give effect to the constitutional right of access to any information held by the State and any information that is held by another person and that is required for the exercise or protection of any rights; and to provide for matters connected therewith.

You can view the whole act on the website of the Department of International Affairs and Cooperation.  With Telkom being partly owned by the South African government, this seemed like a likely course of action.  Duly submitted, the response came back several weeks later in which our request was denied on every count.  Telkom’s Deputy Information Officer replied that:

In terms of Section 68, I decline to grant access to the records since they contain financial, commercial, scientific, and/or technical information, other than trade secrets, the disclosure of which is likely to cause harm to the commercial or financial interests of Telkom, and moreover contain information the disclosure of which could reasonably be expected to put Telkom at a disadvantage in contractual or other negotiations and/or prejudice Telkom in a commercial competition.

Even though we are invited to apply to court if we are “aggrieved by this decision” the terms of the refusal are so vague that we are unlikely to succeed via this route.  In the job application world, this would be called a PFO letter.

Just to be clear, we asked for a map of Telkom’s existing terrestrial fibre network, not even their plans for the future although that would be even better.  This is the kind of information that companies like Dark Fibre Africa and Liquid Telecom post freely on their websites.  In fact there are lots of African telecom companies that publicly post this information.  Evidently they think it is a good idea to communicate the reach of their networks.

But you know, publishing this information is not just a good idea for Telkom.  This is a good idea for South Africa.  If I have learned one thing from publishing a map of African Undersea Cables over the last 4 years, it is that it is possible to tell a different story about Africa, a connected 21st century Africa.  But right now that map still makes it look like all those cables stop at the beach.  There is an opportunity with this terrestrial fibre map for African countries to show off a little, to demonstrate that they are the best connected country on the continent, that they are THE destination when it comes to companies thinking about setting up African points of presence.

Surely, that is what the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of ICTs in Kenya must have been thinking when he replied to our request for information with a directive to his staff to gather and provide information on ALL terrestrial fibre optic cable projects in Kenya for use in the AfTerFibre map.

So this is where you come in Ms. Moholi.  As the comparatively new CEO of Telkom, this would be an easy way to demonstrate the new, more open face of Telkom by sharing that information and, in doing so, telling the world about Telkom, setting an example for other incumbents, and in general trumpeting South Africa’s extensive information infrastructure to the world.  What do you say?  There is a great South African story to tell here.

Just then the phone rings.  You answer and the person on the other end says “Hi, this is Jo-Philipp Wich calling from Germany.  I am the designer of that stove and I couldn’t help but notice you were having trouble installing the stove I designed.   The problem you’re having is that the manual actually says ‘sprocket’ not ‘socket’.”  Dumbfounded you hang up the phone, turn back to your stove and low and behold you have it installed in about 5 minutes.

Sounds a bit crazy doesn’t it?  Except that on the Internet, this happens every day.

It happened yesterday in the Village Telco community.  Terry Gillett, who has been doing amazing work in developing a drop-dead easy-to-use firmware for the Mesh Potato (and increasingly for some other OpenWRT-based devices) was stuck on the implementation of a secure interface to the web configuration page.  Without the ability to offer a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection to the configuration interface on a Mesh Potato, potentially anyone could eavesdrop on the configuration of the device and take it over.   Unfortunately the webserver (uhttpd – a lightweight http server for OpenWRT) crashed every time it was launched in secure mode.  Terry, Keith Williamson, and Elektra traded ideas on debugging it and started developing some workarounds for the problem.

It was after about five days of back and forth looking for the root of the problem, when this message appeared on the development list:

Hi,

I'm the author of uhttpd and stumbled over this thread by accident.
The libssl issues you see seem to be the result of a miscompilation

The current uhttpd-mod-tls package in OpenWrt lets you choose between
either libopenssl or libcyassl as crypto backend, default is cyassl.
If uhttpd-mod-tls depends on libcyassl but demands libssl.so then it
was linked against the wrong library during compilation, so the most
clean solution would be to rebuild it.

I am afraid that the symlink workaround does no good as cyassl and
openssl have different abis, so any attempt to use such a "faked"
library most likely results in a segmentation fault.

