Coded in Country Concept

[Matt Berg]

I think this is a great concept and something I would be very
interested in being part of as it has been in my mind a lot lately.

I read the memo and have a couple of questions and a couple of initial
reactions.

First, I fully agree that it would be great to create the idea of a
coded in country certification. I think this is something that could
catch on very quickly and I could actually see funders like USAID
actually being attracted to this. At least in Mali, the USAID
mission was always looking for ways to ensure money flowed back to
building local capacity. This would go a long way to helping with
this. USAID funded orgs live and die around the idea of NICRA so I
don't think this would be a difficult concept to sell.

If Coded in Country is to flourish as a concept, I think we may want
to decouple it from the specifics of the proposal in the memo. This
reads more as a proposal of how to setup a network of labs to support
ehealth development in Africa (a great idea) but is not something that
I think people like the AppAfrica lab or other people doing this
already are not going to rally around.

Just to be clear, I think the idea of creating a network of labs is a
great one and is something I would very much like to be a part of.
However, I think the Coded in Country conceptually works better as a
certification then as specific project. Coded in Country could,
however, have a lot of initiatives.

With that a couple of ideas re: Coded in Country

- 50% may be very difficult for some groups to hit (especially
initially). Perhaps we can have different levels of coded in country.
ie) Bronze 10% Silver 25% Gold 40% and Platinum +50% ?

- Think it may be interesting to develop a manifesto of what "coded in
country" means and how it should be measured seeking the inputs of a
lot of the different groups and individuals who would want to be
stakeholders in this. I think this would help tremendously in
developing buy-in for the concept.

- Once we have a manifesto and certification guidelines, we launch a
site where we get different organizations to pledge try and reach a
certain level going into the project. Once they can show they are
hitting their pledge they can officially receive certification.

Love the idea for so many reason. Just think it is bigger then one
sector or initiative.

Would love to hear other thoughts on this. I reserved
codedincountry.org a while back and would be happy to donate it to
cause whatever way we decide to take this.

Thanks for getting this started!

Matt

[Katrin Verclas]

Totally agree with Matt. Additionally, I understand the focus on e-health right now giving the leadership team. but I think this is indeed bigger than just in the health arean and affecting a lot of other dvelopment/aid/civil society areas.  Going broader than just health while keeping a tight focus on the criteria and certification process to stay true to the spirit of Coded in Country is something Matt hints at below as well.

Great initiative.

Katrin

[markD]

It's a great concept, and i think certification is the way to go. But
we need to be clear if we're certifying products or labs. I presume
the former, but we somehow need to acknowledge the labs that have been
established as you mention. I also think we need to keep the
certification simple but should aim higher than just 50% for platinum.
For example, we are 100% coded in country, and I think that's an
awesome achievement and presumably the real meaning of 'coded in
country'. Can we really certify something as coded in country if 75%
of it was not?

[Mark Gerard]

Good Idea Guys. Noble and brilliant.

Just a few thoughts though:

1. I think we may want to do a ground work research to establish which
particular entities we can encompass in this goal. There is health,
banking, agriculture, commerce etc and we can harness the
opportunities that come with this.
2. We need to get more working solutions out there in the field on
board in order to be able to up our clout. Katrin can help us achieve
this but solutions that have been developed in Africa or partly by the
African developers through collaborations can be a good start.

Otherwise, I am par of this. Very noble indeed.

Thank you Neal, Jonathan, Joel and the team

Kind regards.

Mark

[Carl Fredrik]

Brilliant initiative. I just returned from working with the Rwandan
Information Technology Agency during the past year and saw first-hand
the consequences of all software projects being outsourced to external
consultants. Will try to be an active participant in this initiative.

Food for thought: one major problem in developing countries is that
international consultancy companies take the opportunity to present
expensive, custom-coded solutions for problems where off-the-shelf
software exists. I would like to see a larger emphasis on local
adaption of off-the-shelf, open source software. This would increase
the deliverables from local developers, while promoting knowledge
transfer.

[Jonathan Jackson]

Hi All,

Great to see this discussion and these points are excellent and there
are two components (and perhaps we should just focus on 1 for now)

1. Brand Creation, awareness, certifiication, transparency, and
demand creation.
2. How to create or find organizations as the CIC nodes and get them
enough projects and partnerships that they gain the institutional
capacity we are hoping to create.

The tiered CIC categories are a great approach, we had wanted to call
them "CIC-10" "CIC-20" etc, so you could ask "What was that project's
CIC number?"

I also think that the CIC label needs to be applied to projects, not
orgs, at least at first, because I can't see a way to verify it
otherwise.

And I completely agree we want to get this bigger than health. As you
pointed out, that's where Joel, Neal, and my backgrounds are in, so we
thought it would make the most sense to start there.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[Mark Gerard]

Thank you Jackson.

I had earlier stated that we need to work with grass root
organizations and probably public institiutions like Universities.
That way, we can able to easily create brands, capacity and any other
transparency as required.
I am a bit skeptical about working with private organizations as this
might not have enough transparency but I stand to be corrected.

