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What is Open Development?

I attribute the origin of the term Open Development to my former colleagues at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) who have taken it as a kind of unifying rubric for their work funding research into ICTs and development. They define Open Development as an emerging set of possibilities to catalyze positive change through open informationnetworked activities in international development. A fuller explanation can be found in the introductioni to the ITID Special Issue on Open Development (http://itidjournal.org/itid/issue/view/40).

The Digital Era and Intellectual Property

The growth of digital networks over the last 50 years has profoundly challenged our basic understanding of the nature of information and knowledge and their place in society and in commerce. Digital networks have facilitated the spread of ideas and led to a pace of innovation that is now bewildering fast. Today it's hard to think of an aspect of life that hasn't been transformed in some way by the digital world. In the pre-digital era, knowledge moved about so slowly that it was easy to misunderstand its fundamentally social nature. Organisations often made the mistake of confusing information, a knowledge by-product, with knowledge itself which is intrinsically connected with knowers i.e. people. The organisations most challenged by the digital world have been those that depend in some way on the control of information, whether text, audio, or video. Newspapers, libraries, music publishers, and movie makers, to name a few, have been profoundly challenged by the ease of replication and difficultly of controlling the spread of digital works. This has led to something of a stand-off between those who believe that that loss of that control is a good thing and those that believe it is a bad thing. On the one hand, there are interests protecting traditional information industries though intellectual property (IP) laws, especially copyrights and patents. They argue that the authors of new ideas and works have the right to have their ideas and works protected from exploitation. They are argue that the protection of intellectual property rights is fundamental to ensuring continued investment in research and innovation. They have a point. On the other hand, there are those who have experienced the power of collective contributions, collective scrutiny, and/or collective action via digital networks who recognise that small contributions when shared can become massive. They wonder how much we might achieve if we shared even more. They are sceptical of the individual nature of innovation and invention, choosing rather to believe that all creative works build on the past. They too have a point. Unfortunately the debate between these two perspectives does not occur on a level playing field. Interests that represent the status quo, namely industries that have become wealthy thanks to closed IP regimes, have a significant stake in maintaining and even increasing controls over intellectual property. Their wealth affords them the time and resources to influence political regimes and to defend their position in the courts.

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The Digital, the Developmental, and the Open

What relevance does this debate have to the developing world? The history of digital connectivity in the developing world is comparatively short. Until fairly recently the lack of communication infrastructure has limited the possibility of any digital services going to scale. As mobile networks and, more recently, broadband infrastructure have begun to spread throughout the developing world, there are signs of real impact occurring as a result of pervasive communication infrastructure. And where does the term open come into this? Integral to the phenomenally successful growth of the Internet have been the notion of open licenses and open standards. The GNU Public License was the first open license which stood traditional copyright on its head by entrenching the right to view, modify, and share modifications to software code among programmers and ensure that the results could not be closed again. This was the first serious leveraging of collective interest via digital media and its effect was profound. It enabled the building of a global distributed communication infrastructure which we know as the Internet. Just as important as the open license is the concept of open standards. An open standard is a clearly articulated, consensually agreed-upon description of how heterogeneous digital systems can productively interact with each other. An open standard can describe the format of a document or the way in which email is exchanged between servers. It can describe almost any digital interaction where multiple parties want the freedom to evolve their work but to ensure their ability to continue to inter-operate with other digital systems. An open standard in the digital world can be proposed by anyone. The success of an open standard is based on one metric: use. Useful standards get used. No one is compelled to use them. Internet standards are referred to by their RFC number. RFC stands for Request for Comment which implicitly recognises the evolving and consensual nature of Internet open standards. Open standards ensure interoperability without top-down control. These two concepts, open licenses and open standards, has been such a profound enabler of the growth of the Internet that it was inevitable that people would begin to apply the open paradigm to other fields. Soon open licenses began to migrate beyond software to all other kinds of content from the written word to photos to movies and beyond. In the last 15 years, it has become clear that distributed collective action can do what was previously unthinkable. Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) is perhaps the most famous example of this and has supplanted the most successful traditional encyclopedia in the world (Encyclopedia Britannica). When talking about open, innovation and the Internet, there is some confusion between open initiatives that use explicitly use open licenses as an alternative to traditional IP regimes (Open Source, Open Access, etc) and initiatives that focus on creating a more permeable membrane around organisations which facilitates the flow of ideas and innovation across organisations as a means of catalysing innovation. Crowdsourcing is an example the latter: open innovation. While crowd-sourcing is a collective approach to problem-solving there is no particular obligation that the results be shared as would be the case under an open license. The open nature of the Internet has meant that anyone possessed of sufficient technological understanding and comparatively modest resources can connect to the Internet. South Africa is

