There are a large number of related efforts underway to strengthen the capacity to develop software in low-income countries.  The goal of this group is to discuss if and how to unify and jointly promote these efforts.

One option we hope many groups can put their support behind is to promote a brand akin to to the “FairTrade” label for software projects in which a software package or module can be certified as “Coded in Country” if a sufficient percentage of the software development budget was spent on local developers.  Projects will be encouraged to report their “CIC number”, i.e., the percentage of their software development budget that is local.  We will publish guidelines for how to compute these numbers.  We have a 1-page overview of the idea.  A first Coded in Country (CIC) node in Nairobi has been launched by DataDyne with technical assistance by Dimagi and  support by the United Nations Foundation, and the IDRC has included support for this idea through the OpenROSA consortium on mobile data collection and decision support.

This website and mailing list are not meant to be the long term home CIC, but just a way to have the conversation about how to start CIC.   We hope this discussion will result in a concrete set of next steps to promote Coded in Country (or a similar effort).  Minimally, this could include a way for groups to publicly pledge their support for this cause, to list software projects or modules along with their CIC numbers, and to create a common calender of CIC events.

Please join this group if you would like to participate in the conversation and please introduce yourself with a few sentences.  Feel free to  post related links and resources to this group.

Thanks!