Would be good to show support for the only candidate from Africa. See his tweet at https://twitter.com/Samson_Goddy/status/1368268956570685443.
The festival they organize(d) was promising from the planning. I do not know how they engage post-event. Power to him.
Wishing Sam the best:
“I can do these things without being on the Board for OSI, but I have the opportunity to bring more people around the culture, as I recently did with many efforts from Africa, like the Open Source Festival.”
Yes one thing we’ve realsied, especially in South Africa, is no-one listens to a few lone voices, you need to represent a group or an NGO especially when it comes to FOSS.
I found individuals in tech-departments (the sys-admins) can play a disproportionate role in steering an organization or government office to FOSS or closed-source. While I see OSA has the right message, they are also funded by some of the main beneficiaries of closed-source surveillance software used by governments in Africa: Microsoft + Google. I hope the board offers more insight and capacity in how to deal with these structural issues.
Which is why they need broader representation and volunteers. Oddly enough the picture has changed a lot in governments, as the sys admins are now very much bypassed as tech companies realised they could not sell many of their tech offerings to open source people, so the tech companies use leverage to meet with Directors-General and other senior non-tech decision makers to convince them to go cloud services etc. Then the disillusioned sys admins end up resigning, and government gets more dependent on tenders and external service providers. If only governments were listening more to their own loyal employees, they’d have more home-grown and owned solutions…
One would think that with all the talk around ‘sovereignty’ the governments would see the dependency matrix they are fixing themselves in. They also do not come cheap – an email account on Xchange may cost over 10Dollars a month. It is puzzling how a low-income country would opt for a costly, dependence-inducing platform yet their technical people advise on fairly priced options that give them more autonomy.
So true! It boggles the mind but don’t under estimate the PR and marketing machine by some of the big companies. There is good reason they bypass government’s own tech people. I’ve seen a case where a big company flew out negotitaors especially to deal with senior officials. The back room tech sys admin just does not get to see his/her own senior officials. And yes, the costs for the cloud based subsciptions is way more ove rthe long term, and worse, extracting yourself and your data is not easy at all when supposedly a contract period is supposed to end. You can have your data back but good luck on using it in any meaningful way…
