, global deep-sea fisheries would operate at a loss of $50 million a year. A great deal of the subsidies paid to deep-sea trawlers is to subsidize the large amount of fuel required to travel beyond the 200 mile limit and drag weighted nets.[29]

"There is surely a better way for governments to spend money than by paying subsidies to a fleet that burns 1.1 billion litres of fuel annually to maintain paltry catches of old growth fish from highly vulnerable stocks, while destroying their habitat in the process" – Pauly

"Eliminating global subsidies would render these fleets economically unviable and would relieve tremendous pressure on over-fishing and vulnerable deep-sea ecosystems" – Sumaila

Namibian fisheries don't get these subsidies. I guess they get to avoid the annual license fees instead ?

BOFFFF = Big Old Fat Fecund Female Fish

Scary stats - what throwing 'away' can mean for end-users of redundant mobile devices

Reading about the material composition of mobile devices, it's fairly obvious that a vast quantity of harmful stuff is being ditched as phones and other assistive mobile technologies are being replaced with newer models. 

So what's in a mobile phone (courtesy Cécile Marin)?  

So what's truly nasty in a phone (courtesy www.healthystuff.org)?

And expect loads more to come -  with 1.9 billion phones expected to be sold in 2013, the current projection is that some 2.9 billion new assistive devices will be sold in 2017.  Which means that  e-waste - intricate mixtures of plastics, metals and chemicals - which can be harmful to people and the environment if not handled properly, will also increase in astronomical volumes.  

In developing countries where e-waste is poorly regulated, and generally dismantled and recycled by hand, harmful chemicals and plastics are introduced into the environment via water, air and soil. Workers who dismantle and burn e-waste to retrieve valuable metals and other materials are exposed to harmful chemicals such as heavy metals and inorganic acids, which have the potential for long-term and serious health risks.  

Check the findings of this report...for an e-waste site in Accra, Ghana.  Very scary stuff.

First cheetah kill at home!

There have been several reports of cheetah sightings in the area of Brakwater - where we live about 16 kms (as the crow flies) from the centre of windhoek. While we've had plenty of spoor of feral dogs, leopard, brown hyaena and other smaller predators and scavengers, we've always been somewhat iffy about suspected cheetah spoor on our place, because they are so easy to confuse with those of dogs.

Late afternoon, day before yesterday Liz disturbed an adult cheetah at a freshly killed young kudu about 50 metres from our game waterhole and salt-lick.  What a thrill for her!  Hoping that we'd see more of this cheetah, we put the trail camera in a tree near the carcass.  

And here's the outcome - what a nice surprise to record the cheetah's return to the carcass just before dawn the following morning, feed to satiation, leaving after an hour or so, with a very full belly!  

A sequence of photos - 

Just before dawn - 06h20

First light

Alert to presence of jackals hovering around.

Alert 1.

Alert 2.

Feeding in a hurry.

Huge belly,

Finished eating, last photo in sequence  - 07h47!

Jackals, warthog, tawny eagles and vultures came in to feed subsequently... including a partially leucistic youngish Lappet-faced vulture

Interview for the eLearning Report 2013

Interview for The eLearning Africa 2013 Report

1. Please tell us about your personal journey: what was your most influential formative educational experience as you were growing up?

A truly gifted, knowledgeable and inspiring biology teacher in my last two years of high school.

Why did you find this to be so influential?)

I chose to pursue a career in the natural sciences as a result of this teacher's enormous enthusiasm to (freely!) share knowledge with her learners. She gave so much more than was required to pass a final matriculation exam, and instilled an incredible sense of urgency to learn so much more than what was simply conventional.

2. What was it that inspired you to participate in FOSS(FA)?

I've always believed that international collaborations such as the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), founded to empower and support organizations, social movements and individuals in and through the use of free and open source ICTs, can build strategic communities and initiatives which make meaningful contributions to equitable human development and social justice in the face of ulterior political and economic processes. In 2002, it became imperative to have access to a widespread network of African collaborators to support the cost of ICT4E ownership model I was developing in Namibia using Free and Open Software (FOSS) and Open Education Resources (OERs) with Creative Commons (CC) licensing in its infancy; when every commercial vendor of ICTs in Namibia was lazily, and lucratively, promoting a (monoculture) flavour of costly proprietary bloatware for education.