Regards,
Jow

The message was from Jo-Philipp Wich, the author of the uhttpd server.  He was able to suggest the correct solution immediately when in retrospect is fairly straightforward but everything looks straightforward in retrospect.  Had the Village Telco development community not been an open and transparent one with searchable archives on the Internet, this would never have happened.

This may seem like trivial example but in fact I think it is one of the most significant illustrations of the power of the Internet and the what the birthday paradox really means.  Someone out there has the key to what you need to do next.  It might be the answer or just a clue to think about things differently but chances of someone out there having the key to your next step, whatever you happen to be working on, are pretty good.

That’s why it is so important to live out loud on the Internet, to leave a breadcrumb trail while you work, because you just never know who is going to find your work valuable or who is going to have the answer to your problem.

Interestingly, this is surprisingly hard.  Bill Tucker is a computer science professor at the University of the Western Cape.  I was chatting with him and some of his grad students last week who are working on some mesh networking projects related to Village Telco.  They are doing some really excellent work and I urged them to share what they were doing in the online development communities they were working in.  They acknowledged it as a good idea but I could tell they weren’t completely convinced it was a good idea.  I mean who wants to look like an idiot?  Worse what if someone calls you an idiot?  The Internet is not without its share of trolls.

It dawned on me then that I still find it hard to live out loud.  I founded Village Telco and I often feel intimidated suggesting things within the community that fall on the edge of or fully outside my area of expertise.  The same goes for this blog.  Every post I write, I have to overcome a sensation that this post might be so obvious, so trivial or so wrong that I will be subject to abject humiliation by posting it.  It’s irrational as that has never happened in four years of blogging but there it is.

If I feel intimidated as the founder, it must be much harder for newcomers.  Not for everyone of course.  Some people are lucky enough to have grown up fully confident in themselves and some are just natural extroverts.  That’s great but if we are going to solve the challenges that face world today whether poverty, injustice, or climate change… we need everyone.  We need to leverage the power of the birthday paradox and get everyone leaving breadcrumbs on the Internet that will create non-linear innovation such as we have never seen.

So get out there.  Share your idea, your problem, your expertise.  We need all of us.

1) Repeating the Lessons of History

Do you remember ICTs for Development in 1999? ICT4D in 1999 looked a lot like an Alexander McCall Smith novel in that there was a complete absence of cell phones. In 1999, we were still talking about modems and getting a good quality dial-up connection and even telecentres. I only woke up to the impact that mobile phones were having in about 2002 and then finally it became an official reality when, in March of 2005, the Economist announced that mobile phones were the real bridge to the digital divide. And how right they were. I don’t think even then they would have predicted how cheap and how powerful mobile phones would become.

However, it is worth trying to put technology in context. Let’s look at a little recent history. From an ICTs and development perspective, here are some things we didn’t talk about in:

Now of course some of you are thinking right now, hey, I was talking about technology Y in 20XX, and perhaps you were, but what I am referring to is the dominant dialogue in technology and development. As William Gibson famously said, “the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”

So what can we learn from this? Just this, that the future is going to be a surprise and tying the notion of development to a particular mode of technology is as bad an idea now as it was in 1999.

2) Player, you are being played

Yes, that’s right Mr. mobile 4 development, I’ve got an app for that, incubator, mobile app challenge, startup, mobile entrepreneurship, etc.  You are being played by the mobile operators who “join forces” with development agencies to solve the critical problems facing Africa. Well, news flash, the critical issue around mobile technology is not an app, it is price. The cost of access is the real barrier to innovation. In fifteen years of explosive mobile growth in Africa prices have not come down substantially. Why? Because mobile operators through their de facto control of mobile spectrum and because of  the muddy position governments play as both investor and regulator, competition hasn’t bitten in most African countries, Kenya being a notable exception.