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an illustrative example. In 1989, while still under extensive international sanctions, academics at the University of Stellenbosch forged a digital link to the University of Oregon and suddenly South African universities were on the Internet. In spite of this, the growth of Internet access in Africa has been slow as challenges ranging from a lack basic access to power, to high communication access costs, to lack of human capacity to build and manage networks have slowed the pace of Internet growth.

The Mobile Miracle

Standing in stark contrast to the open manner in which the Internet has evolved are mobile phone networks. The high level of investment involved in setting up a mobile phone network and more recently the scarcity of available licensed spectrum have set up high barriers to participation in mobile infrastructure markets. The result has been the creation of walled gardens by mobile operators which restrain competition and consumer choice. This constrained environment has stifled innovation and kept prices artificially high for users of these networks. Yet, mobile networks have grown faster in the developing world than the Internet grew in the industrialised world. Part of this can be explained by the fact that mobile technology is better adapted to regions without other well-developed infrastructure, by the evolution of innovative pay-as-you-go services, and by communication technologies simultaneously becoming more powerful and less expensive. This is a powerful counter-example to the open example of Internet infrastructure growth. In Africa, mobile operators have arguedii that the lucrative profits they make are necessary to subsidise the roll-out of infrastructure in under-serviced areas that would otherwise be economically non-viable. Researchers have produced evidence to the contraryiii but the fact remains that mobile networks in the developing world remain an extraordinary proprietary success story.

Connectedness and Generativity: Openness versus Price

Another way of looking at the role of open in development is to examine barriers to participation. Digital connectedness facilitates human communication. Sometimes that communication can be informal in the form of conversations, ideas, etc., and sometimes more formal through published works which are governed under intellectual property laws. Because the cost of digital reproduction is close to zero and because the reach of the digital world has expanded so dramatically, it becomes increasingly challenging to apply the notion of property in its traditional sense to digital works. When Thomas Jefferson said Knowledge is like a candle. When you light your candle from mine, my light is not diminished, it is hard to imagine that he had an inkling of the billions of potential candles that could be lit by one bright spark via the Internet. The term 'open' has become so powerful because of the millions of individual thinkers and actors at the end of every Internet connection. Open approaches to development whether through
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explicitly open approaches to intellectual property, or more generically through collective contributions and action, open opportunities to tap into human potential in ways that until a few years ago were inconceivable. Yet, understanding and measuring the value of open is extremely challenging. Measuring the impact of open is complex even in traditional settings. Digital goods can have several functions simultaneously. For example, a piece of Open Source software can simultaneously be a source of revenue for consultants, a platform for others to build on, a tool that can solve the same problem in multiple locations simultaneously, a learning environment, a focal point for community, the underpinning of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) industries and/or the basis for other commercial software. The deep value of being connected to a digital network is generativity. The more ideas and innovations people are exposed to the more learning and the more potential for new ideas and innovations to emerge. Yet,it is over simplistic to say that the more open a network is, the more generative it is. Something can be free and open but if the cost of accessing via a digital network is too high then any generative value of openness is lost. A digital service may be completely closed from a traditional Open Source point of view but if access to the service is very low cost and the extent of the network reach is large enough (think Facebook, Twitter, Gmail) then it may still constitute a generative environment. For example, Facebook is a wellknown for its walled-garden approach to its network but because the transaction cost of accessing it is so low and its network reach so pervasive, it was able to play a powerful generative role in the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt. This is not to paint Facebook as an ideal environment for generativity but rather to point out that when the transaction cost of human communication is low enough, generativity happens but at a social level not a code level.