3. Please tell us how you influenced (the use of) FOSS(FA)

If I did somehow manage to influence my FOSS(FA) collaborators in any way in the past decade, it was to pursue *cost effective*, robust, free and open source software, hardware and information content solutions in all sectors of development. But more to the point, the underlying reason for influencing other decision-makers - including governments, civil society and international funding agencies like Sida, USAID, ADB and several others - to embrace FOSS, OERs and CC licensing was to encourage all these players to embrace a comprehensive, and very stable, assistive technology service solution for an education sector subjected to a wide range of adverse conditions - social, economic, environment, infrastructure - conditional on one common denominator; free access to information using high speed broadband internet.

4. Can you give us an example of the challenges you have faced in the process of initiating FOSS(FA) and how did you overcome them?

There are several horror stories I can relate (a fail faire would have been a useful platform for this!), having had first-hand experience of well-meaning, internationally-funded FOSS-based ICT4E consultancies transform into nasty mud-slinging fests in Namibia and further afield. In every instance such challenges were created by commercial service providers concerned about losing their monopolistic grip on government tenders for (proprietary) hardware, software and communication services, and even more lucratively, medium- to long-term technical maintenance contracts to support their inflated-cost deployments. While not always successful, my general approach to such larger-scale economic challenges has been to tackle ICT4E on a smallish, localised scale, going back to fundamentals, i.e., *realistic* internet access using robust technologies scaled for *prospective* use by all members of a local community, with simple learning curves supported *locally* by one or (ideally) more members of the same community. At a cost which is readily supportable, even by local corporate philanthropy. On the other hand, conventional ICT4E development by government, World Bank, MCA, ADB and similar agencies, along with their big international corporate allies, at national and even regional scale, will continue to need civil society watchdogs (like myself:-)) to track and criticise results, until eventually they do become transparent in their reporting of overtly ambitious project outcomes.

[Ironically, FOSS has become pervasive in ICT4D, given the dominating volume of FOSS-based mobile technologies being consumed globally]

5. How do you think ICT can best help build sustainable human development across Africa?

By providing, across the entire scale of human literacy, unambiguous universal access to information. Information which can (mostly) be educational, useful, entertaining and rewarding.

(What are some of the pitfalls to avoid?!)

Any forms of control, censorship or misrepresentation which would be counter-productive in providing such unambiguous universal access to information. This includes any form of commercial advertising with hidden costs of participation.

6. What do you think is the most significant change that needs to happen in order to tackle the education and training challenges that Africa faces? (kindly provide reasons for your answer)

Given the rapid evolution of diverse forms of assistive technologies, and concomitant devolution of unit cost, the only significant change required is the provision of universal access to free, high speed broadband internet, with the inherent implication that all educational centres will have the infrastructure and electrification to do so. What is a reasonable bandwidth benchmark for African schools? Most ICT4E specialists believe that the definition of 'high-speed' broadband for schools should be at least 10 Mbps, with many countries having already set goals of at least 100 Mbps, even 10 Gbps, in the foreseeable future. Regardless of the method used, a realistic school bandwidth benchmark should take into account occasional bursts of traffic, anticipated increases in simultaneous users and new applications that will require additional bandwidth in the near future. So, what is a reasonable bandwidth benchmark for African schools hoping to support a technology-rich learning environment in the next 2-3 years?

• An external Internet connection to an ISP of at least 10 Mbps per 1,000 learners/staff (or 10 Kbps per person); and
• An internal wide area network at school of at least 100 Mbps per 1,000 learners/staff (or 100 Kbps per person).

These are not impossible goals, while squeezing every last bit of capacity from deficient infrastructure and poor upstream ISP services has become a science. We can use gateways, caching, proxy servers and local mirrors, even large local storage devices for 'store-and-forward' content delivery solutions, to maximize Internet bandwidth and traffic shaping, load balancing and content prioritization to help ensure the integrity of the most important internet service requirements at school; all strategies to conserve limited bandwidth, and make the 10 Kbps per person a comfortable standard for our schools in the (very) short term.

7. What do you consider to be the most transformative, innovative and exciting initiative currently taking place in technologies and education, skills development and lifelong learning and training in Africa?

The rapid expansion and cost-reduction of fibre-based internet bandwidth / connectivity to and in Africa. Combined with the reduction in unit-cost and energy demands of innovative, plug-and-play assistive technologies such as wifi-enabled tablets, ultra/netbooks, zero-clients and single-board servers (eg Raspberry PI), smart-phones, shared workspace projection of collaborative free and open source OERs, APIs and APPs in the cloud.

8. What is the most significant lesson or piece of advice you would share with others seeking to follow in your footsteps?

Read as much as you can! It's very likely, then, that you won't be following, but overtaking me instead.