So when the foundation from a mobile operator or an aid agency subsidises the cost of access in an m4d project, are they doing it out of the goodness of their hearts?  Well, that is no doubt part of it but the real bonus is that providing subsidies reduces the pressure that people with influence might bring to bear for lower prices in the market. Fewer voices that speak out with indignation about the high cost of access combined with the high profits being made by the mobile operators. The poor have no voice on this. If they did they might say that reducing the price of voice and SMS was a bigger priority for them than mobile broadband right now.

Mobile operators have entrenched themselves with development agencies as the saviours of access and give generously to m4d development programs. Development agencies have rushed to embrace mobile operators. Why? Because good business is now good development and although it may sound odd in the context of this post, I too believe this to be true.  However, what the mobile operators have achieved through this embrace is the effective sidetracking of debates about competition and affordability. The mobile operators opine that the invisible hand of the market will bring down prices and there is a grain of truth to this in the same sense that it is true that I am mortal and will die one day… just not any time soon (insh’allah).

Finally, it is worth pointing out that mobile operators do not have an economic model for rural broadband access for the poor.  LTE is not going to be economically viable for sparsely populated, poor, rural areas.  If that matters to you then we should be thinking about broadening the discussion a little.

3) Resilience

If we have learned anything in the last three years, it is that monolithic, tightly linked industries are dangerous. They are dangerous because when they fail, they do so catastrophically. What we want is an ecology of technologies that will:

1. increase the resilience of networks, making it difficult for any one entity to interfere wholesale with access; and,
2. break the lock that mobile spectrum has on the market opening up new avenues of competition for access and through that driving down the cost of access.

So while Africa is busy embracing its mobile future, the United States appears to be embracing its WiFi future. According to this Comscore report

“In August 2011, more than one third (37.2 percent) of U.S. digital traffic coming from mobile phones occurred via a WiFi connection. This percentage grew nearly 3 points in just the past three months.”

And here is what telecom giant AT&T have to say:

• Users now make 100 million AT&T Wi-Fi connections per month. Wi-Fi connections in a single month now exceed the total connections made in all of 2009 and are five times the total connections made in 2008.
• Data carried on the AT&T Wi-Fi network more than doubled versus the third-quarter 201

But I am not advocating WiFi for Development, I am saying we should be thinking and talking about the whole access ecology. By failing to do that we are likely to miss important new trends.

Now, before you mention it, yes, I fully admit that there is a healthy amount of self-interest in what I’m saying. As a WiFi startup social enterprise, Village Telco, is often excluded from “mobile” challenges.  But the reason I invest my time in Village Telco is because I believe all of the above.  Development agencies could do a great deal of good by investing in policy advocacy around competition and access ecologies.  Sadly it may be left to industry once again to figure this out as well.  Kudos to Google for hiring a policy team in Africa.

This is a short summary of progress and learning from the first couple of months since launching AfTerFibre, a project to map terrestrial fibre projects in Africa. From the beginning AfTerFibre has been designed as an open project both from the point of view of transparency and from the point of view of participation. So the first goal was to make it easy to share information. This involved setting up a AfTerFibre Google Group so that anyone could contribute information or ask questions.  Next we needed a place to store resources as we found them so a wikipedia page was set up to capture information and links to maps of terrestrial fibre projects.  That part has gone reasonably well.  We now have 83 people in the Google Group and the Wikipedia page now has 67 African  operators known to have fibre projects listed, for which about half have links to maps.  Where possible I have linked directly to the map on the web if it exists.  In other cases, I have uploaded map images that I have found to a Flickr set.  Finally there is also a Diigo list of news links related to AfTerFibre.

Having gotten the repositories for the raw information in place, the next challenge was to find out how to create an information chain that would make it easy not only for people to contribute map information but also to submit updates. I’ve been working with some of Google Africa’s GIS team in Nairobi to solve this.

Step 1 – Convert Image Maps into GIS Maps

This stage of the mapping turns out to be remarkably simple. GoogleEarth (GE) is an amazingly simple yet powerful tool. You can import any jpg or png image of a map as an overlay into GE. GE makes it a piece of cake to stretch the image to neatly match the image map borders with the real GIS borders in GE. This makes it relatively simple to then trace fibre routes with the Path tool. I really can’t overemphasise what an amazing job the Google Earth designers have done to make it easy to trace maps. As an example, when you are actively tracing a path in GE, the mouse is no longer available to move the geography as you trace along a line. Happily the keyboard arrow keys are enabled for this purpose allowing you to trace with the right hand and move the geography with your left hand. More software should be this well designed. Because I am a GIS greenhorn, I have just assumed that KML is the appropriate format for this data.

