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.
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.
It is surely evidence of how quickly and thoroughly Internet history passes by, that few will have noticed as one of the most iconic personifications of the rise of the Internet passed into oblivion recently. In late December 2007, America Online (AOL) announced that it would officially cease development and support for the Netscape browser on February 1st, 2008. One reason why Netscape will not be missed is that its popularity has long been surpassed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (77% market share) and Mozilla Firefox (a 16% and growing share) — which itself traces its history back to open source software derived from Netscape. Aficionados of Netscape can still download the software at this website, but AOL will not provide any support.
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.
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.
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.
