Full Circle Associates

As someone who works in international development, specifically with online interaction, this article, excerpted below by David Brake, caught my eye. It resonated. There is a conflict between what we imagine is possible and the embedded socio-political-economic situations. We must pay attention to these deeper levels.

How economics trumps 'Internet culture' in Africa

Ethan Zuckerman posts about a thought-provoking lecture by Guido Sohne on the limitations of open source development in Africa. It’s worth reading his whole post but I will just note that Guido suggests open source development is limited in Africa because African programmers are too busy trying to earn a basic living to donate their time to creating open source code. Similarly, providing free wireless Internet access as many are doing as a volunteer effort around the developed world is much more difficult when the cost of providing that access relative to income is much higher in Africa.

In other words a lot of the benevolence we often take for granted online and consider part of the Internet culture actually relies on a certain economic base where programmers have free time and energy to work on projects they consider worthwhile and bandwidth and computing resources are ‘too cheap to meter’.

For a more optimistic view check out Dan Gillmor’s eJournal - Open Source a No-Brainer for Developing World.