Step 2 – Create a online updateable repository of map data that can feed the AfTerFibre Map

Our initial assumption was that Google Fusion Tables would make a good data repository. It is capable of directly importing the KML files generated from the tracing of maps in Google Earth. The map you see above is a direct representation of the AfTerFibre maps after a simple import into Fusion Tables.

Here is where things get more complicated. Fusion Tables turns out to have some idiosyncrasies (it’s still in Beta) which make it somewhat problematic for AfTerFibre. For a start, it doesn’t allow for easy multi-row editing so if you wanted to make a change across an entire country or operator, it is a very slow process. Second, while Fusion Tables allows you add fields, which is essential for AfTerFibre to capture all the additional information on fibre projects, Fusion tables stops importing KML files properly after you change the database structure. The geo-coordinates are mapping into text fields etc. Chaos and confusion.

An alternative then is to import the KML files into Fusion Tables and directly export as comma separated files (CSV) files which can then be imported into a spreadsheet program. A spreadsheet solves some of the problem by allowing multi-record editing and also making the data easier to massage in general. Each time a new fibre map is made, it could be imported into Fusion Tables, saved as CSV, imported into a separate spreadsheet and edited to match the field layout of the master spreadsheet and the imported into the master spreadsheet. The master spreadsheet can then be exported to CSV which can then be re-imported into Fusion Tables for display in Google Maps.

If this were a one-time process, the above might be an acceptable solution but not only will new maps regularly be added but existed maps are likely to receive numerous corrections.

So, what to do? It seems to me that what is needed is some kind of versioning repository (like Github) for the KML files for AfTerFibre. I’ve done some googling around this but haven’t come across anyone who is storing their KML in a versioning repository. It seems like a clever idea but it worries me that I can’t find anyone else doing it.

If KML files could simply be updated in a Github or similar repository, then it wouldn’t be that hard to write a script that retrieved the files from the repository and massged into a GIS display with the appropriate mouseover information displays etc.

So, I’m a little bit stuck here and open to suggestions.

It is this message that Tim Harford drives home in his book.  He states that economies, governments, corporations, and markets are not the essentially predictable entities, naturally tending towards equilibrium, that neo-classical economics tells us they are.   Instead he builds on the work of people like evolutionary economist Eric Beinhocker and complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman (among others) arguing that an evolutionary model offers a better explanation for market behaviour, the life and death of corporations, and human systems in general.  If systems are effectively unpredictable, Harford draws the inevitable conclusion that making big bets on the future may not be such a good idea.  He draws on what we’ve learnt about evolution and suggests we follow some basic rules of success for evolutionary environments.  He boils this down to three rules of thumb:

1. Variation —  keep trying new things, keep throwing stuff at the wall and look for things that stick.  He backs this up with some fascinating research from Cesar Hidalgo on how economic growth is correlated with diversity.
2. Survivability — thinking of trying something new?  Do it on a scale where failure does not cause catastrophic damage.  He doesn’t lack for recent examples where big systems have failed to massive human cost whether the global banking system or the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster
3. Selection — keep reviewing your choices, weed out the dead-ends and reinforce success.  This is good advice but here Harford is a little less convincing as to how to go about this.  And indeed it turns out that we are naturally bad at acknowledging our own failures.  He has some great evidence about how bad we are but not much advice on how to compensate for it except perhaps through self-awareness of this inbuilt human failing.

