Botswana’s Centre for Human Rights, Ditshwanelo, is currently holding its annual Film Festival in Gaborone. Always notable for the sometimes disturbing and often thought provoking movies, this year’s selections do not disappoint — the full program is available here. One example: Shake Hands with the Devil — The Journey of Romeo Dallaire dramatizes the predicament General Dallaire faced when he was sent to Rwanda in 1994 at the head of a UN peace keeping force with severely limited resources and mandate. Ultimately, he was denied authority to intervene, and his force was reduced then abandoned and in the end proved incapable of stopping the genocide. Learn more about this movie here. Learn about the genocide here.

Ditshwanelo’s website which Cyberplex Africa recently developed contains information on the organization’s work in Botswana, the variety of which surprises many given the country’s reputation as a well governed, democratic, prosperous and peaceful nation in a historically troubled region of Africa. Take a look at it for yourself.

Website and web applications developers are familiar with MySQL — one of the predominant database platforms used throughout the Internet, including by powerhouses such as Google, Yahoo!, Nokia, and YouTube. More than 100 million copies have reportedly been downloaded and distributed during its history. On January 17th, Sun Microsystems announced that it would buy MySQL AB, the Swedish developer of MySQL for US$1 billion. On February 26th, Sun announced that it had completed the acquisition.

This stunning development shines the spotlight on the gains being increasingly made by so-called FOSS (free and open source software) solutions which “grant the user the right to study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code“. MySQL is a key part of the LAMP stack consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python, and was originally developed in Sweden by David Axmark, Allan Larsson and Michael “Monty” Widenius who had been working together since the 1980s.

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Despite its well-earned reputation for tranquility, good governance and notable wealth, Botswana’s level of access to the Internet lags most other countries, including fellow African ones. According to Internet World Stats, as of December 2007, the country has only 60,000 Internet users. The resulting Internet penetration rate of 3.3% is lower than the African average of 4.7%, and is significantly below the world average of 20%.

 By comparison, the top 5 African countries (in terms of population online) are Nigeria (8m), Morocco (6.1m), Egypt (6m), South Africa (5.1m), and Sudan (3.1m). In terms of % penetration, the order is Seychelles (35.4%), Reunion (27.4%), Mauritius (24%), Morocco (18.1%), Tunisia (15.7%). The population list is notable for emphasizing countries with the bigger populations, while the penetration rate throws the spotlight primarily on island nations.

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