Last week, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) announced a new LPI certification and training project throughout the 22 countries in the League of Arab States. This is certainly good news for ICT capacity building in general and even more interesting for the community of ict@innovation, which has been building training capacities around Linux Administration in Africa […]
What the call is about: The German Government via its Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) released a call to fund research partnerships between German Research institutions and partners in Subsaharan Africa. One of the main goals is to build African ICT study courses and to fund exploratory measures / pilot measures in “Applied […]
Just got news about this years courses by the Free Technology Academy, which is a partner of http://www.ict-innovation.fossfa.net. See the following announcement: The Free Technology Academy expects to run two course modules for users and systems administrators who want to get started with GNU/Linux systems. Skills in this area are increasingly demanded and hard to […]
Two days ago, I met Prof. Michelis, who just published the second edition of this “Social Media Handbuch” (in German). Interesting book, with some good summaries on forward-looking issues such as “Commons-based peer production”, “Wisdom of the crowd” etc. Link to Book promotion – in German: http://www.nomos-shop.de/Michelis-Schildhauer-Social-Media-Handbuch/productview.aspx?product=14264
Interesting article on “Mobilizing Global Volunteers for Grassroots Innovations” in the online journal digital development debates. Also check my comment and related article on the “knowledge commons” and the “freedom to innovate“. Link: http://www.digital-development-debates.org/06-innovation/science-technology/mobilizing-global-volunteers-for-grassroots-innovations.html
Only one month to go before the “5th African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons” will start in Abuja, Nigeria. Idlelo is a conference organized by GIZ partner FOSSFA every two years to bring together the Open Source Community in Africa to share experiences and to network. Link: http://www.ict-innovation.fossfa.net/event/idlelo-5-5th-african-conference-open-source-and-digital-commons
This is an interesting call by the “Open African Innovation Research and Training” inititative, which is part of the GIZ commons@ip programme, which I run: “The Open A.I.R. initiative on the role of intellectual property (IP) in open development invites applications for a three- or six-month Research Fellowship to work in Cape Town, South Africa, […]
FYI – Interesting upcoming event on the knowledge commons: “1ST THEMATIC CONFERENCE ON THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS” -governing Pooled Knowledge Resources: Building Institutions for Sustainable Scientific, Cultural and Genetic Resource Commons. The call for papers is still open until 31. January 2012 … CONFERENCE TRACKS . Track 1 on “Scientific Research and Innovation Commons” . Track […]
UNCTAD just released their Information Economy Report 2011 focusing on the link between ICTs and private sector development. It also mentions our programm ict@innovation with FOSSFA (see section on “developing human resources” page 59). Check the: Information Economy Report 2011 – ICTs as an Enabler for Private Sector Development More Info on the site here:
Just released: an IT sector promotion manual and toolbox with many examples and tools pertaining to OpenIT@giz – Open Innovation for Development such as capacity building, open innovation methods, training-of-trainer networks in IT, Open Source etc. Check it out! BTW: It is drawing on the ict@innovation programme and other programmes described here). And for archival […]
“Free your IT Business in WEST Africa!” This was the motto of the first Training-of-Trainers of ict@innovation held in the West African region. Balthas Seibold and his colleagues Petra Hagemann & George Nyambuya officially welcomed more than 26 FOSS experts from Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Cameroon and Senegal, who engaged in 10 intense days of peer-discussions […]
The working group on ‘Promoting Innovation Systems’ of Germany’s development cooperation just published a documentation on “Strengthening Innovation Systems in the Context of Development Cooperation”. An article by Balthas Seibold gives an overview of the potential of open innovation for developing countries. Taking the capacity building programme commons@ip as an example, the paper enumerates important […]
So this is me at InWEnt’s first regional Alumni Conference for Southeast Asia in Hanoi, Vietnam. At the conference, I was acting as a moderator of a Workshop on “open source for healthcare” (Link now to latest version of page on the Internet Archive. Here’s a gist of the workshop as summarized back then: Free […]
This biennium’s Idlelo (four) conference on Open Source and the Digital Commons in Africa organized by FOSSFA had the theme of “Development with ownership” and took place in Accra, Ghana from 17.04-21.04. Balthas Seibold was there to launch with FOSSFA a training book resulting of the joint regional capacity building programme “ict@innovation – creating business […]
Germany’s international Development + Cooperation Journal just published an article by Balthas Seibold, which looks at open innovation and the knowledge commons in the framework of business development in developing countries. The piece argues, that innovation is key to private sector development, so stringent protection of intellectual property rights can hamper businesses in poor countries. […]