The state of Open Source & Joomla! in Southern Africa

Further to my blog post earlier this month about the Open Source in ICT Conference [http://joomlajournal.blogspot.com/2008/05/joomla-day-south-africa-joomla-open.html]...

I have returned from the event, which was professionally organised by Business Zone, with mixed feelings about the state of open source software in the Southern African internet landscape.

The conference was attended by about 45 delegates from a variety of government departments [Defence, Education, Intelligence, Social Development] corporate banking [FNB], internet research specialists [Arthur Goldstuck], web related smme's [Slingshot], corporate consultants [VOX], open source developers [UWC] and NGO's [Joomla! Southern African Portal, FLOSS Portal, NetDay] amongst others. All in all a hetrogenous, almost eclectic mix of clients, service providers, producers and consultants.

Highlights of the event for me were the networking opportunities that happened on the fringes, in the form of business card exchanges, with the possibility of follow on business relationships, collaborative ideas that seemed right to both parties who had not previously heard of one another and exposure to a healthy range of ways that open source software is being used and employed in innovative, traditional and unconventional ways through a number of Case Studies delivered by experts in their respective professions.

Lowlights of the two day affair were the apparent lack of accredited / approved service providers, incidents of poor project management, failed implementations and impersonations by under-qualified and inexperienced consultants, coupled with a general lack of awareness of industry trends and conditions that surfaced during the stimulating and challenging debates and question and answer interactive times following some of the presentations.

The way forward is not necessarily clearer to me, however most of the delegates indicated that they had benefitted from the Open source in ICT conference, and we have undertaken to maintain communication by means of another wonderful tool in the Google Box, which I have setup and cordially invite anyone interested in developing, using, changing, deploying, migrating to or managing open source technologies in their industry / organisation / company / community.

You can find and join the Open Source in ICT user group here: http://groups.google.com/group/open-source-in-ict

Relating this to Joomla! is the next challenge, as the demand for Joomla! powered websites increases at an alarmingly exciting rate, with requests for training and project work coming through my inbox on a daily, sometimes hourly basis, sometimes with the unfortunate reason that the first service provider has under-performed or in some cases simply abandoned the project, leaving clients high and dry with incomplete websites, that should by now be fully functioning content management systems.

This paints an opportunistic picture for those who do deliver on time and over and above expectation (like the Joomla! developers whom we refer our project requests to), however for clients it may mean paying dearly for school fees before they find a development partner whom they can rely on and trust to produce the Joomla! powered goods they are willing to pay for.

I would be interested in comments from clients and developers alike, who may be able to shed more light on this rapidly expanding industry of website content management, not only using Joomla! but also Plone, Drupal, Mambo, Zope and a whole directory of smaller, less well known open source systems.

That's all folks.

Sean

All 4 Joomla!
& Joomla! 4 all