ACT 2004 Report

Day 1

Our booth was quite packed since there were quite a few of us from the Mauritius Internet Society Chapter, the Mauritians Using Linux Group with Aadil and Yan, as well as Avinash and myself. We were located between the Open Knowledge Network and the DCL booths. Right in front of us was quite a big and nice blue booth for Sophos.

DCL had generously given all exhibitors a wireless hotspot. We even got a wireless card from them to install in one of the three PCs at our booths. The PCs were then networked through a LAN hub. The Internet connection was thus set-up and ready to go. DCL provided us with quite a high-bandwidth connection. I believe it was about 250Mbits/s. Avi used Samba to get his presentation from a floppy to the outermost Fujitsu-Siemens PC machine where we were going to present Knoppix and some presentations made with OpenOffice Impress. His presentation was set up to loop, which freed us to discuss with visitors.

View from our booth. On the left, Sophos. Afar, the refreshment area

Avi was present and was asked by a lady working for the MSIRI about Linux and the reasons that could prompt them to migrate over from Microsoft to Linux. She especially wanted to know about support, and this issue was one which was often raised by other visitors at the booth or around the event area. I mentioned that one should think about training the internal staff and the migration costs would be a one-off cost and would bring financial benefits for a long period of time when others expect you to upgrade and renew licenses with hefty price tags.

I attended Dr. Harold Wesso's presentation in Conference Room Chamarel 1 about ICT within the Government, namely within the Western Cape region in South Africa. It was an interesting presentation as it showed what strategic issues were necessary for building better government services for citizens. Certainly there were things to be learned from this presentation, but as far as I am aware, none of our local Government representatives were present. In fact, I was told that in the morning, Mr. Jeeha was very noticeably absent from the talk he was scheduled to make himself and had been replaced, thankfully by Sushil Khushiram who mentioned GNU/Linux and Open Source Software, according to an article by Gilbert Ahnee in Le Mauricien. I think that cool enough to warrant sending an invitation to join our LUG to both.

Closeup view of the totally useless contraption depicting the Windows logo. What does it mean?

On the tables, there were loads of totally useless contraptions made of glass and a metallic faceplate depicting the Windows logo. There was one of these useless objects in front of each seat. At least LUGM and MULG were giving away free CDs with a complete Operating System, together with 2GB worth of compressed software like OpenOffice and much more.

Aaah, a free Operating System with 2GB of compressed free software to boot (no pun intended)! That's something you CAN use compared to totally useless contraptions from Microsoft.

Paradoxically, in Room 2, there was another presentation about how Monopolies are incompatible with enhancements in the Telco industry. That's not the paradox, because that is a fact, and it is very fortunate that Denis Vellien of our local ICT tribunal overturned the former ruling of the ICTA to force MT's competitors to align their prices on MT's... The paradox was that at the conclusion of this presentation, the speaker was citing Egypt as an example of Best Practices, and that South Africa was named, with Ethiopa and another country, as the 'Worst Practices' instances.

Endless rows and rows of totally useless contraptions placed by Microsoft

Back to the booth, I met with Ifeanyi Ogochukwu from the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency. He is the IT Manager there and hence was already well-versed with Open Source Software. He actually uses Linux and OpenOffice on his personal laptop. Still, he was happy to get his own Knoppix bootable CD as he would like to make other employees get to know what's possible on the desktop. Mr. Ogochukwu was also looking for a firewall solution on Linux, and as I had brought my latest PCQuest CD, I made him a copy of the featured SmoothWall firewall for Linux. He also wanted to speak to me about OpenExchange or Open-XChange.

Conference room 2: More totally useless contraptions. Somebody in Microsoft thought this would be a good idea. And they get paid for that kind of thing too.

Later on, I met with Andrew Gakiria who hails from Kenya, and is a delegate of the Office of the President, more precisely the Directorate of e-Government. We spoke a bit about Kenya and Nairobi. I told him I had liked the Carnivore, and as soon as I mentioned 'Dawa', he broke into a wide smile and shook my hand again. We chatted some more about Open Source software and he was treated to our Knoppix Linux CD.

Two more ladies from Kenya also were given their Knoppix and made to promise they'd try it. They were very happy and asked loads of questions, especially the one who had a Deloitte and Touche folder in her hands. All in all there were many delegates from Kenya.

Aadil and Yan at Piment Rouge

Avinash at Piment Rouge

I met Desiree Miloshevic, a trustee from the Internet Society, the very society of which Dave opened a local chapter. Desiree was very nice to chat to and I briefed her about the ICT tribunal over-ruling the ICTA clause right before the Summit. The Internet Society hosts the IETF, of which she has been a panel member according to Dave. The Society works to preserve and enhance Open Standards for interoperability, robustness and efficiency for the Internet. She told me about Afilias, which manages the .info domain name and offers registry services. Desiree also spoke about enum which links a telephone number to D.N.S. I believe it's a protocol being evaluated from within ISOC or IETF. She wanted to know about how we would perceive some registration fees locally. I therefore showed her my site from ICDSoft.com and we came to the conclusion that the fees mght be too expensive. Desiree wanted to know if blogging was big here in Mauritius, and hence I showed her Aadil's site so that she could get links to other Mauritian's blogs too.