Layers of Openness
It is worth exploring the idea of layers of openness. The Internet is built on a layered model. The OSI Modeliv separates aspects of connectivity into layers so that parts of the access infrastructure can evolve or change without affecting the overall connectivity. Thus, it doesn't matter whether you are connected to the Internet via a copper wire, a fibre optic cable, or a wireless connection as that physical layer of connectivity is independent of the other functional aspects of connectivity such as error correction, encryption, web servers, VoIP, etc. The next layer up from the physical infrastructure of the Internet which manages the flow of bits from one place to another is unconcerned with the underlying physical technologies. Similarly, applications on the Internet such as web servers are unconcerned with the underlying routing of digital traffic on the Internet. Finally people are generally unconcerned about what applications they use as long as they are able to share knowledge effectively with others. It might be an interesting framework of analysis to examine generativity and the importance of openness from a layered perspective. Inspired by the OSI model, perhaps one might develop a layered model for openness.

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Physical Access to Spectrum, Open Access to Fibre Backones, Access etc Transport Open versus closed networks, censorship, walled gardens, interconnection fees, etc. Platforms Availability of the building blocks of the Internet, web servers, programming and scripting languages, etc. Applications Availability of easy to adapt tools such as blogs, social sites, etc. People general availability of human communication and networking tools

Research Possibilities Exploring the Dimensions of Open

The very nature of open implies multi-dimensionality and no one research strategy is likely to embrace the many aspects of Open Development. The following represent some lenses through which we might look at the impact of open networks and applications in the developing world. There is necessarily some overlap among the lenses listed below but each represents a unique aspect of open worth exploring. At the moment, only Option 1 Open Platforms is being proposed as an immediately viable research initiative. The subsequent options are still of interest but require further development.

