On Wednesday I have the pleasure of travelling to Accra, Ghana to run the GNOME booth at Idlelo 4, one of the largest Free/Libre and Open Source Software conferences in Africa.
A couple of years ago, I volunteered as an ICT Support Officer for 6 months in South-Western Uganda. Besides learning how to work with people from a different culture and coping with the unreliable infrastructure, I also found it challenging to work with mostly Windows based software. I had been working professionally with Linux (and to some extent with GNOME) for several years before I went to Uganda. Throughout my time there, I felt that many of the organisations that I worked with would have benefited from the advantages to using free/libre software but unfortunately none of them seemed too interested.
I was pretty excited when the opportunity to help GNOME have a presence at this conference came up. I’m really looking forward to sharing my experiences in Uganda and my thoughts on how using GNOME can help serve people in this region better than proprietary alternatives. I’m also going to be trying to show people that GNOME is a great community to work with at all levels – from developers and translators all the way up to users.
As part of the conference, I’ve been asked to sit on a panel about non-profit administration. Right now I don’t have any details about this session besides the title but I would really love to get poeple’s thoughts on the various kinds of GNOME software that could help with non-profit administration. I would like to present a community perspective along with my own perspective. Please comment on this blog post or send me an email (my first name <at> my domain name) if you have any thoughts to share.
Preparations for the trip have been going well. I’ve completed most of my pre-conference todo list:
- flight and hotel booked
- medical stuff sorted out
- valid visa in my passport
- CDs and stickers to hand out at the booth
- GNOME booth posters …
I printed the ‘Official Desktop of Happy People’ and the ‘Preferred Language? All of them’ posters on heavy duty vinyl and plan to send them to the North American GNOME event box when I’m back from Ghana.
I’m going to try to post updates and photos throughout the week and a half that I’m in Ghana. I’m not sure how good my internet access is going to be so things might be sporadic until I get back. Keep your eyes peeled! 
Posted in General
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Tagged FLOSS, Ghana, GNOME
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Billboard advertising the Nokia 1200 phone in the Kampala Taxi Park.
The Nokia 1200 and companion 1208 are good examples of technology that have been designed with the conditions of developing countries in mind. These phones both include an easily accessible flashlight (torch in British English), a long battery life and dust-proof buttons – all great features for dealing with unreliable power and unpaved streets.
Last week I attended the GNOME a11y hackfest at CSUN. Despite that I am no longer funded work on Caribou, I’m still glad I went. I was able to meet all of the other people working on GNOME accessibility in person which helps motivate me to continue to work on Caribou in my spare time.
One of the more difficult aspects of working on Free Software that targets people with mobility impairments is that there tends to be a big disconnect between developers of this software and potential users. Typically, Free Software projects are started to “scratch an itch” of the founding developers. That is, the projects usually solve a problem that the developers have and the developers themselves directly benefit from the software they create. As a developer of Free Software that targets users with mobility impairments, I don’t have the traditional motivation to produce the software because I don’t benefit directly from the software that I create. More importantly, because I don’t need to use Caribou to access my computer, I don’t have a good idea of how the users should interact with it or what features need to be included to make it useful.
I tried to address this issue a little by spending a couple of hours walking around the exhibition hall during my time at the conference. It was really nice to be able to see what commercial companies are doing to serve people in the same target group as Caribou. While I don’t think this is a substitution for including users in the various stages of development, it was still useful and definitely a step in the right direction in this area.
Over the course of the week, I spent a lot of time chatting with Flavio Percoco Premoli, the author and maintainer of MouseTrap. Soon after meeting, we realised that both Caribou and MouseTrap target the same users. We had lots of discussions about how we can make our software work well together. I’m really looking forward to working with Flavio on this.
On Friday afternoon, I had the pleasure of meeting the USC team that worked on Caribou for the SS12 coding competition. It was really great to meet the students after mentoring them during the competition at the beginning of the month. They’re a really inquisitive and smart bunch of people. They had loads of questions about Caribou and accessibility in general. I had a great time answering their questions and helping them clean up the patch they submitted as a result of the competition.
A big thanks to Eitan Isaacson for all his hard work in bringing this together. Another thanks goes out to the GNOME Foundation and Mozilla for providing the funds to make this happen. I hope we can do this again next year!
Posted in General
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Tagged a11y, GNOME
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Rural Uganda is infamous for unreliable power. Through the month of February 2008, power was on for about 40% of the time in Kabale. We would literally run to the power outlets when power came back so that we could charge our phones and laptops. If we really needed to get work done, we were forced to have an extended lunch at the Litte Ritz, the only restaurant in Kabale that had a generator. And there was usually some contention for the available outlets.
I got a little annoyed by this so I had a fellow volunteer bring me an auto adaptor for my laptop from Canada which would allow me to run the laptop from a car battery.
battery, charger and modem
I was able to rent a battery and home-made charger from Osman, one of the local mobile phone techs, for about 30 USD / month. Osman made me a connector for the laptop adaptor and for my fixed wireless terminal so I could use the internet when power was out. I could get full speed, about 16 Kb/s, when power was out because most of the internet cafes didn’t have generators. Once I had this setup, I was kinda happy when power was out – at least during the day 
workspace in Uganda
Posted in General
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Tagged Technology, Uganda
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