ADEF experience sited in Bloomsbury book release on Access to knowledge in Egypt
Access to Knowledge in Egypt: New Research on Intellectual Property, Innovation and Development Edited by Nagla Rizk and Lea Shaver
"Two OSS-using organizations interviewed are not involved in the IT
sector at all, but are rather pure consumers of OSS, creating what we now
call Layer 3. These parties on the customer end are not only using OSS
to facilitate their business operation, but are actively promoting its use.
The case is manifest in the Arab Digital Expression Camp, a residential
summer camp for children that aims to give them digital tools for self-
expression and constant exploration of their identity through culture and
heritage. The founders of this project made a conscious decision that the
output of the children would be licensed under Creative Commons licenses.
The children’s contributions are put on archive.org and on an open blog
in which they are stakeholders, but also where others can use and benefit
from it. “We also want our curriculum to be open source, which anyone
can use and teach elsewhere,” the founders added (Shaath interview 2008,
Yehia interview 2008).
The driving force of their concept is promoting collaborative work and
information sharing at all levels of the camp, all of which are empowering
tools of self-expression. The concept of using OSS as a catalyst for self-
expression is meant to diffuse largely amongst different sectors of
society since it encourages the participation of children from different
backgrounds and various parts of the Arab World. Children learn
“blogging, collaboration” as the program highlights “the power of a person
in a community – completely individual yet part of a global community.”
Through deploying open source techniques, children get to learn that the
Internet is “a network of people not a network of computers.” Although open
source solutions in certain areas like animation and multitracked offline
editing are not yet optimal, the camp still uses them, since its mandate is
to teach the children self-expression rather than filmmaking per se. This
tendency is relevant given the emerging trend of independent cinema,
low-budget productions and experimental filmmaking (Shaath interview
2008, Yehia interview 2008).
(Chapter 5, The Software Industry in Egypt: What role for Open Source? p.157)
link to downloadable pdf version of book