1) Open Platforms Tides that Raise All Ships

Building on the notion of a layered analysis of open, perhaps one of the most important areas of to explore is the platform layer, that is open technologies that facilitate the creation of new technologies. For example, while the web servers and the web scripting languages are not intrinsically useful to the average person, they are fundamentally powerful tools for creating unique tools and resources for organisations and individuals. Platform tools are generative in a unique manner in that they can enable an entire industry. One can see in the graph to the right the consistent popularity of the openly licensed Apache web server over a Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains - August 1995 - December 2011 Source: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2011/12/09/december-2011-web-server15 year period. The impact of survey.html
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platform tools can be hard to measure though because their effects are so fundamental that value can only inferred from markets enabled by them. Other examples of open platform tools are the many web-scripting languages such as PHP and others and, more recently, web frameworks such as Ruby-on-Rails, Django et al as well as popular blogging and content management systems such as Wordpress and Drupal. An Africa-specific example of an Open Source platform application is OpenMRS (http://www.openmrs.org), a collaborative open source project to develop software to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. Avenues for Exploration It would be challenging to evaluate the impact of most platform tools simply because they are so pervasive and non-exclusive. There are few instances where one can say that a particular digital platform is used here but not there. However, OpenMRS may offer a unique opportunity to examine the impact of an Open Source platform for a few reasons: a) It is relatively young. At seven years old, it is possible to chart the entire history of OpenMRS in some detail; b) It is developing-country specific. OpenMRS was created to specifically address a developing country challenge; c) It has commercial alternatives. OpenMRS is a FLOSS alternative to commercial medical record systems which can offer comparative benchmarks on a variety of levels from performance to financial to systemic; and, d) At a country level, there are countries where OpenMRS has been implemented and countries that have no instances of OpenMRS. The above opens the possibility of making a reasonable comparison of OpenMRS implementations versus other approaches. Perhaps more ambitiously, it could be used to examine links to health policy and general health information ecosystems in countries where OpenMRS has been implemented versus non-implementing countries. Research Summary An Open Source platform like OpenMRS offers an alternative approach to innovation, capacitybuilding, learning, and sustainability than that of commercial software platforms. OpenMRS may have the potential to be the Apache web server of the electronic medical record industry but issues of sustainability, competitiveness, and ecosystem are not well understood. This research would attempt to compare and contrast Open Source and proprietary approaches with the intention of better understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each. Projects to Investigate Carry out a comparative analysis of three different Medical Record System implementations. 1. Open Source System OpenMRS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMRS): A collaborative open source project to develop software to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. It
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would be possible to choose one or more of the lead implementation countries for OpenMRS. A case study could be chosen from Rwanda, Kenya, Haiti, or Pakistan. 2. Publicly-Funded Proprietary System SmartCare (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartCare): An electronic health record system (EHR) developed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Zambia in collaboration with the Ministry of Health (MOH) Zambia and other implementing partners. This is an example of a publicly-funded (PEPFAR, CDC, et al) yet proprietary medical record system. 3. Commercial Proprietary System Meditech (http://www.meditech.co.za/): A comprehensive and integrated Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that can be adapted to a variety of medical management needs. Meditech South Africa is a subsidiary of Meditech, a Boston-based privately-held company. Meditech's deployments in Kwa-Zulu Natal and/or Botswana could be used. Analysis Perspectives Financial Analysis Claims that Open Source software is cheaper than commercial software have been challenged in the past by commercial software providers who have argued that the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of Open Source software is higher than that of commercial software. The lack of a single standard methodology for measuring TCO has meant that the results of TCO analyses have been quite varied. Thus this debate remains largely unresolved. However, this is still an important point of investigation for an initiative such as OpenMRS and there are useful methodologies to draw on such as this TCO-Model approach developed by the Swiss governmentv. An investigation should then calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of each three implementations over a 5 year period using a recognised TCO methodology, including: key system differentiators hardware and software costs cost of customisation support and capacity-building costs hidden costs reliability and risks security There may be some challenges in comparing publicly funded projects and commercial software. It could be argued that publicly funded software, such as the case of the CDC medical record project in Zambia, is all customisation since the software was purpose-built for the application. Nevertheless it is likely that a rationally justified line in the sand may be drawn for each project. Innovation Analysis Arguably more important and generally under-examined is the role that each software system plays in catalysing innovation, learning, and growth in the social and economic ecosystem in
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which they operate. To what extent do these systems: facilitate replication? act as a platform for new products? build capacity of implementers and users? stimulate innovation? embrace collaboration? encourage standards? cultivate sustainability? produce unexpected benefits?

This part of the research would examine the innovation ecosystem around each of the MRS platforms used. Determine the extent to which they have enabled new businesses, innovations, capabilities. Using a exponential discriminative snowball samplingvi methodology, researchers would begin by interviewing the person(s) principally responsible for the overall strategic development of the software with a structured set of questions designed to elicit the positive outcomes listed above. Each interviewee would then would be asked to name five people who most exemplify some of the positive outcomes described above. These fifteen people would be interviewed in a similar manner. These too would be asked to identify five people who exemplify the above criteria although it is likely that a subset of these selected people will be required to round out the analysis of each project. These interviews should provide a rich comparative base to explore the strengths and weaknesses of the three approaches. Learning and Empowerment Analysis Estimate the extent to which each implementation fostered an ecosystem of learning around which the capacity to strategically implement a medical record system. Carry out an analysis of the learning and support community created by OpenMRS including Google Summer of Code, online communities, problem-solving, etc. as compared with Smartcare and Meditech. Embed research questions in econometric research above designed to elicit sense of ownership and commitment that project owners feel towards their medical record system implementation.