9. Looking forward to the next 5 years – what do you see on the horizon in terms of influential transitions, technologies and trends that will affect the integration of educational technologies in education, skills development and lifelong learning landscape in Africa?

Even more expansion and cost-reduction of fibre-based internet bandwidth / connectivity to and in Africa. Even more reduction in unit-cost and energy demands of innovative, plug-and-play assistive technologies, with even more locally relevant educational resources in the cloud. Combined with a new wave of highly mobile teachers and learners, capable of using contemporary (often bring your own) assistive technologies, comfortable with rapidly evolving social media, news, crowd sourcing and viral marketing apps, so much the better informed to make educated demands of their political leadership for meaningful change.

10. What will FOSS(FA) contribute to Africa's human development over the next five years?

With ever-increasing use of FOSS in (mobile) assistive technologies (with Android presently in the lead, Ubuntu will soon also become one of several competing open source mobile ecosystems), it's pretty clear that the global FOSS community will continue to contribute significantly to developing free and open source applications and content relevant to human development. As an organisation, FOSSFA should remain a very vocal public forum for transparent dialogue about the merits of an open system for free and open access to information at the level of government. Hopefully with a new wave of social-media savvy decision-makers capable of thinking out of the box about ICT4E&D!

(Some of these thoughts originated from a more expansive view of ICT4E in Namibia -

http://www.tatejoris.org/2012/12/why-shouldnt-we-look-joels-gift-horse.html)

13 March 2013

Incroyable! How Open Source CMS template use can be profitable!

I simply have to share this story! I'm gob-smacked by the temerity of this gang!

The real cost of SA’s most expensive website - 05 Mar 2013 by Arthur Goldstuck | Filed in Web World

 The budget for South Africa’s most expensive web site yet makes for startling reading, writes ARTHUR GOLDSTUCK, who pins down its cost.

More was spent on the planning of the Free State government web site than most South African corporates have ever spent on the full development and implementation of their web sites.

 The tender was awarded by the Free State Province on 24 February 2012 for the “Redesign/Relaunch of a comprehensive and integrated website” to the “Cherry Ikamva-Jugganaut Joint Venture” *.

It includes four phases prior to implementation, followed by implementation, maintenance and “content generation and management”. The tender award document, supplied yesterday to Radio 702 by the Office of the Director General of the Free State Provincial Government, makes for startling reading.

Phase one, for “planning, conceptualization, research and information development”, allocates the following funds for financial year 2011/12: “R350 000 per site for departments and Metro; R300 000 per site for larger Local Municipalities; R200 000 per site for Entities and District Municipalities; R150 000 per site for other Local Municipalities”. The Free State Provincial Government comprises 11 departments, including the Office of the Premier. Along with the Metro, the first line item therefore comprises 12 sites, for a total cost of R4 200 000.

The Free State province comprises 19 local municipalities, of which 6 could be described as “larger” (those that include the larger Free State towns, namely Kroonstad, Welkom Sasolburg, Parys, Harrismith and Bethlehem). The second line item, based on this outline, comes to R1 800 000.

 The province includes four “District Municipalities”, which are in effect umbrella bodies for the 19 local municipalities. The Entities refer to statutory bodies, of which there are four: Free State Tourism Authority, Free State Gambling and Liquor Board, Free State Development Corporation and Centlec, the local electricity authority in Bloemfontein. Based on these municipalities and entities, the third line item amounts to R1 600 000.

A total of 13 “other Local Municipalities” are not included in the second line item, making for a cost, in the fourth line item, of R1 950 000. The total cost, then, of planning the Free State government website was R9 550 000.


 Phase Two, for “Design”, also allocated to the 2011/12 financial year, included the same line items, with the same costing. In other words, the Design of the site/s cost exactly as much as the planning: a total of R9 550 000.

The allocation for Phase Three, the “Development and Creation” of the site/s, was R1 100 000.

Phase Four, for “Testing”, was open-ended, specifying “R900 per hour x 10 persons”. Assuming, very conservatively, that three 8-hour days were allocated for testing, this would have amounted to a relatively humble R216 000. No ceiling was placed on this amount, however, and it could be ten times as high.  (Now ain't that typical ?)

Phase Five, for “Implementation”, which appeared to be something other than design, development, creation and testing, was given a budget of R413 600.

 The total for the first five phases is R20 829 600, simply to get the site/s up and running.

