Interviewing Dwayne from translate.org.za in our latest podcast was a real inspiration. Despite his quiet manner, Dwayne's passion for language, his desire to help protect indigenous languages and provide greater accessibility to the benefits of information technology for affected communities comes through forcibly.

 In our recent interview with Karl Fischer, one of the topics we touched on was brand recognition in relation to Linux adoption.

Back in the day when I started my IT career, Novell Netware was still a contender in the server room along side Unix.  

Today, there is still strong Novell brand recognition in government and business, Though they are basically closed source, in South Africa, organizations still have an affinity for Novell products. 

 While i was in Montreal recently, I took the opportunity to pay a visit to Canonical's office as I wanted to increase my knowledge of the business offerings which are available to Enterprise customers who choose the Ubuntu OS.

I started my IT career when Novell was the dominant name in the enterprise space and it is good to see other options emerging that complement & support choice in desktop operating systems.

 Recently I had the pleasure of speaking with Jon Gosier,  the CEO of Appfrica, where he incubates and invests in East African entrepreneurs. Through my work with CrisisCommons, I was introduced to Swift River, the open source application which can be used to filter crowdsourcing information from sites such as Ushahidi.  Jon is part of the Swift River development team.

Last February I organized a CrisisCamp in Calgary, which took place in coordination with several other cities.  The focus was on developing apps that could be utilized real time during the Haiti earthquake crisis.

Recently I read through the writeup from iHUB Nairobi's RHOK (Random Hacks of Kindness) camp and it was kind of cool to see them also picking up on projects we had worked on such as the We have/We need project and the Haiti AMPs Network.

Well this weekend I linked up to the local Jozi WUG (Wireless User Group). Now Google doesn't know absolutely everything I do online :) Take that marketers! Anyway it was a great project. A lot of fun. What a great weekend, WUG, soccer world cup finals and beer!

Let me preface this blog post by telling you straight up.....I am not a developer! However I am the bridge between a development team and organizations who chosen to use open source software.

I find myself in a difficult position. My friends & family definitely see me as a geek, often commenting that it seems as if my Twitter & Facebook are in some other language. But among the open source or Linux crowd, there is a caste system in place which can make one feel like an 'untouchable' if you are not a hacker, or a developer.

Episode 21 - Interview with ThePenguinTrail.org Organisers Veera Uusoksa and Armi Korhonen -

Episode 21 - Interview with ThePenguinTrail.org Organisers Veera Uusoksa and Armi Korhonen

 Well episode 20 is out! We had a great interview with intrepid Alastair Otter, editor and founder of Tectonic, the online news source for the open source community in South Africa.

Mark and I talked about the Humble Indie Bundle in our latest podcast and Mark had posted about his recent download of the bundle.

Hard to believe that 25% of the downloads from the site are actually pirated, because people don't want to pay the 1 cent to obtain the key code, but instead are posting it on sites such as forums, 4chan, etc