Comments The field of electronic medical records in the developing world is necessarily constrained but it is the constrained nature of the sector that offers hope of an effective comparative analysis between open and proprietary approaches. As an Open Source initiative, OpenMRS has grown dramatically since its humble beginning in Eldoret, Kenya. Yet, proprietary medical record systems continue to thrive as well. This research will explore the full value chain of both approaches and produce a deeper understanding of the impact of open versus proprietary which should inform policy-makers, health system professionals, and entrepreneurs alike.

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2) Diversity, Complexity, and the Adjacent Possible

There is a growing body of researchvii related to innovation that tells a radically different story about the sources of innovation and how to cultivate innovation. Gone is the notion of the lone genius receiving divine inspiration via an apple falling on the head or similar. What we now understand about innovation is that it is unpredictable and non-linear. Innovations emerge out of fertile ecosystems that increase the potential for new concepts and approaches to occur. This picture of innovation is much more closely aligned with how we understand the natural world and evolution. Seeing our social and economic environments as complex, evolving systems helps us appreciate the fundamental unpredictability of the world we live in as well as the way in which we might cultivate rich ecosystems of social and economic growth. Complexity theorist, Stuart Kauffman, has developed a concept he calls the 'Adjacent Possible' which describes the evolutionary environment we live in and the number of possible innovations that can occur based on the existing environment. As an example, with the invention of the automobile, petrol stations, mechanics, car washes, drive-thrus all become adjacent possible innovations. None of these innovations could reasonably exist without the automobile. Similarly there are many non-adjacent innovations in the same space. In 1910, a self-driving car was not an adjacent possible technology because no computing and sensing technologies existed that could allow the a self-driving car to success. Today with the creation of these technologies, selfdriving cars are moving into the realm of the adjacent possible. Thus it is possible to see our social and economic space as a range of concepts or products that can be recombined to create new value. Economist Paul Romer defines economic growth as occurring whenever people take resources and rearrange them in ways that make them more valuable. A useful metaphor for production in an economy comes from the kitchen. To create valuable final products, we mix inexpensive ingredients together according to a recipe.viii However, what Romer doesn't mention is that what increases our ability to make new recipes is the range or diversity of ingredients that we have access to. And it is the issue of diversity that is picked up by economists Ricardo Hausmann and Cesar Hidalgo who argue that diversity is essential to economic growthix. Building on Kauffmans concept of the adjacent-possible, they have come up with a methodology for calculating the economic diversity in a given country or region. They treat economies as a collection of capabilities. These capabilities might be specific like technology manufacturing capacity or legal/political such as regulatory regimes or systems such as road or postal networks. They are the collection of capabilities that enable new capabilities (the adjacent possible) to emerge. Hausmann and Hidalgo have developed a methodology for mapping this collection of capabilities which they call a product space. They have been able to establish a correlation of between product space complexity and wealth. Economies with more complex product spaces tend to be wealthier. And indeed complexity turns out to be a good predictor of growth. They have been able to accurately predict rapid growth for economies that have complex product spaces but are not comparatively wealthy.

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There is a small but growing recognition from development professionals. Economists from Harvard University, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) have joined Stuart Kauffman in calling for recognition of the importance of diversity and generativity in developing economiesx. This is a very broad and challenging question that naturally extends well beyond ICTs and development. However, generativity is central to the current debate around Internet protocols and standards and is recognised as a core element of open networks and tools. Having seen the catalytic power of communication networks, is it possible to interrogate the role of open networks and technologies in increasing diversity and generativity in developing country economies. Hausmann and Hidalgo have developed a useful proxy for understanding diversity in countries by contrasting the number of exports in a given country with the relatively ubiquity of product. They use scarcity of a product as a proxy indicator of the complexity of the product itself. Avenues for exploration There is an interesting research analogy to explore here in the context of ICTs and Development. Traditional macro analyses of the impact of ICT infrastructure have tended to focus on penetration as a correlate of GDP growth. It would be interesting to explore whether there is something that can be said about ICT diversity as an indicator of growth. In particular, it would be interesting to contrast the impressive growth in Kenya's ICT sectorxi (see graph at right) both internally in comparison with other sector as well as with other economies in sub-Saharan Africa. The challenge in pursuing this angle of inquiry would be to find a useful metric to measure digital diversity. Hausmann and Hidalgo's use of exports as a proxy indicator allowed them to avoid the thornier question of what diversity is specifically made up of. In their analysis it is simply all that it takes to produce a product for export. I've tried but haven't yet come up with a fruitful angle of inquiry into this.