 Phase Six A, for Maintenance, and Six B, for “Content Generation and Management”, is a fascinating mix of hidden and unstated cost. Maintenance is costed at “R900 per hour x 2 persons”. It can safely be assumed that maintenance was allocated to budget as an ongoing function, i.e. 40-hours per week x 2 persons, amounting to R72 000 per week. Assuming the financial year ended in June, as it usually does for provinces, and a modest 12 weeks of maintenance was provided, the total would be R864 000. 

Phase Six B, “Content Generation and Management” allows for “R75 000 per month per site x three months” in financial year 2011/12. The total number of sites, derived from the breakdown of Phase one, is no less than 39. For one month, the cost is R2 925 000. For the last three months of financial year 2011/12, the total cost was R8 775 000.

 Assuming the project started in time for three months of content generation and management to be provided in the 2011/12 financial year, the total paid out in the four months after the tender was awarded would have been R30 468 600.

For financial year 2012, two phases are provided namely: “Phase: Maintenance, including review and update of design: R900 per hours; “Phase: Content Services, Generation and Management: R68 253 per month per site.” Based on four weeks of maintenance per month, and assuming one person responsible, the cost of maintenance is R144 000 per month, or R1 728 000 per year. This assumes that it is not a per-site cost.

Content services, generation and management, on the other hand, is a per site service which, for 39 sites, amounts to R2 661 867 per month, or R31 942 404 for the 2012/13 financial year.

 The total cost of the web site for 2012/13: R33 670 404. The allocation for 2013/2014 is exactly the same as for 2012/13: R33 670 404.

This puts the total cost of the site over less than three years at R97 809 408. 

This, in turn, gives the Free State Government website (http://www.freestateonline.fs.gov.za) the distinction of being the most expensive website ever built (or not built) in South Africa. The previous website to hold that dubious honour, a South African Airways site aimed at foreign visitors, cost R90-million in a venture that was eventually aborted in 2001. By way of comparison, the website of the South African Presidency (http://www.thepresidency.gov.za/), which is somewhat more complex than that of the Free State provincial Government, was built and maintained by Absol Internet Business Solutions at a total cost of about R250 000 over the past four years.

*Who is the "Cherry Ikamva-Jugganaut Joint Venture"??  

And nogal using a Simple WordPress design...the Free State Online website uses a WordPress theme (London Live), priced at $40.

it would not take an experienced web designer more than a few days to complete such a redesign from a WordPress theme.

the website development agreement was signed with businessman Tumi Ntsele, who reportedly holds tenders with several other provincial departments.

“According to the contract, Cherry Online, Juggernaut, and Ikamva Joint Venture, in which Ntsele has a 74% stake, won the tender despite two companies in the final round of bidding submitting applications with significantly lower prices,” the Sowetan reported.

Free State director general Elzabe Rockman signed a three-year contract to redesign the website in 2011, the Sowetan newspaper reported.

Retrospective - Wizards of OS 3

The Wizards of OS 3 site has become very slow to access from here in Namibia, so I've taken the liberty of porting parts of my presentation there in June 2004 to set a precedent for future thinking. I want thank my son Daniel for sorting out this transfer - with the fabulous bandwidth at his disposal in California! Part ONE - and Part TWO

Civil Society blues

Freshly excerpted (mostly) from NGO-pulse Issue 358. Charmaine Smith attended the Goedgedacht Forum for Social Reflection dialogue. She is the communication and knowledge manager of the Children’s Institute, UCT. A comprehensive report and presentations are available at www.goedgedachtforum.co.za

I believe this has relevance for civil society in Namibia -

In expressing concern over the ‘dismal signs of a failing state’, former MP and deputy chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Dr Alex Boraine, highlighted that civil society now more than ever has an important function in South Africa’s (read Namibia) democracy:

“Against a power hungry state, civil society is called to play an ever increasing role in combatting this slide towards a one party state, and a state which is becoming increasingly unstable.”

Dr Borainne raised the alarm over civil society’s "diminishing role as watchdog" due to the tough economic climate. He reflected on especially the plight of advocacy organisations while, generally, he believed that ‘many organisations are in serious trouble’. Advocacy organisations are disappearing faster than the rest and that especially funds for networking were no longer forthcoming.

A recent survey among close to 700 South African nonprofit organisations in 2012 found that 80 percent of participants have experienced significant funding cuts over the previous year, and over 64 percent had to cut services to their beneficiaries.

