Bill Thompson on Open Source in India

Posted on May 12, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

Seems like there’s a lot of talk about open source software in regards to development these days.
The BBC’s Bill Thompson has an interesting story on open source software in India: BBC NEWS | Technology | India lays down ‘open’ challenge
Among other things, he touches on the isolation of Indian coders. There are Indian special interest groups, coders are doing much more than simply localising existing software and there is a lot of government support, but there is a lack of project that are really focused on solving Indian problems. This seems like it could be a sort of chicken-or-the-egg question similar to the “who gets ICT first, student or the teacher?” I mention in a previous post. Especially when we consider that open source software relies on the voluntary feedback of real users to identify problems. Maybe the issue is that they need more users rather than government support…

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Movie about free and open source software for development

Posted on May 10, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

This sounds very interesting. Too bad I don’t get BBC World! Maybe it’ll be available for free download after the BBC airing…
Coming Soon: The Code Breakers – a BBC World Documentary on FOSS and Development

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ICTs in India

Posted on May 10, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

A very insightful article on the BBC website today about how ICTs are being used in rapidly changing India: BBC NEWS | Technology | India aims to be hi-tech heaven

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World Ahead: Intel’s new development move

Posted on May 3, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

Intel to design a cheap laptop and put $1 billion into teacher training worldwide. Intel to Offer Its Own Plan for Global Internet Access – New York Times
At some point sometime, Negroponte, of the $100 laptop project, said that he didn’t feel that teacher training was the right way to go in a development sense, better to target the children. I agree with him up to a certain point. I wouldn’t rule out the teacher training route because I feel that to maximize the benefits of ICTs as a learning technology for a learning society they need to be integrated into the classroom and therefore teachers will be an issue sooner or later. I think that as long as people are aware of the difficulties and time factors involved in targeting the teachers they should be able to design programmes that work.
Intel’s site about the World Ahead programme is here: Intel – World Ahead.

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Who do we trust?

Posted on May 3, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

This article on BBC News considers how perceptions of the media are changing in an information age. Interesting read. BBC NEWS | Technology | Media holds its own in trust poll

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The UNU-IIST on open source software

Posted on April 25, 2006 by Tryggvi Thayer

Things have been very quiet around here lately. I’m hard at work on my thesis and finishing up the semester, so things are probably going to stay fairly quiet for the time being.
But, there’s always something. I came across this interesting article on open source software in the development context. Pay special attention to the last two paragraphs about linking the open source community with IT people in developing countries. This captures my opinion exactly – open source is not just (and not most importantly) cheap software for developing countries, it also has the potential to raise awareness among a huge and influential global community of developers of the needs of developing countries to make sure that the tools needed are available and appropriate.
Make sure you visit the link to UNU-IIST to get the whole picture.

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