Archive for the 'All Things Open' Category

Shooting Back with a Flip

Published
by
Steve Song
on 1 August 2008
in All Things Open
. 0 Comments

I had a great conversation with David Carman yesterday who runs a community mesh network in Scarborough (south of Cape Town). We discussed mesh technologies, topologies, and Open Source medical applications but towards the end, the conversation strayed to digital video and security. He told me about a remarkable project in Palestine, called Shooting Back, in which a human rights NGO distributed 100 cameras to palestinian citizens to record human rights abuses.  The results are pretty disturbing as this Guardian article testifies but also pretty remarkable.  As David put it, often the power of the criminal lies in anonymity.  Letting people know that they don’t have the luxury of anonymity can be a powerful incentive for behavioural change.

I was reminded of this today when I read a post by Brian Longwe in Nairobi about the Flip Camera that he had recently acquired.  The Flip is an inexpensive (~USD130) video camera with a dead simple interface.   This might make an interesting project.  Acquiring 100 Flip video cameras to distribute to a high-crime community in South Africa would cost less than USD 13,000.  It might have an impact on crime but also with a powerful, easy-to-use device like this, who knows what worthwhile unintended uses may emerge.  I note that Brian’s first use of the camera was to record Kenya’s “Jim Hendrix” at a bar.

Dabba in The Economist

Published
by
Steve Song
on 17 July 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 0 Comments

In the development world, getting a project profiled in The Economist is a bit like a rock band being profiled in Rolling Stone.  This week’s Economist has a profile of Dabba. Pretty cool.

Dabba wins Social Entrepreneur of the Year Award

Published
by
Steve Song
on 10 July 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 1 Comment

Last week in Berlin at a Forum on Social Entrepreneurship hosted by German venture capital company Hasso Plattner Ventures, Rael Lissoos and Dabba won the Social Entrepreneur of the Year 2008 award. The event, sponsored by Deutsches Bank and MAN brought together 250 social entrepreneurs together with investors.

This is great news for Dabba and by extension for the Village Telco. The concept of Social Entrepreneurship has recently had some push-back in the form of a critique of philanthrocapitalism called Just Another Emperor.  While the publication justly criticises the broad generalisation that non-profits should operate more like businesses, it seems clear to me that there is a lot of development mileage to be had from enterprises that operate on the principles of enlightened self-interest.

Equally, it seems clear to me that Open Source and Open Hardware offer a great intersection point between philanthropy and entrepreneurship.  By supporting the development of software and hardware that help Dabba operate their social enterprise but doing it via open licenses, we can lower the barrier to entry in a market which is dying for more competition.  Too often, donors make the mistake of funding an interesting pilot thinking that it would find sustainability once it got on its feet.  I certainly have been guilty of this often enough myself.  Sadly, more often than not, that initial funding, against all intention, creates a culture of dependence.

Philanthropists need to make it easy to do the right thing without doing the right thing.  We need to do more leading of horses to water and less making them drink :-)

Open Standards - It’s Not Just Good for the Internet

Published
by
Steve Song
on 12 June 2008
in All Things Open and What I'm Reading
. 4 Comments

The Bottom BillionPaul Collier at TEDA talk worth watching is Paul Collier’s heartfelt presentation at the TED event earlier this year.  He talks a bit about his book The Bottom Billion which, as a non-economist, I am finding both insightful and accessible.  He talks about the critical role of good governance for poor countries with significant natural resources.  He points out that, without good governance, natural resource wealth turns out to be worse for poor countries than if they hadn’t had those resources at all.

This is pretty depressing.  Not surprisingly natural resource wealth in poor countries tends to get “captured” by those in a position to do so and leads both abuse of power and market distortions which, after a brief wave of prosperity, renders the poor, in particular, even worse off than before.

What is most interesting though for me is the solution that he proposes… Open Standards.  Standards for transparency in natural resource extraction that can be adopted by companies and by countries such as those proposed by Transparency International could be a powerful mechanism if widely adopted.

As an example, Collier talks about the British Treasury’s sell-off of 3G spectrum licenses in which an estimated market of 2 billion pounds sold for 10 times that much when put through a “verified auction”.  He appears to imply that verified auctions are a kind of existing standard but in reading the story of the auction and the conclusions of Paul Klemperor it appears that there is no one-size-fits-all solution and auctions must be carefully designed to fit markets and market players.

With that cautionary note, it still seems like a great idea.  One has the sense that the people who want to do the right thing are in the majority, they just don’t know how to go about it.  And while they cast about for solutions, the process is captured by the greedy.  The SA telecommunications sector comes to mind here. Also, the existence of international standards can give weight to the arguments of those who would like to do the right thing.  And finally, international standards can give civil society a measure to judge governments and corporations by, if not a stick to beat them with.

There is little question that the open, voluntary standards process of “Requests for Comment” (RFCs) which evolve into de facto standards through partcipation has been a key element in the phenomenal growth of the Internet.  Perhaps there is something to be learned from that.

Dabba and Village Telco: Getting to Alpha

Published
by
Steve Song
on 29 April 2008
in All Things Open and Village Telco
. 4 Comments

Here is a short note on where things stand with Dabba and the Village Telco. The Shuttleworth Foundation is planning to fund the hacking/adaptation/development, to at least alpha version, of an Open Source “Village Telco” integrated suite of applications. This will be developed based on the business model established by Dabba in Orange Farm and aimed at facilitating the replication of that model.

Dabba brainstorming with Internet SolutionsA lot of the detail written below came out of a half-day brainstorming session that I participated in earlier this month. Rael hosted myself and a three very cool business development / technical / entrepreneur folk from Internet Solutions. Internet Solutions have informally supported Dabba in exploring low-cost telephony and data business models from the very early days. They have an interest since businesses like Dabba are a potentially natural complement to Internet Solutions. I hope in my meeting with them that I also convinced them that there was a useful and important place for an Open Source VillageTelco project which could speed the replication of Dabba-clients and Dabba-like enterprises.