The need for civil society–state collaboration alongside civil society’s watchdog role and the impact on this role by the state acting as a funder of nonprofit services are making it a complicated relationship that is often characterised by conflict. Inherent reasons for this conflict include:

• competition for money due to overseas funding being channeled through the state;
• civil society’s exposure of inadequacies of the state, which leads to antagonism;
• competition for recognition between nonprofits and organs of the state; and
• government’s perceived moves to regulate (silence?) the sector with restrictive legislation.

The question of who in civil society structures represents and speaks for whom came up throughout the dialogue, as did issues on self-regulation, accountability and the general lack of diverse representation in nonprofit organisations.

I had to remind myself about renewable energy

 My remnant concern with monoculture (coconut, new bio-fuel plants, even cocoa -  driving many biomass/ gassification projects today - is what happens to traditional use of arable land and undeveloped forests?  Will the emphasis on energy production impact on the local folks' decisions to clear undeveloped land and plant non-edible plants at the risk of food short-falls in the event of a shorter term climate event messing with their ability to feed  themselves.  Would Samoa become a net importer of staples in such an event?

I remain an advocate of hybrid solutions - a mix of hydro, solar, geothermal and bio... eggs in diverse baskets, and localised to meet local smaller-scale community requirements.  

Everyone seems to always avoid talking about load loss on national grids. It can be astronomical, and additionally, if you have a major section of this grid wiped out by a disaster then everyone suffers... instead, think of creating 'pockets' of local community-based energy in different parts of the islands. Many villages, many energy plants.

I like modular power solutions - I have a solar rig at home which generates, on average, 4 kW daily, and a generator which is can be doctored to accommodate biofuel instead of diesel.  I'm exploring small-scale gassification to complement this outfit with local bush  encroachment - a source of income for local unemployed community.  I calculate I can triple my energy production to 12-14 kW daily, and supply enough extra power to charge the batteries of the 20-seater electric bus I want to bring in to serve the schools requiring environmental education outing for their life science classes to our place.  Any surplus power would be available for local diversification - build a few more guest or staff houses to also benefit from this local off-grid solution.

You'll have noticed my abundant use of the word 'local' :-)

Facebook is not a good platform for sharing outrage

While any one of my 400+ Facebook "friends" could probably share my emotive bits and pieces with their networks of friends, and some of them do, the fact remains that most issues are forgotten very quickly, especially if they don't directly affect most folks.  I continue to look for a Namibian equivalent of Avaaz, but alas, no such luck.  

So I'm choosing to use my blog more as a diary this year - a place to every now and then remind me and readers of issues which haven't yet been resolved - like this one:

Incroyable! It is hard to believe that almost 7 years down the line (some of) these personalities continue to live this most remarkable notion of progress. Roll on, a hundred years of solitude! 

Hold on to your breakfast... 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=VBkd7O4C8-Y

This particular documentary reminds me of an earlier Darwin-like award for contributions to ICT4E in Namibia.

http://www.tatejoris.org/2005/09/microsophical-reflections-part-1.html

Things *really* haven't changed.


Another issue which failed to elicit much reaction from my FB friends -

"The internet has given the world unimaginable economic and social benefit during the past 24 years. All without UN regulation. We cannot support an ITU Treaty that is inconsistent with the multi-stakeholder model of internet governance." This is the position taken by the USA and a few other lateral thinkers at ITU's WCIT-12 in Dubai this past month. A typically closed-shop ITU meeting of Telco and government officials revising an aging international treaty which many see as an excuse for member states to be given the "sovereign right" to "regulate the activities of operating agencies providing Internet access services within their national territory". Countries like Sweden, Canada, Holland and Germany - even Malawi and the Gambia - who do not agree with this treaty, see the internet as an open, free and independent international service, not to be tampered with or regulated.

While it's a slap in the face of internet freedom fighters in Namibia, it doesn't come as much of a surprise that our ITU representatives signed the treaty. They've always enjoyed being in control, even though it's anyone's guess who these Namibian decision makers were, this time round... Come to think of it, though, it's also quite possible that they gave their proxy to the Russian delegation in order to do some last minute shopping. Why else would anyone convene a meeting of government officials in Dubai :-)?

And another issue - 

Dedicating works to the public domain is difficult if not impossible for those wanting to contribute, voluntarily and of their own free will, their works for public use before applicable copyright or database protection terms expire. Wouldn't it be nice if our Ministry of ICT, legal custodian of copyright and related rights in Namibia, would consider Creative Commons offerings such as CC0, a universal tool that allows users to voluntarily relinquish all copyright, database and related rights to the fullest extent allowed by law, in their current amendments of this Act (6 of 1994)?