Sector growth in Kenya (2000-2009) Source: http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/learning-froma-kenyan-revolution

It is possible that one might develop an ICT diversity framework against which one might come up with an aggregate score for the ICT sector but I fear that this would end up being too subjective as a lens for analysis. My instinct is there is some interesting avenue of exploration along the lines of diversity and also density of connections that might produce some interesting insights but I haven't worked out where a suitable data or proxy data might be found.

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3) Personal Digital Empowerment

One of the defining characteristics of digital networks is near infinite replicability of data at approaching zero cost. One of the things that this has meant in the developing world is access to powerful digital tools at very low cost. Here I am referring to personal online productivity tools. Examples of personal digital tools, all of which assumes computer and network access, include email, web browsing, blogging or simple website software, page layout software, and digital photo editing tools. While access to the Internet has been limited in the developing world, there has been an early generation of Internet-savvy designers, bloggers, and networkers whose lives were transformed by ICTs and who in turn facilitated the transformation of their societies and economies. These early adopters who typically came from privileged environments have become today's influential technorati providing leadership and influencing a new generation of budding writers, entrepreneurs, and politicians. Avenues for exploration Is it possible to explore the extent to which ICTs assisted an early elite of users in developing countries who became champions and leaders as ICT infrastructure spread? Ory Okolloh, now head of Policy and Government Relations for Google in Sub-Saharan Africa rose to prominence 10 years earlier as a blogger, online advocate, and founder of Ushahidi, an online, Open Source, crisis monitoring tool. Would be possible to examine the role of ICTS in the rise of a new generation of thought leaders from developing countries? Did access to affordable or free Internet services such as blogging tools provide them with a voice that they might not otherwise have had?

4) Open Standards Small Pieces Loosely Joined

Open Standards are at the heart of the design of the Internet. They are publicly available, transparent, royalty-free, non-discriminatory, extensible definitions of how technology should inter-operatexii. In the domain of ICTs, this can refer to everything from web pages to wireless signals, from email transmission to document formats. Open Standards facilitate layer separation on the Internet and allow platforms, tools, applications to work together without being dependent on each other. This is a fundamentally powerful concept that allows the Internet to evolve in a massively parallel manner. Open Standards allow commercial and Open Source applications to comfortably co-exist. As long as they communicate with each other via the Open Standard, they have no need to know anything about the deep functioning of their respective applications. Open Standards facilitate an evolutionary landscape for software allowing the most effective software that conforms to an Open Standard to achieve pre-eminence. Similarly Open Standards themselves operate in an evolutionary landscape as use of Open Standards entirely dependent on the functionality and utility of the standard to developers. Useful standards are adopted, maintained and extended whereas less useful ones atrophy and fall away. Avenues for Exploration
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Are there cases where Open Standards have had a significant impact in the developing world? It is of course possible to look at the general suite of Open Standards around the Internet and look at its growth but this is too high a level of analysis to tell us anything useful. Possible standards for exploration: GSM versus CDMA in wireless networks Closed versus open messaging networks (BBM, Facebook, Twitter, SMS, etc) Document formats PDF, MSWord, ODF, etc Standards for data communication setup on 3G phones. Cheap chinese phones don't work out of the box but more expensive phones do, better supported by the operators. Points to a lack of standard for 3G connectivity.

