Summary

The Meraka Open Source Centre (OSC) of South Africa is charged with the mission of stimulating the adoption of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) on the African continent and harnessing FOSS to empower the people of the South to contribute to economic development and improving the quality of life. Towards this end, it has embarked on a series of projects and activities to advocate FOSS, facilitate project work on various FOSS initiatives and help empower users and producers of FOSS with access to courseware and certification.

Some of the projects and activities of the OSC have attracted national and worldwide attention. The "Go-Open Source" campaign of the OSC that has been successfully completed was spread over two years and it involved creating awareness about FOSS by making use of the electronic and Internet media. This campaign had several novel projects under it, notably the popular "Go Open" TV series, a world-first for FOSS, and the Geek Freedom League project that signed up volunteers and provided them with materials to help them introduce FOSS to friends and colleagues. The OSC is responsible for the development and maintenance of the Government website that houses the documents and other resources pertaining to the South African government's FOSS strategy and policy that has attracted considerable worldwide interest. Other important government-related FOSS activities carried out by the OSC include the setting up of a web-accessible registry of initiatives, projects and parties associated with FOSS (the GOSSIP project) and the formulation of project plans and strategies to assist government agencies and bodies to migrate to FOSS. The OSC is also assisting the Translate.org.za project, which is involved in the localization of several widely-used FOSS desktop packages to the South African official languages.

The OSC is now an entity within the Meraka Institute (African Advanced Institute for Information and Communications Technology) with an expanded research and development programme. It also carries out activities to engage and forge links with other countries. The projects and activities of the OSC have brought about an increase in awareness of FOSS and the benefits that it may bring to developing economies like South Africa; impacting both the public and private sectors as well as the general public.
Background of Organization

The Meraka Open Source Centre was established by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and the Department of Science and Technology of South Africa. It is part of the Meraka Institute and it plays a key role in the implementation and realization of the FOSS strategy of South Africa.

The vision of the OSC is to promote empowerment of the people through appropriate FOSS interventions. It sees its mission as playing an enabling role aimed at stimulating the adoption of FOSS on the African continent and beyond, and harnessing FOSS to empower the people of the South to contribute to economic development and improving the quality of life. With this mission, the Centre works together with other organizations to achieve these aims.

The Centre has five full-time employees while the Meraka Institute has about 65 staff members.

Objectives of Project

The OSC aims to significantly amplify the beneficial impact of FOSS and seeks to align FOSS with South Africa's national objectives. These objectives include increasing investment in the country; creating a more competitive economy, taking into account the speed and extent of globalization brought about by developments in information and communications technology (ICT); broadening participation in the economy, particularly amongst the poorest of the poor; building a better world; and improving the capacity of the state to deliver on its mandate. The Centre works towards utilizing FOSS and its ideology to help realize these national objectives.

The OSC seeks to make an impact in South Africa and Africa as a whole, while contributing to similar efforts in other parts of the world. It is therefore targeting all sectors of society through various programmes aimed at making an impact on specific stakeholder groupings.

To fulfil its mission the OSC works with various organizations both within South Africa and Africa as well as throughout the world. These include South African government bodies like the CSIR, local and national government agencies, and international NGOs like the Open Society Initiative and the Shuttleworth Foundation. It has also formed international partnerships with countries like Brazil, China, European Union, Finland, India, as well as organizations like the Free/Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), the Wikimedia Foundation, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and various other United Nations agencies.

FOSS Application

Description

The role of the Centre is to promote FOSS. As such it does not promote a particular FOSS application but rather it makes use of various FOSS applications itself (the Meraka Institute and CSIR also use FOSS). Within the OSC office, stable and established desktop and web FOSS applications are used on a daily basis and the testing of newly developed ones are carried out as well. The FOSS desktop used include various distributions of GNU/Linux like Impi/Ubuntu, Suse and Mandrake. Office application suites used include OpenOffice.org and some KOffice. On the server side, applications built using GNU/Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl (the LAMP stack) is used.

The projects and initiatives of OSC can be classified under three main categories:

• OpenSpeak - this is concerned with advocacy and establishing a network of FOSS players in the public, private and civil sectors.
• OpenProject - this is concerned with enabling access to FOSS applications and encouraging and providing the catalyst and environment to facilitate project work on various FOSS initiatives.
• OpenMentor - this is concerned with empowering users and producers of FOSS with knowledge addressing skills gaps, facilitating access to courseware and lowering barriers to certification.

A listing of some of the projects carried out by the OSC is given under the Deployment Section of this case study.

Choice of FOSS

FOSS is used by the OSC and the organizations that it serves as it is a body set up to encourage and promote the adoption and usage of FOSS in the country and Africa in general. FOSS is seen as a means to empower the people of the developing countries so that economic development and a better quality of life can be achieved.

Implementation and Deployment

Given the nature of the OSC and the network it is serving, the systems deployed cannot be quantified. The efforts of the OSC to promote and help other organizations use FOSS are ongoing. The CSIR itself is in the process of migrating to FOSS. The South African government, many academic institutions, civil society, a number of industry players as well as other sectors of society are involved in a wide variety of FOSS initiatives. Sometimes as these systems get deployed, the OSC becomes involved with them; an example is that of the Anti-Corruption Management Information System.

There are various deployments of activities concerning FOSS under the initiatives/projects of the OSC. Some of them are listed below.