This is a pretty compelling argument, especially in the light of the obvious lack of predictability and catastrophic failures that we have seen in the last few years.  He should have stopped there.  But unfortunately he goes on to link this issue to leadership.  He cites the work of economist Paul Ormerod who has compared the extinction patterns of animal species over a half billion years with the life and death of corporations and found some striking similarities.  This is good as far as it goes and reinforces the notion of markets as evolutionary systems.  He goes further though drawing on some additional work of Ormerod in which he attempts to create a mathematical model which represented corporations as modestly successful planners.  Ormerod found that this model couldn’t be made to match the extinction pattern of corporations nearly as well as the straight-out evolutionary model.  Tim Harford takes this result and says:

We should not leap to conclusions based on an abstract mathematical model, but Ormerod’s discovery strongly implies that effective planning is rare in the modern economy.  I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that Apple should replace Steve Jobs with a dart-throwing chimpanzee — even though it would certainly liven up Apple product launches.

Harford fails to take his own advice here because he does leap to the conclusion that leadership is overrated.  Don’t get me wrong I am not in favour of the cult of the CEO nor do I think that the vast majority of them deserve the salaries that are orders of magnitude larger than their co-workers.  However, I do think he confuses planning with leadership, implying that the fact that leaders cannot predict accurately predict the future reduces their utility.

Steve Jobs is a great illustration of this and, as luck would have it, his recent decision to step down will be a good opportunity to test Harford’s theory.  The popular perception of Steve Jobs is of a visionary CEO leading his loyal acolytes into the future.  That represents a basic misunderstanding leadership.  This Harvard Business Review entitled Why Apple Doesn’t Need Steve Jobs articulates it well.  What Steve Jobs gave Apple was not so much great future foresight but great culture.  Steve Jobs inspired Apple staff with a vision, a sense of mission, an esprit de corps.  So powerful was this cultural leadership that people buy Apple products in part to access that ineffable quality that seems to permeate Apple products.  Having said that, it is not entirely clear that Apple doesn’t need Steve Jobs as research by Clayten Christensen referenced in this Economist article indicates that:

during Mr Jobs’s first tenure at Apple, the company’s innovation premium was 37%. In 1985-98, when Mr Jobs was elsewhere, the premium fell to minus 30%. Now that Mr Jobs is back, the premium has risen to 52%.

To be fair, the innovation premium and how it is calculated is yet another subject of debate.  But what is true is that most of us have, at one time or another, experienced leadership and know what kind of impact it can have on us personally.  A great leader (not always the top dog) makes us want to be better than we are and makes us feel that we are part of something larger.  Great leaders inspire us to transcend our own limitations.  They inspire a sense of purpose.  This quality, while very tangible is also hard to measure which is perhaps why it doesn’t feature in Adapt which, in its quest to build conclusions on hard evidence, misses the bigger picture.

Tim Harford also wonders at how we rate politicians.  He asks, if trial and error is indeed a more sensible approach to decision-making around complex systems, why do we applaud politicians like Margaret Thatcher who famously said “You turn if you want to. The lady is not for turning” or Tony Blair who claimed not to have a reverse gear.  Worse than that, politicians who change their mind are branded as flip-floppers.  Why don’t we embrace leaders who are publicly prepared to change their minds.  Again, he betrays a misunderstanding of leadership.  A big part of leadership is to inspire the people you are meant to be leading, even occasionally at the expense of the truth.

My favourite example of this is from the movie Band of Brothers TV mini-series that profiles the lives of men in a company from the U.S. 101st Airborne Division in World War II.   The scene I am referring to is from the 7th episode, The Breaking Point, which finds the company in winter with little food and under heavy bombardment.  Their nominal leader, a Lieutenant, is unfit for the job and largely absents himself from the front lines.  The company sergeant is left to “lead” the company and what got me thinking was how he responded to the men who began to voice their doubts and suspicions about their lieutenant.  He lied.  He told them what they needed to hear, which was that everything was alright and that they were going to survive.  People talk about the “air” of success and the “smell” of defeat.  Our attitudes shape the future as surely as our resources and abilities do.  Politicians talk that way because we want them to.  We want to believe that we’re heading in the right direction and that everything is going to be alright.  The ironic thing is that believing plays an important role in it turning out to be true.

This doesn’t in any way invalidate the importance of an evolutionary trial & error approach.  It means we need leaders who will give us the confidence to fail and move on with the certainly of succeeding eventually.