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If you’re going to a college reunion this year (my 25th is in early June!), prepare by reading Alan Lightman’s deftly elegant novel Reunion.

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I arrived home from Africa today. The Namibia/Botswana/Vic Falls portion turned out to be the easiest trip that I ever did, far easier than planning a weekend in Los Angeles. James Weis at http://www.eyesonafrica.net/ organized everything to the point that I never had to think or plan. I was taking malaria pills and covered from head to toe in insect-repelling clothing. The locals all said “we don’t have malaria here” and, in fact, I can’t remember seeing a mosquito. My conclusion is that, at least during the dry season, the most serious health hazard of visiting game lodges is obesity.

In the old days, the tourist would walk from sunrise to sunset carrying a heavy large-caliber rifle. The lodge would prepare a hearty breakfast, a snack with mid-morning coffee, a big lunch, sandwiches with tea, a sundowner drink with snacks, and then a big dinner. The lodges still provide five meals a day, but the tourists now mostly sit in Land Rovers or relax in their bungalows.

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In an earlier posting, “Africa and the Information Age”, I wrote that IT offered a lot of opportunity for Africa. Now that I’ve been here, I think that there is more reason to hope than before.

Africa has been nearly invisible in the open-source community, but a graph that adjusts for open-source contributors as a percentage of Internet connections shows that people here are much more adept than the raw numbers would suggest.

It is hard for an outsider to understand how badly South Africa has been hobbled by their telecom monopoly and government. Even at the universities, Internet is expensive, slow, and unreliable. The situation is so bad that it is hard to know what these folks could do if they had the kind of Internet access that people in rich countries have taken for granted since the 1990s.

Bringing high-speed Internet to South Africa would be ridiculously cheap compared to other development initiatives and therefore, presumably, it will eventually happen. When it does, we should see huge growth in industries that are enabled by IT.

[And if the demographers’ darkest predictions come true, and life expectancy falls to 35, getting more people into computer programming will be a great idea. Computer nerds require only a few years of training, often reach high productivity in their teenage years, and tend to have be shunned by members of the opposite sex (thus reducing the spread of HIV).]

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The Digital Freedom Expo conference opened with a video clip from Archibishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu. He talked about the evils of software patents and the companies set up specifically to litigate them. He praised Richard Stallman, Jimmy Wales, and Larry Lessig.

From the rector (president) of UWC, we learned that South Africa now has a 20-25 percent HIV infection rate and that education is the key to fighting the spread of the virus. [My personal view is that it is not the job of computer nerds to keep people free of disease. We build interesting Web sites and other services to make life interesting and worth living as long as the biologists and doctors are able to keep folks alive. Even if human life expectancy were reduced to 30 years, we shouldn’t abandon our keyboards and move into the medical labs since even a 30-year life can be significantly enriched with Google and Wikipedia.]

The premier of the Western Cape Province (equivalent to a U.S. state governor, presumably) talked about how to make Internet access more widespread in Africa. For Internet you need stable electricity. For stable electricity, you need peace, because one of the first things that rebels do is cut powerlines. The premier went on to talk about how ensuring widespread Internet access would combat Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorism associated with it, which he argued are reactions to uncertainty created by the digital/information revolution.

A bureacrat from the department of education here noted that only 2 percent of South African schools have an Internet connection.

Peter Gabriel, via video, introduced Larry Lessig. Gabriel talked about a non-profit trying to help women in Somalia. More than food, shelter, or other seeming essentials, they wanted Internet access, starting with an Internet cafe for women in the capital (under the Islamic regime, only men were allowed to visit Internet cafes).

Larry Lessig gave an inspiring and thought-provoking talk. He started on a down note, with the 1995 Clinton Administration recommendations to expand copyright on an unprecedented scale, extending regulation for the first time into the homes of the average American. Clinton’s Commerce Deptartment’s ideas became law in 1998 when Congress passed the DMCA, which has turned a generation of Americans into daily violators of the law. The transformation of a “read-write” 19th Century culture into a “read-only” 20th Century culture was complete, with cultural output and creativity thoroughly professionalized. Lessig expressed hope for the 21st Century, however, that, despite the efforts of governments, technology was enabling us to return to a “read-write” culture. He showed examples of remix videos. He suggested visiting http://www.freedomdefined.org and learning about the Pirate Party, a reaction by ordinary Scandinavians to having their fair use rights revoked.

Heather Ford of iCommons talked about the South African organizations and individuals who have begun to license their work under Creative Commons. One was the Johannesburg Philharmonic. It occurred to me that all symphony orchestras had better start giving away all of their audio recordings for free if they hope to attract some new audience members before their current subscribers become too frail to get from their nursing homes to the concert hall.

Jimmy Wales gave an inspiring talk about Wikipedia and how it has been gathering momentum in many world languages. The goal is to have at least 250,000 articles in every language spoken by at least one million people. There are 347 such languages. 1000 articles is the point at which Wales believes that a Wikipedia has achieved critical mass and can be self-sustaining. Wikipedia is the 9th most popular site on the Internet, attesting to the fact that the human desire to learn should not be underestimated. Vandalism becomes less of a problem as the site grows more popular, because bad people tend to be early adopters. As more ordinary people start using/editing a service, the rate of problems goes down.

