/ 28 March 2006

Soweto’s open-source hackers draw attention

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Open-Source Centre plans to open a satellite centre in Soweto in May this year to expose untapped information and communications technology skills and research potential in the township just south of Johannesburg.

The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) Open-Source Centre plans to open a satellite centre in Soweto in May this year to expose untapped information and communications technology (ICT) skills and research potential in the township just south of Johannesburg.

The OpenProject focus area leader at the Open-Source Centre, Ntsika Msimang, who will manage the new centre, says South Africans are talented enough to develop world-class products.

“This ‘scarce skills’ talk is nothing but a fallacy,” says Msimang. “The problem is that the country has not put them to use.

“When we ran an OSS workshop in August 2005 in Soweto, we were shocked to find out how much ICT talent was just lying dormant.

“There was a young man who lives in Pimville [a suburb in Soweto] and works for one of the four big banks, who had been communicating, via e-mail, with Linus Torvalds on a Linux bug he discovered and was trying to fix,” says Msimang.

“When he projected the Linux source code on the screen and a good number of people in the room could tell what the ‘gibberish’ on the screen was doing, we knew we had to come to Soweto and leverage that talent.”

The manager of the CSIR Open-Source Centre, Nhlanhla Mabaso, says he spotted a “Richard Stallman in dreadlocks” at the workshop. Stallman is the founder of the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation.

“If we really want open source to be accessible to people — high-calibre, talented people — we’d like to make it available for them to make that contribution from where they stay,” says Mabaso. “We are hoping that through this we’ll be able to move into that other paradigm, where as we do things, we’ll do them with the involvement of people in the area.”

It’s a move away from the idea of research from the ivory tower of academia, says Mabaso, “where we sit here and make all the wonderful decisions and come up with nice case studies with lessons that [we] could’ve learned if we were there in the first place”.

One of the key focus areas of the centre will be testing the effectiveness of wireless mesh networks in improving internet connectivity in Soweto. The project will also test the internet as a service delivery channel in e-government initiatives, says Msimang. “To avoid confrontation with regulators, we will be operating on a licence-free frequency band,” he says.

Mabaso says Sowetan locals have already built a wireless mesh network — an ingenious solution for those desperate for broadband in the ADSL-deprived area. “They have managed to bounce off signals from the training colleges around them and are passing them on to other areas,” says Mabaso.

The centre also plans to employ developers who will develop open-source smart-card technology, build customised open-source distributions for scientists and write computer-based training software for OpenOffice and Linux.

The centre will be based at the computer training facility at the National Institute for Crime Prevention and Reintegration of Offenders, and has already built a number of links with local businesses and organisations in the area.

Although a launch date has not been set, Mabaso and Msimang say it’s likely to take place during Linux International executive director John “Maddog” Hall’s visit to the country in May. Says Msimang: “He expressed that he wanted to visit the Soweto centre during his visit.” — Tectonic