5) View Source The Power of Seeing How Things Work

One of the most powerful yet underacknowledged features of every modern web browser is the View Source command that reveals the underlying code which renders the web page that is being viewed. All web developers learn and develop their skills by using this simple but powerful function. The ability to see how things are put together opens up the adjacent possible for new variations and improvements. One can see the power of the View Source in the evolution of mobile phone operating systems where Open Source Android operating system historically closed operating systems such as Nokia's Symbian and Apple's iOS. One can see in the chartxiii to the right just how meteoric Android success has been. However, it can be argued that Apple's iOS operating system is something of a counter-factual given its enormous early success and that it can be largely credited with catalysing the modern smartphone industry. Maker culture is also dependent on the concept of View Source. The ability to see how something has been put together opens up possibilities for adaptation. Unfortunately digitallypowered maker culture is still embryonic in the developing world although many maker equivalents have been around in developing countries for years. From the South African n Boer maak n plan to the Indian concept of jugaad, the sense of self-reliance by solving problems with what you have is deeply embedded in the developing world. Avenues for Exploration Smartphones currently still only represent a tiny fraction of the the number of mobile phones in

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the market so it would be difficult to estimate an impact in the developing world of the Android OS. Equally there are many open aspects to Android beyond the power of View Source. In South Africa there has been significant development of value-added industries where entrepreneurs have taken Open Source applications such as Wordpress, Drupal, and others and adapted them for clients. The ability to View Source has been fundamental to the development of this market. One might also credit the early growth of the ISP industry in many developing countries to the power of View Source where new ISPs could emulate larger and more well-established ISPs in the industrialised world by viewing and adapting standard configurations for Open Source tools.

6) Piracy Priming the Pump

There is considerable debate as to whether digital piracy constitutes a net negative or positive in terms of overall development of an industry. Ignoring or outright circumventing intellectual property rights constraints on digital media can have a capacity-building effect that might otherwise not be possible. In the industrialised world widespread piracy of expensive applications like Photoshop directly contributed to graphic designers developing capacity and skills. It has been argued that is also has the impact of entrenching Photoshop as the de facto industry standardxiv. There are many other cases of digital piracy having beneficial outcomes. Brazilian author Paolo Coelho famously leaked the Russian version of his book The Alchemist, on to the Internet which he claims led to a dramatic increase in salesxv. What does digital piracy have to do with open? It relates specifically to the role of price as a barrier to generativity. Avenues for Exploration In the developing world, one might look at markets where piracy has been rife and examine the impact of that piracy. Examples that come to mind are the technobrega music industry in Brazilxvi and the movie industry in Nigeria (Nollywood). Evidence from Nigerian film producersxvii indicate that piracy is a two-edged sword providing much need exposure and reputation and creating an ecosystem of film production at the same time obviously reducing revenue earned from sales. It seems likely that piracy can help kickstart capacities whether in music or film or in pharmaceutical industries. An interesting avenue of exploration might be to look at changing attitudes to piracy as markets move from infancy to maturity.

7) Capacity Development Community Learning in Open Source

A difficult to quantify aspect of Open Source culture is the tacit capacity-building that goes on in a within a community where everything is shared. The absence of transaction cost means that problems can be shared community and solved collectively. Perhaps most importantly new members of the community have the opportunities to observe problems being solved by more experienced community members.
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This concept is not particularly new. The concept of Communities of Practice was developed by Etienne Wenger and has since become entrenched in the framework of corporate knowledge management good practice. However, Open Source communities share the benefit of being able to share a common code base allowing for very deep knowledge sharing and skills development. A particularly power example of this has been the African Network Operators Group (AFNOG http://afnog.org) is a community of technical operators of Internet networks in Africa. The community exists to share knowledge and to build technical capacity across the continent. The group, founded in 2000, meets annually to share knowledge and carry out workshops and training for people new to the field. They represent a powerful professional association that are enabled through open licenses and open standards to share knowledge freely, problem-solve, and support each other. Another more recent example is the Information and Communication Technologies for Community Health Workers (ICT4CHW) Google groupxviii which is a remarkable community of technical experts from with the field of community health work who are pioneering new technologies to facilitate community health services. They don't have the same level of organisation as AFNOG but are another remarkable example of knowledge sharing particular in the application of Open Source mobile tools for data collection and dissemination. Avenues for Exploration An interesting research avenue to pursue here would be to carry out some longitudinal studies of community members who have been enabled through their membership of these digital Open Source communities.

