Samasource on making social business work

Published on 2010/9/3 in General and Social Africa. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

@Leila C Janah of Samasource hosted an insight-filled Q&A session at Tech4Africa last month and the video is finally online. I hope she is not offended, but to me, the intro-video candid shot of her might have captured a beginning of her as a figure of African Mama scale-responsibility and stature in the Africa social entrepreneurship community. Just look into her face! In the video itself, she reflects honestly on her struggles and the details of starting a business working in Africa from a fresh Silicon Valley perspective.

For me, the presentation fondly recalls the December 2008 Appfrica‘s Facebook Developer Garage that I attended in Kampala when she had just begun her first collaborations. It was a frenetic co-demonstration with Charlie Cheever of the Facebook App Platform. The senior developer showed a hundred techie Ugandan university students how to start coding on Facebook apps in Makerere’s new technology hub building. Today, Leila is thinking about a much wider scale of social impact and has some real lessons to share. Charlie now heads Quora, a social questions startup and Facebook is a prime force in East Africa with mobile Facebook Zero (0.facebook.com) free through many carriers, substantial market penetration, and one of the very top internet brand standings.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

OpenMRS hackathon: a community profile

Published on 2010/8/22 in Coding, General and mHealth. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I spent the latter portion of this past week at the 2010 OpenMRS hackathon in Indianapolis, Indiana at UIPUI university getting an inside look at an effective Open Source ICT4D project. As a result of the gathering, I hope to contribute back some improvements to the software over the coming weeks. For the moment, I want to share details of their compelling project:

OpenMRS Hackathon at Regenstrief Institute

OpenMRS is a powerful electronic medical records (EMR) package used at hundreds of clinics around the world in about 46 developing countries.

The Open Source project was founded in 2006. For US readers, the highest profile user is likely Partners in Health. They apply it very actively as their ICT4D/mHealth solution in most of the countries they serve including Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Rwanda.  They also employ several full time Open Source contributors to the project.

Vibrant Open Source projects often draw from an eclectic variety of contributors. Given this, it is somehow not surprising that this kind of scheme can blossom with good software so effectively. Talent attracts talent. It seemed that each of the participant categories at the hackathon was represented by rockstar programmers that also had their MD’s.

The two-day event kicked off with the weekly developers’ screencast conference call. We had contributors from at least 3 continents represented on the line and another 20 developers in the room. Some 6 major contributors worked at the main Regenstrief Institute office above our venue. Another 3 worked for Partners in Health. There was an assortment of graduate students from nearby universities. On the phone, participants from the just-completed Google Summer of Code joined in (OpenMRS is one of the program’s top largest and longest-running projects).

The conference call itself opened slowly but soon we had contributors demoing slick integrations of SMS + website patient profile up on the large screen. The developer was able load a patient’s full record, including details of their participation in various programs and send them a relevant SMS reminder from the same page seamlessly. Responses from the patient were saved back to the patients record as an instant message log.

I should have more to say about the coding event over the coming days, for now I simply leave these impressions.

Enhanced by Zemanta