Botswana Gets Cybercrime Law

Botswana finally has a cybercrime law. Passed by Parliament in December 2007 and signed into law by President Festus Mogae later in the same month, the law goes a considerable distance towards updating the legal framework required to facilitate effective use of computers and computer networks in private, commmercial, and public spheres. The Attorney-General’s Chambers defines the purpose of the law as “to combat cybercrime and computer related crime, to repress criminal activities perpetrated through computer systems and to facilitate the collection of electronic evidence.” Officially the law is referred to as the Cybercrime and computer related crimes act, 2007.

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An Effective Intranet — All I Really Wanted for Christmas

According to the Wall Street Journal (quoting Forrester Research Inc.) the top 7 reasons why companies build or consider building intranets are to: let employees find information (94%); enable collaboration/information sharing (50%); automate business processes (44%); reduce costs (40%); provide secure, remote access via Web (25%); provide online training (17%); and, control access to content/applications (10%).

Consider, for example, how a new employee gets inducted into the organization. How and where does he/she find important information such as what the company holidays are, leave policies, the latest training manuals, etc. Read More

Finally, Web Collaboration Everyone Can Use — for Free

One of the enduring features of an Old Economy is the large amount of physical stuff that gets shipped around in order to get things done (printed documents, people). Yes, in the end some physical objects do have to be loaded up and delivered. After all, factories and homes are built with physical bricks, and people eat physical food. Still, looking around southern Africa, it is amazing the amount of stuff that gets shipped physically from one place to another. This includes people — shipping themselves to meetings, training courses and the like. In our business it is not unusual to have several people fly all the way from Kasane to Gaborone for a 2 hour training session, or drive 4-6 hours one way to Gaborone for a meeting. In an earlier post we introduced YouSendIt, a free file upload service that eliminates the insane physical delivery of electronic documents. Today we offer Yugma, a free solution that can help your organization eliminate unnecessary physical shipments of people all over the place.

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Cutting to the Chase — “RSS” in Plain English

We often get the questions - “What is RSS?”, “How can I read RSS?” and “How can we use RSS on our website“. Truth be told, many explanations of Web terminology are too self-important and too loaded with technical jargon to be useful to many people. Today we bring you a short video explanation of this technology in a fun and completely accessible way. This video from Common Craft is about 3.5 minutes long and is entertaining enough that you’ll forget you are learning something.

The video controls include sub-titles in many languages other than English. Sadly no African language is included other than Afrikaans. Volunteers are invited to help translate the film. When you’ve finished viewing it, let us know what you think as we’re always on the lookout for useful resources to share with you.

Cyberplex Africa Research Powers University Connectivity Across Africa

Many of our clients are familiar with our website design and development portfolio. Fewer are aware of our consulting and research activities. For example, building on our pioneering background in Africa-wide Internet infrastructure and services (see Africa Online’s history), we were privileged to carry out World Bank- and IDRC-funded research on the cost and availability of Internet connectivity at African universities across the continent. These studies, which we carried out in 2004 (view report here, and earlier reports here) and updated in 2006 (view report here), concluded that “Internet connectivity in tertiary institutions in Africa can be characterized as too little, too expensive and poorly managed.” We recommended the creation of bandwidth-buying consortia as one viable approach to improving the situation.

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American Business Council in Botswana Launches Website

Botswana’s American Business Council (ABC) is a member-driven non-profit organization dedicated to increasing trade and investment between Botswana and the United States of America. Clearly, information dissemination and exchange is a crucial element of such an initiative. With the recent launch of it’s website (click here to view), ABC hopes to increase its effectiveness through better and more timely communications with members and the general public. In addition to the standard organizational information, the website showcases ABC’s highly successful public events such as seminars and includes a photo gallery and list of member organizations.

Drive Across Town to Pick Up a 20MB File? Are You Kidding?

“When can you come pick it up?” — This is a common question heard around Gaborone when dealing with people who work with large electronic documents. These graphics, documents and multimedia files are so large that email systems refuse to transmit them. The Gaborone solution is to have someone zip across town with a memory stick or blank CD, copy the file, and zip back across town. Read More