8) Crowdsourcing and the Power of Large Numbers

The power of collective action has tremendous possibilities but we have seen only small examples in the developing world. The MapKibera (http://mapkibera.org/) project is one. In November 2009, young people from Kibera, a slum on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya, created the first free and open digital map of their own community. This is a great example of the power of collective action to do something that would be impossible for one person to achieve. Going further, one can look beyond generic crowdsourcing such as the MapKibera project above to initiatives like TxtEaglexix (http://www.txteagle.com/) which leverages the mathematics of big numbers. TxtEagle crowd-sources work that can be carried out on mobile phones by paying workers in airtime. The vast amounts of data they collect allows them to do extremely accurate text translations and consumer analysis. None of this would be possible without vast numbers of connected mobile users. Is this Open Development? It is hard to say but it is clear that vast numbers of connected people in the developing world are creating new opportunities which are changing how we understand the importance of connectedness. Avenues for Exploration This is an area to watch for the future.
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iv v vi vii viii ix x xi xii xiii xiv xv xvi xvii xviii xix

Open Development: A New Theory for ICT4D - Matthew L. Smith, Laurent Elder, Heloise Emdon http://itidjournal.org/itid/article/viewFile/692/290 Vodacom warns against 'a dramatic reduction of charges http://mybroadband.co.za/news/business/9988-vodacom-warns-against-a-dramatic-reduction-ofcharges.html 13 Oct 2009 (Accessed on 18 Dec 2011) Mobile Termination Benchmarking: The Case of Namibia - Christoph Stork - Towards Evidence-based ICT Policy and Regulation Volume TWO - Policy Paper 3 2010 http://www.researchictafrica.net/publications/Policy_Paper_Series_Towards_Evidencebased_ICT_Policy_and_Regulation_-_Volume_2/Vol%202%20Paper%203%20-%20Mobile%20Termination %20Benchmarking%20-%20the%20case%20of%20Namibia.pdf OSI Model - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model TCO-model and TCO-tool are part of the implementation of the OSS-Strategy of the Swiss Government. http://www.tcotool.org/index_en.html Snowball Sampling Experimental Resources - http://www.experiment-resources.com/snowballsampling.html Reference Stuart Kauffman, Tim Harford, Steven Johnson, Eric Beinhocker Paul Romer http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/EconomicGrowth.html The building blocks of economic complexity - Cesar A. Hidalgo and Ricardo Hausmann - PNAS June 30, 2009 vol. 106 no. 26 NPR - Beyond The 'Washington Consensus:' Economic Webs And Growth http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2010/01/beyond_the_washington_consensu.html Learning from a Kenyan revolution - Wolgang Fengler - 2011-11-28 http://blogs.worldbank.org/africacan/learning-from-a-kenyan-revolution The Wikipedia entry for Open Standards illustrates that there is some variance in the details of what is an Open Standard - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_standard Business Insider Chart of the Day - http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-android-is-takingover-the-smartphone-market-2011-11 Adobe Logic - http://piracy.ssrc.org/adobe-logic/ CNN Money - Author Paulo Coelho's profitable Net obsession 1 Feb 2008 http://money.cnn.com/2008/02/01/technology/kirkpatrick_coehlo.fortune/index.htm Tacky and Proud: Exploring Tecnobregas Value Network - Ana Domb Krauskopf http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com/images/C3TecnobregaWhitePaper.pdf African Economic Forum 2011 - http://africanspotlight.com/2011/04/african-economic-forum-2011/ ICT4CHW Google Group - http://groups.google.com/group/ict4chw TxtEagle is now JANA.

Apologies for the complete absence of any sort of consistent endnote formatting. To be corrected.