• The "Go-Open Source" campaign, a two-year project that had been successfully completed, was carried out in partnership with the Shuttleworth Foundation and industry partners to create awareness about FOSS by making use of the electronic media, including the production of a TV series (the "Go Open" TV series - a world first for FOSS).
• The Geek Freedom League campaign, started out as part of the Go-Open Source project, attempts to encourage as many users as possible to introduce FOSS to friends and colleagues, an endeavour that will earn them the prestigious status of geeks! Upon signing up as a FOSS geek, the volunteer will receive the materials needed to convert people and computers and this campaign has attracted over 1,000 volunteers.
• The development and maintenance of the Government website – http://www.oss.gov.za, which houses the South African's government FOSS strategy document, as well as mailing lists and continuous online discussions on various aspects of FOSS.
• The Global Open Source Software Initiatives and Projects (GOSSIP) is a web-accessible registry of initiatives, projects and parties associated with FOSS, extending FOSSFA's online database.
• The OSC led a consultation to identify how donors and others could support FOSS in Africa. This involved a number of workshops, including various countries using FOSS such as Brazil, China, Vietnam, etc., as well as donors and NGOs.
• The OSC is involved in formulating project plans and strategies to assist various government agencies and bodies migrate to FOSS. These include CSIR, State Information Technology Agency (SITA), Department of Science and Technology (DST) and the City of Johannesburg.
• The OSC is assisting the Translate.org.za project, which aims to translate FOSS into South African official languages.
• Educational and training activities to bring FOSS and free learning resources into the formal and informal education arena.

Impact

The OSC is the main FOSS centre in South Africa. It is the main vehicle that the government relies on to promote FOSS in the country, as well as, to assist it in its efforts to bring FOSS into mainstream usage in the government. The main impact that the activities of the Centre have had in the country is in bringing about awareness of the benefits and usefulness of FOSS and how it can be used to assist developing countries and communities acquire ICT facilities and skills. These activities have benefited the areas of content development, business development, skills development, research, ICT policy and access.

In particular, the usage of FOSS in the country has seen cases where the quality of service has improved, as for example in the case of CSIR where it is now running its access card system for all staff on a FOSS platform. The Translate.org.za project has experienced that using FOSS, technical problems are getting addressed faster as there is less dependence on local partners who, for proprietary software, are mostly at the behest of the proprietary software package owners and they are slower in solving the problems.

Apart from the government, the OSC projects have also affected other sectors like education and business as well as groups like small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME), NGOs and the home, as FOSS is promoted and introduced into these areas. For example, under the "Go-Open Source" campaign, the Go-Open TV Show has been very popular and proved successful in reaching out to the general public on the virtues of FOSS.

Lessons Learned

With the setting up of the OSC, other organizations can seek its assistance should they need support with various FOSS initiatives. They can also benefit from the wide experience that the OSC has in promoting FOSS and cultivating a FOSS environment in cooperation with various government bodies, NGOs and commercial companies.

Current Status of Project

On 17 May 2005 the OSC became a semi-autonomous entity within the newly launched Meraka Institute. With FOSS becoming more prominent, more organizations are now involved with FOSS advocacy work and in accordance with this, the OSC has begun to shift its resources and energies from advocacy to research and development. The research activities of the OSC have expanded as well as engagements with other countries on FOSS issues.

Benefits and Challenges

The most obvious benefit from the activities of the OSC has been in the increased awareness of FOSS and the benefits associated with it for a developing economy like South Africa in particular and for African nations in general. The activities and projects organized by the OSC have impacted the public and private sectors as well as the general public. These include the assistance of the Centre in the efforts of the various government agencies to migrate to FOSS; the engagement with various foreign nations and organizations on FOSS related issues; the project to translate and localize the major FOSS packages into the South African official languages; and educational and training activities on FOSS.

The OSC has also benefited the policy makers in the government in that it has been involved in shaping the National FOSS Strategy and developing the FOSS aspect of the National Research and Development Strategy.

On the operations side, in addition to the usual benefits of FOSS in terms of flexibility, stability, skills and cost, the use of FOSS has seen an increase in social solidarity. FOSS has enabled the Centre to freely collaborate with a wide variety of organizations across the world. The use of FOSS has promoted access while also helping to deal with a broader set of issues in the ICT space concerned with promoting skills, bridging the digital divide, etc.

The main disadvantage experienced in migrating to FOSS in CSIR, has been in the adjustment that some of the staff members within the broader CSIR have had to make. This has resulted in temporarily slowing down productivity levels.

Other Information

The secretariat of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) was handed over to the OSC in early 2006.

There are other initiatives around FOSS that started after the OSC launch and have grown significantly. In some cases, they have become well-known FOSS initiatives; an example being the African Virtual Open Initiatives and Resources (AVOIR) project.

Conclusion

The OSC of the Meraka Institute is a key organization in the implementation and realization of the South African government's FOSS strategy. In acting out its main role of stimulating the adoption of FOSS in the country, it has successfully implemented many initiatives and projects to promote FOSS and introduce it to the public and private sectors of South Africa. Among its successful projects are the "Go Open" TV series and the Geek Freedom League project where volunteers are recruited to introduce FOSS to friends and colleagues. OSC is also active in efforts by the government to migrate several agencies over to FOSS from proprietary software as well as in educational and training activities to bring FOSS and free learning resources into the education arena.

With more organizations now performing FOSS advocacy work, the OSC has now shifted its focus to research and development in FOSS as well as more international activities to forge links with other countries.

Contact Information

Project: Open Source Centre
Organization: Meraka Open Source Centre
Contact Person: Nhlanhla Mabaso
Street Address: Building 43, CSIR, Meiring Naude Avenue, Brummerria, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa
Postal Address: PO Box 395, Pretoria, 0001, South Africa
Email: nmabaso@csir.co.za
Phone: +27 12 841 3728
Fax: +27 12 842 7066

Websites

The Meraka Open Source Centre
http://floss.meraka.org.za

The Meraka Institute
http://www.meraka.org.za