Wales’s latest initiative is a free open-source search engine system whose rankings would be transparent. It does seem as though there is room for improvement on Google, which often delivers domain squatters and search engine spammers as #1 links. (Google’s business of selling ads puts them in a difficult position; the domain squatters are some of their best advertising customers since if you land on a vacant domain there is nothing to do except click on an ad.)

Brian Behlendorf, the Apache and Subversion guy, gave a great practical talk on coordinating open-source software projects.

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In an opening talk at the conference here in Cape Town, we learned the history of the University of the Western Cape. It was started by the apartheid government in order to create a class of colored intellectuals who would support the idea of racial separation. Instead, the faculty at the university became “implacable foes” of the apartheid government, which continued to fund the university on the basis of the number of students graduated.

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Being with Jimmy Wales here in Cape Town reminds me to tell a story about walking the dog in Harvard Yard. I peered through the window into one of the classrooms where the children of the American aristocracy learn the big ideas for $40,000 per year. What had the professor prepared for these eager young minds? What secrets were they going to learn that poor public school and public university kids would never have the fortune to hear? For 15 minutes, she taught from a video projection of the Wikipedia page on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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Andrew Wermuth, the documentary filmmaker behind Balloon Hat, very kindly agreed to experiment in the making of a couple of photography tutorials for photo.net:

• The three basic controls that affect the image (applicable to any camera)
• Using the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (applicable to most digital SLRs)

Comments would be appreciated. Should we do more of these? Give up? Change the style?

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For South African readers of this Weblog, my schedule is shaping up…

April 17: Stagger off BA flight from London early in the morning; talk from 13h15-14h30 at the University of the Western Cape Computer Science Department Seminar Room (about teaching software engineering). Evening: Collapse at the Cape Grace Hotel on the waterfront.

April 18: Fly Cessna 210 with Mark Semonian (sightseeing, aerial photos, instrument approaches for Mark).

April 19: Attend http://digitalfreedom.uwc.ac.za (hear Larry Lessig and Jimmy Wales speak)

April 20: Attend http://digitalfreedom.uwc.ac.za ; keynote talk at 10:50 on “Building and Sustaining Online Learning Communities” then a nuts and bolts talk at 14:00 on why the RDBMS has been so important for building multi-user Internet apps (expecting an audience of 0 since this is in parallel with open-source hero Brian Behlendorf talking about how to be an open-source hero)

April 21: Sightseeing around Cape Town

April 22: Departure in the Cessna 210 for game parks, Victoria Falls, Botswana, Namibia, etc. Mark seems to be a last-minute guy, so it is unclear exactly where we are going….

May 7: Return to Cape Town. Crash in corner of Mark’s apartment.

May 8: Evening flight to London (12 hours) and then home to Boston on May 9.

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I leave for Cape Town, South Africa on Sunday night. U.S. AID is being kind enough to send me there as part of their program to help Africans improve their capabilities in information technology. It is easy to be enthusiastic about the potential of the Information Age for economic development in Africa.

For a country to participate in the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, it needs a lot of infrastructure: cheap and reliable transportation, capital sufficient to build large facilities, management to coordinate hundreds or thousands of workers, efficient and non-corrupt import/export procedures, etc. Africa was never a good candidate for being a rising industrial star due to its distance from world markets and the general chaos and corruption of post-colonial governments.

What about generating economic growth from expertise in information technology? India has tremendous problems with infrastructure and a sluggish and corrupt government, yet its IT sector has been booming for two decades. What makes IT such a great opportunity?

• you don’t need physical transportation; a land-locked country or one where airfares are very high can be competitive
• you don’t need a big factory; a competent programmer at a PC connected to the Internet can earn a good living
• small-scale IT enterprises aren’t natural targets for corrupt government officials
• competitors in First World countries are weak; the average programmer in the U.S. is incompetent, constantly missing deadlines and delivering bug-ridden undocumented code that fails to meet customer needs. The average programmer generates rage in the heart of his or her employer.

What are the special challenges?

Expensive telecommunications is one challenge. Telecom is one of the few things that can be taxed in Africa, so it is. It can cost 5-10X as much to get an Internet connection in a poor African country compared to a rich American suburb. The effect of these high costs is devastating to the economy, but governments can’t resist.

A deeper challenge is education of software engineers. American universities pretend to educate computer science majors, but in fact nearly all of the practical learning happens during summer jobs and in the first year or two after college, assuming the CS major is lucky enough to find some mentors. (If he doesn’t, he usually remains incompetent as a software engineer and switches careers.)

The education at an African univesity has to be substantially better than at a Stanford or MIT. The African CS graduate won’t have a lot of good jobs from which to choose. The African CS graduate needs to be able to compete on the world software engineering market immediately upon graduation. For this to happen, he or she needs to learn how to be an engineer while in school. That means all of the problems identified in http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/undergrad-cs need to be fixed.

It is a tough challenge, but every university that has tackled it has succeeded.

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PC World magazine lists the 50 Best Tech Products of All Time. Two out of 50 (#24 and #36) are anti-virus or anti-spyware Band-Aids.

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