Windows, since the 1990s, has greatly relied on its huge and unavoidable market share and its network effect to make new users trained and familiar with its metaphors. Windows still has only a rudimentary plan to evolve. These new operating systems, in contrast, take advantage of progressing input technology to discard the original assumptions and draw users closer to the machine. They abstract away the gotchas that can, without training, clutter or interfere with common problem solving; fundamental things like saving, file organization, and mouse coordination. Forgetting to save is mitigated by removing save. A tower of babel of a folder hierarchy is flattened by search and ordered by task or sites. The touch interface deletes the mouse. Only the keyboard really remains unassailed.

If the new OSs’ revolution universally succeeds, then Windows may feel progressively less and less attractive as more and more of its founding metaphors are tossed off and deprecated. More importantly, computers and their designers are showing a new kind of egalitarianism that can accommodate new societies and groups adopting computers for increased productivity in ways that don’t presume an essentially top-down training model of adoption–more like mobile phones and Facebook. The best software has always been intuitively discoverable, now maybe the basic concepts can be too.

Related links

• How the iPad 2 will revolutionize classroom Education, Fast Company.
• Why I don’t care very much about tablets, Ars Technica
• From Filing Cabinets to Digital Thought, The Atlantic Tech

(excuse the title change and back again, WordPress client for iOS is quirky.)

To this end, (whether or not they realize it) it is customary for Peace Corps volunteer bloggers to post packing lists of things so that new Peace Corps invitees to those countries can get an idea of what might be useful in country. The common items on the lists are ridiculously intricate but eminently useful Western inventions like Leathermans and USB keys.

It is also often claimed that moving home to America after a two year experience is just as or more mind-bending as moving into your host country. This is nearly true. Last week was the third year “anniversary” from the date that our training group landed in Tanzania and 9 months since I boarded the plane to finally leave Tanzania. Leaving your PC site is a bittersweet stretch–it involve a lot of hard goodbyes and American life may still seem quite distant. In retrospect, my bag was not necessarily packed with things that would make me happy today. Here are some things that I wish I had brought with me from Tanzania now that I am sitting in the United States with time behind me:

• Favorite dog-eared local language (especially Swahili) dictionary(s) – There are few great Swahili dictionaries. One of the best is Baba Malaika’s Friendly Swahili Dictionary (refreshed in 2008, published for 20+ years). Unfortunately it is hard to find internationally. Forget quick-cheap Amazon purchase–It sells on ebay and used book sites for almost a hundred dollars. You may want this for a variety of reasons: 1) nostalgia for quirky sayings and proverbs–you probably know exactly where they are in that book. 2)  You may want to volunteer your translation skills. 3) you may want to communicate warmly with Host Country Nationals and just can’t remember that word.
• Peace Corps Cookbook - charming locally bound book that was oft-consulted in country. Good for your bookshelf’s character or an old favorite recipe still fondly remembered but only in the terms of you friendly jiko (brazier stove). It will give you a chance to rework the recipe for a grill.
• GSM SIM card with Phone numbers (you can read these with T-Mobile or AT&T phones) – Your phone is full of people and memories–its like your social network account for country except you can throw it away or have the sum of those connections lifted from your pocket if you are careless of that fact. (Granted, now it seems like so many of my Host Country friends now have Facebook too?). You will probably want to phone at least one friend or counterpart when you get home. But you probably also want to gift your phone to a worthy friend before you go. There is a good compromise: bring the chip home scotch taped to something rigid that you won’t lose. You can’t use the phone number in the US but with international telecommunications, having the numbers makes it easy to call anyway. T-Mobile outlets sells $20 locked phones which come bundled with some respectable amount of call time and can read these SIM cards.
• “Cultural Artifacts” – This one is personal. For me I wish I would have brought home: My three-legged stool and my cursed-ugly carved statue. Check wood items for termites. I did find travel-friendly versions of mortar & pestle, weathered hand-carved spoons for friends, unique Kanga garments that carry stories of special times or events. Election/political party oriented Kanga’s are excellent story-imbued carry-homes. I had a handkerchief from a wedding that had warm sayings painted in Swahili on it that I hadn’t thought twice about in country but was quite thankful I had packed.
• Picture of you at work. Don’t forget to have a picture of yourself in action at your site. Both of these last two can be key for “third goal” activities back on red-white-and-blue soil to help you bring the whole world that you left behind back home.

Above all, recall that as soon as you land in the impersonal US airport, anything you got in country is of a infinitely higher personal value than any Western items you carried into country. It is very easy here to go on Amazon and pick up a new backpack or even a laptop. As impossible to fathom as it may be, you can also probably drink most water after getting on the plane, so that closely held Nalgene need not be so anymore.

Related articles and links

• Congress approves Peace Corps, Sept. 22, 1961 (politico.com)
• Kevin Quigley: The Third Goal Is Our First Goal (huffingtonpost.com)
• Recently Returned RPCV mentoring (rpcvmentoring.org)

@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

• Tech For (And By) Africa (techcrunch.com)
• How Quora Is Trying to Build an Ideal Society (gigaom.com)
• How Samasource Helps The World, And A Secret Tattoo Unveiled (Video) (techcrunch.com)
• Tech4Africa: Building for a Global Technology Market in Africa (downtheavenue.com)

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.

Continuing from last week’s post on Primary initiatives in Tanzania with US corporations:

Secondary: Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (SEDP2) (pdf SEDP II overview) (home page)

This project, utilizing the business consulting expertise of Accenture, is still very much in the planning stages to discover the tools necessary to bring the next big jumpstart of quality for Tanzania’s high school/secondary education system. It may be funded by 450Mil grant similar to the SEDP from years past that drastically increased the number of secondary schools and secondary school enrollment.

Founding Ideas:

• Will work with 4,000 schools, and 1.5m secondary school students each year.
• Secondary Teachers can be more effective with laptop + inexpensive projector.
• Computers can be a platform for continuing education.
• Video and Distance eLearning might be used as a way to provide valuable, well-educated teachers with opportunities to live in desirable and well supported locales such as Dar Es Salaam but still reach the millions of rural students in remote areas with weaker infrastructure.
• Video may also allow fewer teachers to reach more students in fast-expanding areas like Dar Es Salaam.

Links:

• A more specific blog post by INGO collaborator NetHope.
• The Citizen: ICT Solution to 85,000 Dar Teacher Shortage News Release link (mirror)
• Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow Video

Post-Secondary: UDOM/University of Dodoma partners with IBM (link)

There are also the beginnings of parallel efforts to improve collaboration of new Tanzanian Universities with outside organizations. IBM has followed up on its initiative to send many of its Corporate Service Corps members to University of Dodoma over the last year with an agreement with Tri-Continental to help service the swiftly growing Dodoma University as it reaches for its 40,000 student goal, along with improvements which may be related to governance and the primary and secondary levels.

Speaking recently when presenting a paper at a training session in Dar es Salaam, IBM East Africa marketing and communications manager Maureen Muthua said the agreement between IBM and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training aimed at helping realise the government’s vision of building a ‘Silicon Valley’ type of environment around Dodoma University. (link)

This post continued from 3 Major Corporate ICT Collaborations at Each Education Level: Tanzania. Don’t miss the first page.

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• Engineering HELP in Africa: Left behind but thinking ahead (scientificamerican.com)