[Joel Selanikio]

Just to add my two cents regarding the "tiers" idea. I think that the
CIC number itself could, and should, be produced for every project.
That's the whole idea. But to earn the "CIC Seal of Approval", or the
right to display the logo, I really believe that we need to aim for at
least 51%. I realize, firsthand, that that is hard to get to, but
that's the whole point of this, isn't it: to point out the HUGE
disparity in spending.

[Matt Berg]

I think the pledged percentage of a project could be incredibly powerful/useful with funders.  Ideally, it would be great if the CIC percentage is incorporated as selection criteria or consideration when awarding projects.  In a sense, the CIC percentage rates will be market driven and should in theory increase as demand for capacity in the field grows.  To push for CIC, I agree we should set a standard that people should aim for right off the bat (markets can be slow :)).  However, it will be interesting to see what groups are currently hitting.

I guess an initial step would be to start defining how CIC is calculated.  Obviously a topic for another thread and I look forward to the discourse.

Thanks,

Matt

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ICT Coordinator
Millennium Villages Project
Columbia University, NYC
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Skype: mlberg

[heather zornetzer]

Hi all,

this is another heather (!) writing from the 1st Central American Open Source Software Conference being hosted in Nicaragua. There's interest in exactly this kind of CIC initiative being brainstormed here.

To give my 2 cents on what the Latin America region looks like in terms of CIC % right now, it's probably at or above 50% already, depending on the sector (health, education, governance, etc.). Seems like in this case, that maybe there could be a country or regional scaled metric?

As for focusing on partnership building and support for this idea,
we - the Sustainable Sciences Institute, with an eHealth "solution lab" in Nicaragua - are working hard to strengthen collaborations and training programs between the Ministry of Health, engineering and med school programs, as well as the NGO sector in the region. We'd love to help support Latin American CIC demand, and in my experience that would go over really well for (the few!) funders that do work in the region. There exists a pretty solid developer community here, but it's not at all connected to many of the other ICTD initiatives out there.

excited to see this moving forward!

-heather

--
Heather Zornetzer
Program Coordinator, ICT for Health
Sustainable Sciences Institute -- www.ssilink.org
San Francisco, California  |  Managua, Nicaragua

hzorn...@gmail.com  |  skype: hzornetzer  |  USA +1.530.902.0134  |  Nicaragua +505.8.630.7755

[j.gosier]

Hey, I'm excited to participate in this and I agree with Matt's
original statements. Initially I feel like this is something that
should be 'applied for' like a copyright or an ISDN number on a
project-by-project basis. This is for many reasons but largely
because approving a 'lab' opens up the possibility that once approved
the lab will just start outsourcing all of it's work to other
countries as a front. That would be dubious, but we have to think of
all levels of accountability and how the system could be abused.

Since someone brought up my company, Appfrica Labs, I also agree with
the fact that while I'd love to support the general CIC concept, there
are some occasions where participating in some sort of mandatory
projects would not be in our best interest. We would always
appreciate the work, but we also want to make sure that locally
developed solutions are also getting supported. In other words, even
though it's coded in country in the literal sense doesn't always mean
it's a 'local solution'. Again, the example of outsourcing to India
comes to mind, where people develop software for companies without
having much of a say in what it's going to be used for or if it's even
needed. There just needs to be a balance between the two types of
work.

In my my mind the system could look something like this on a companies
website: Our Company is a CIC participating organization. Here are a
list of all our projects which have been CIC approved and each
projects CIC number. Just a thought.

Thus, CIC would be sort of like a collection of organizations that one
can work with in each country to ensure they are supporting local
economies. This would put pressure on a lot of NGOs who insist on
developing projects through foreign contractors or 'in-house' talent
when verified alternatives (CIC approved companies) are available.
The solution for them would be to hire local contractors or hire local
staff to do the majority of the work.

It would also be cool to have a blog or community where we could
highlight all the CIC projects being worked on around the world.

- Jon of appfrica.org

> hzornet...@gmail.com  |  skype: hzornetzer  |  USA +1.530.902.0134  |

>  Nicaragua +505.8.630.7755
>
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Matt Berg <mlb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I think the pledged percentage of a project could be incredibly
> > powerful/useful with funders.  Ideally, it would be great if the CIC
> > percentage is incorporated as selection criteria or consideration when
> > awarding projects.  In a sense, the CIC percentage rates will be market
> > driven and should in theory increase as demand for capacity in the field
> > grows.  To push for CIC, I agree we should set a standard that people should
> > aim for right off the bat (markets can be slow :)).  However, it will be
> > interesting to see what groups are currently hitting.
>
> > I guess an initial step would be to start defining how CIC is calculated.
> > Obviously a topic for another thread and I look forward to the discourse.
>
> > Thanks,
>
> > Matt
>

[James]

I don't have too much to add that hasn't already been written.

But there is one thing that comes to mind: how would you evaluate work
done to modify or extend an existing codebase? My particular area of
focus is learning technology (which, BTW, doesn't seem to get much
attention in eHealth circles), and I often work with tools like Moodle
(http://moodle.org/). If a new module was developed "in-country" could
it qualify for CiC certification? Or does the entire codebase need to
reach a certain level?

And another quick one: what about electronic learning materials? This
could be anything from documents to Flash games to instructional
videos. But maybe that would be too much of a stretch for CiC. Unless
the name was changed to "Created in Country" :P

Looking forward to the continued conversation,
James