So, as currently planned, the first iteration of the Village Telco will include:

  • mesh network provisioning and management
  • pay-as-you-go billing and management
  • wireless access / captive portal setup and management
  • SIP/VOIP server and client management
  • least cost routing solutions

subsequent iterations will include:

  • an integrated web-based management interface to the Village Telco
  • content server
  • customer relationship management (CRM)
  • caching proxy for web content
  • multicast streaming video

So here is a little more detail on what is required to get each of those components off the ground.

Mesh Network Provisioning & Management

open-mesh.netOpen-mesh.com and Meraki have the slickest mesh network provisioning and management interfaces going. Both are based on the deployment of Meraki wireless routers which run a version of the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol called RO.B.IN (ROuting Batman INside). Both Open-Mesh and Meraki have very similar interfaces which is not surprising as Open-Mesh was developed as a reaction to Meraki’s decision to close the change to their End User Licence Agreement to preclude anyone from changing any of the software that they install on their units. So now you can buy a Meraki mini router, flash it with Open-Mesh’s more open firmware and connect up your mesh without being locked into Meraki. Pretty cool although you still have to use the OpenMesh site for network management. It would be much better for a Village Telco to have its own network management software that was as cool as Open-Mesh. Happily a group of students at UNC Chapel Hill are developing an Open Source mesh deployment server called OrangeMesh that is compatible with Open-Mesh. This would be a great place to start developing a provisioning interface for a Village Telco, one that would ideally handle both OpenWRT/LinksysWRT54Gx routers running B.A.T.M.A.N. and Meraki Mini or similar devices running RO.B.IN.

Pay-as-you-go Billing and Management

A2Billing appear to have the most robust Open Source voice billing solution for Asterisk that supports pay-as-you-go billing. The goal here would be to create a customised A2Billing configuration particularly geared to the Village Telco environment.

Wireless Access / Captive Portal Setup and Management

Image from CoovaChilli siteThere are a few great Open Source captive portal applications. Coova, ChilliSpot, and WiFiDog are probably the best known although Chillispot ceased development some time in 2007 and has morphed into CoovaChilli and there are other hybrids such as CoovaAAAwithWiFiDog. WiFiDog has a great captive portal and customised/localised content for users but relies on a standard password file for authentication which probably means that it will not scale well. Both Coova and WiFiDog have versions of their captive portal software that are designed to run on wireless access points (APs) such as the Linksys WRT54G series. While the Village Telco will use Linksys APs, because the APs will be meshed together, there is no need to run authentication on the local AP. It can be handled at the server. Something like CoovaChilli makes more sense because it authenticates with Radius but it would be nice to also have some of WiFiDog’s captive portal features as well. It sounds like CoovaAAAwithWifiDog should do that but CoovaAAA is a service not a software provided by Coova. For anyone who read my earlier post, you will note that authenticating from the server versus the AP represents a change of strategy.

SIP/VOIP server and client management

AsteriskThe two big applications for SIP authenticating and managing VoIP traffic are OpenSER and Asterisk. In my earlier post, I wrote about running OpenSER on a Linksys AP. Once again, in a mesh environment, it seems that this is not necessary either. OpenSER’s chief advantage over Asterisk in this domain is that it is comparatively very efficient and would be able to route calls within the AP’s coverage area without leaving the AP to authenticate at the server. There are even some very cool OpenSER distributions designed for the Linksys AP such as Milkfish. However, the downside of this is that those calls would not get tracked or would at least be much more work to track. Having a central authentication for calls makes sense as tracking usage patterns will be quite important to managing service delivery and growth. In the end, it probably makes more sense to have a single Asterisk implementation that handles authentication. Once again, because the network is meshed, this should be relatively seamless across APs.

Least Cost Routing Solutions

Least Cost Routing (LCR) refers to the set of tables, software, appliances that ensure that a call is made for the least possible cost. So, for a Village Telco, you would first want to make sure that calls within the WiFi mesh were routed directly to another user within the mesh. Next, if the call were leaving the VillageTelco coverage area, then you would want to have direct connections to all the major networks in order to avoid paying additional interconnect charges. This means having the SIM cards and hardware to route calls to the GSM networks and having the facility to interconnect with the Publicly Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) e.g. Telkom. There is a host of hardware and software for achieving this and part of the challenge will be choosing the right technology. Equally if not more important will be deciding where in the connectivity chain to break out to other networks. In some cases, an isolated Village Telco would have to solve all of these problems by themselves. However in the case of Dabba in South Africa, Dabba can solve many of these problems for local Village Telcos by offering LCR services (among other services) to Village Telco operators. This is particularly important in a place like South Africa where Telkom insists on having carrier-grade interconnection equipment which is typically very expensive.

Customer Relationship Management

Vtiger The above covers most of the basics of the Village Telco but thinking further forward, it would be great for the Village Telco operator to have the tools to manage relationships with his/her customers. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Vtiger could offer marketing and support functions to a Village Telco operator that would help them expand their range of services, provide better support, and generally understand their customers better. However, one step at a time and much will depend on how easy it is to integrate something like Vtiger with the other elements of the Village Telco.

That’s a start. Obviously much more to come. Please feel free to post comments, observations, suggestions on the above as this is definitely a work in progress. Also, I’m learning in this space as well so if I have misrepresented issues, forgotten issues, or left out an amazing piece of Open Source software, let me know!

For more software and hardware possibilities, check out the list compiled by Sebastian Beuttrich for the CSIR’s Wireless Africa initiative.