I am super-happy, that the Agence Française de Développement (AFD) through Jan Krewer has managed to shed some light on a crucially under-researched topic: How are digital commons in Sub- Saharan Africa doing? Which resources are governed through a commons-approach on the continent? How important are they and how are their communities functioning? Although the […]
So you would like to build a software system for a project of development cooperation and you consider using “Free and open source software (FOSS)”? Good choice, as going open source will offer you a highly sustainable and cost-effective way of developing these systems. See also my think-piece on the “why development cooperation should use […]
I just updated the “Compendium of hubs for commons-based peer production 4Dev”, which is hosted on this site. By adding the “Low-tech Lab”, I now count fourteen hubs and repositories. If you are aware of any other hub, please let me know. Check out the compendium here.
Researcher Evangelos Papadimitropoulos just published a cool article that sums up and puts into perspective some of the emerging schools of thought on commons-based peer production (cbpp). Fresh hot off the (virtual) press, it also presents a pretty comprehensive and up-to-date list of references. I recommend the article to everyone interested in getting beyond the basics […]
I report here about one of my favorite sessions at re:publica 2018, which was on „Crisis response makerspaces“. I finally had the opportunity to meet Susan Long, innovation adviser at Field Ready in Syria and Bahar Kumar, strategic adviser at Nepal Communitere. Both stressed the need to „be locally grounded“ and to build strong communities […]
Roy Mwangi Ombatti started to tinker with 3D-printing in Nairobi, Kenya more than three years ago. He co-founded and led the Nairobi FabLab Robotics Outreach Program, he produces 3D printers from waste materials, became a Stanford Fablearn Fellow 2014 and he developed a successful low-cost solution to a pressing health problem (his project ‘Happy Feet’ […]
Open innovation – often based on open licensing and commons-approaches – is changing the business models of more and more businesses and social institutions. Before the advent of open innovation, innovation was kept within the boundaries of the firm (or research institution). In contrast, “Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and […]
Yesterday, I tried to put the future of „global networking for international cooperation“ in one slide – looking five to ten years ahead. My first problem was to find a name for the future. I ended up with „Amorphous action communities for open innovation and [commons-based] peer production (globally connected, innovating locally)“. Then, I outlined […]
What do the problems of climate change, global access to affordable medicine and software, food security, and crop availability for poor farmers have in common? In all of these fields, more and more people are looking at how a collective building and owning of key knowledge can help solve protracted global problems. A global core […]
Just found an interesting TV show on “African Innovation” aired by Al Jazeera three days ago. They make several points e.g: ” Across Africa, developers and programmers are coming up with new technologies from mobile banking to mapping software and medical tablets to cloud storage. Now the continent is increasingly relying on its own homegrown […]
“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 […]
While most technology conferences happen as swanky, slick, and well-rehearsed events, the recently concluded Asia Source 3 took the opposite track and ran a camp that was spartan yet spontaneous. From November 7 to 12, 2009, Asia Source 3 gathered 150 representatives from Southeast Asia to discuss developments in open source. For those six days, […]