Idlelo day two (Afternoon edition)

More from the Idlelo conferenece in Cape Town.

The opening plenary was Dimo Calovski from the UN Conference on Trade and Development on the role of the United Nations and other international organisations in the area of Open Source.

Dimo's sole slide said ``If the production, flow, and control of information are defining features of our global economy, then the type of information technology that is used becomes a fundamental international policy issue.

Amongst other things, Dimo discussed the problems of the lack of synchronisation between various international organisations and agencies within the United Nations, and their disparate redundant programmes. This ran a bit late, so the programme went a bit pear-shaped for a while.

I started the next session with my ``Building open communities using web log technology'', which apparently didn't involve me seeming as nervous as I was. Quite a few people chatted to me about the talk - hopefully we'll be seeing some more blogs about Open Source and Open Content in Africa soon. Dwayne Bailey from Translate.org.za was chairing this session.

Mohamed Cassojee was up next, and unfortunately his talk seemed to be more about Oracle's approach to Linux as a platform than the principles of Open Source. He did cover some of what Oracle was up to in this area.

Finally, Adi Attar gave a wonderful disillusioned view of Open Source in her talk, ``Freedom versus Credibility in Open Source Software''. Basically, simply being Open Source doesn't mean you're going to succeed or have a better product, and we shouldn't lose focus of what brings people to develop on Open Source software. I thought it was excellent.

After a very short break (to fix the schedule), I chose to listen to Evan Leibovitch. Evan covered Open Source deployments in governments. He drew on his own experiences in Brazil and the lessons learned there, and then covered some other good case studies in deployments by the city of Munich, and in Peru and China.

Luckily for me, Dwayne's talk on ``Open Source Software as an enabler for ICT relevant to Africa'' started late, and I got to listen to it. Dwayne used his Translate.org.za project as an example, and gave an insight into the failures and successes in the project.

Dwayne said one thing that resonated with me a bit - ``Free software is a philosophy, Open Source is a development model''. Translate.org.za apparnetly is the only unified translation project which translates multiple packages - in this case, OpenOffice, Mozilla, and KDE. Dwayne discussed a consortium model for Open Source development as an enabler for ICT in Africa - whereby a group of companies come together and fund Open Source development.

A final snippet of interest, is Dwayne identified ``channel partners'' as a threat to creating deep local skills in Open Source.

The next talk was contreversial, as it discussed the .NET environment and Microsoft's Shared Source environment. Covered the stuff I expected it to - Rotor, Mono, and DotGNU, but unfortunately became a justification and defense for Microsoft's decisions, which was unnecessary. It also listed some misguided thoughts behind the access of source code and security, accountability, and bugs.

We then broke for lunch. I sat with Dwayne and David from Translate.org.za, as well as Mr Boake from Pretoria University. We'd mostly followed the same session choices, and Adi's talk was a main topic of conversation. We headed back and discovered the FOSSFA workshop we were all interested in attending was actually a closed committee meeting, leaving only the Bandwidth Workshop as an option. I decided to post instead of going to the session immediately, and I'm back off to see what there's to see.