Avi, Aadil and myself met with Mr. Lochun from the EPZDA. He's an Operational Analyst for ICT at the EPZDA and is already well aware of the financial advantages of using Open-source and GNU/Linux and that it could, in his own words, save the industry literally millions of Rupees yearly. He left for a conference, but not before getting his very own copy of Knoppix.

I also briefly met Ashraf Esmael, who's the Vice President and Head of Central Services at BAI. They had a booth for HDM Interactive, displaying kiosks which could be accessed through both touch-screens and keyboards. The kiosks were running Windows 2000. I tried to find some screenshots of KDE in kiosk mode to show to Jehanne Ghanty who was at the booth, but couldn't find any.

A representative of Norway's Taide Networks passed by and we had a brief but pleasant chat. I asked the obvious and he said that all his engineers are crazy about Open-Source and Linux.

Panic! We forgot Dave!

Dave was doing the last presentation of the day, explaining the World Summit Web Awards and so he asked me to come to the conference room to take some pictures, which I did. Mr. Moroney, form AITEC had forgotten about announcing this and hence almost everybody had left, probably to slip into more relaxed clothing for he cocktail, but Dave still went rapidly through the presentation.

DAP showing a hefty download rate of 52.3KBps ;o)

I went down to the cocktail area at around 6.30 pm. A small group of people was already there enjoying a relaxing time around drinks and snacks. I settled for a round table where two Kenyan delegates and one from the USA were discussing joyfully. On seeing my MLUG badge, they soon engaged a conversation about Open Source. One of the ladies thought the peanuts were quite tasteless fruits until she saw me opening the crust. The US delegate asked some very pointed questions about OSS, for instance whether one should adhere to the philosophy of Open Source to benefit from it. Dr. Wesso soon joined the table and I briefly quizzed him briefly about his presentation.

That's how you do it, aaah!

I thought they were tasteless. No, don't put my picture online!!

It was approximately at that time that I went to speak to a seemingly reserved young man at our table. He turned out to be a total riot to himself. Emmanuel Mugabe is the web master for President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. He had had some trouble with flight administrations and barely made it to Mauritius as people seemed bent to keep him in South Africa. He was happy to have reached our shores and said he liked the country. Emmanuel was very excited about me promising to give him a Knoppix CD. We had a hilarious chat, he kept me laughing out loud with description of people still using floppies to store their files. “Actually, that's how they judge the quality of a laptop”, he said, “Where's the floppy drive?”. Some people wouldn't believe him when he told them they could securely store their files in their own folders on the server through the network.

“You're Robert's son!”, I asked him jokingly.

Emmanuel Mugabe, Robert's son. Just kidding!!!!

Emmanuel described to me how ICT in Rwanda was taking up very rapidly, and he ascribed all the progress made in Rwanda to his President's astounding vision and ability to communicate and act upon it.

We were joined by Andrew whom I met previously, and we spoke about the Rwanda genocide as well as Darfur... Arab militia killing black people in Sudan to take over their plot of lands...Because of the oil fields...Which they could then sell to the Americans, for instance. I wondered aloud whether the U.S. also sold the arms to the aggressors, to which Andrew and Emmanuel almost replied in unison “They make a double profit...”. Emmanuel said that President Kagame sent Rwanda's troops there to help the Darfur people.

Andrew also spoke said that one of Kenya's top ICT Professional had been hired by Rwanda and that Kenya wanted him back. Emmanuel said with a smile: “That easy: Pay him good money”. The salary Emmanuel cited for the Kenyan professional prompted me to ask whether he'd like an assistant who comes cheap - like about half as much - and willing to go to Rwanda immediately ;o) This prompted heavy laughter from all sides. Emmanuel, if you're reading this, please make a personal copy of that Knoppix CD to President Kagame on my behalf, and let me know whenever he's looking for a young ICT professional with a similar vision as his, thanks ;o)

Emmanuel told us some of President Kagame's quotes about ICT and the vision he had for Rwanda. Upon hearing the heaps of deserved praise for President Kagame, I half-jokingly said “Hey, can't he Preside over two countries simultaneously”? More laughter ensued. It seemed us three couldn't stop laughing. It wasn't the drinks, it was a gathering of three young Africans who knew the benefits of ICT for developing countries and who were living that reality and who had therefore found it easy to relate to each other.

Andrew Gakiria. Hey Andrew, when do we partake in some Dawa together?

A light comment by Andrew about making an online group for young African ICT professionals suddenly turned more serious as we all three became determined to make this a reality. I proposed my web space and the forum software (Open Source, of course!) already in place for that. This idea might be forthcoming soon, following some more discussions with Andrew and Emmanuel.

I had to leave before we had time to discuss this further, and so there ended Day 1 at the ACT 2004.

Yash

for LUGM and MaJUG