Melisse Benn will be visiting us from South Africa to give us an overview of an open source project called African Virtual Open Initiative and Resources (AVOIR). This is a project at the University of Western Cape, funded in part by USAID, which is promoting the use of open source as an alternative to commercial software in Africa. The following is excerpted from Melisse's concept paper.

Many of the areas of expertise found in the developed world exist in Africa, but they are scarce and the experts are not concentrated in numerous well-funded, high-quality institutions as they are in the USA and other developed countries. By the creative use of technology, it is hoped to create virtual concentrations of expertise comparable to that in developed countries.

The project hopes to develop open source to support the following areas:

• Open source software development and advice provision particularly to small businesses and government
• Open content education, research and development, including the development and provision of methods and tools for managing the development, versioning, and sharing of open content
• Open database development to create freely shared data (e.g. bibliographic data, geospatial data, biodiversity data, oceanographic data, etc.) in a number of areas based on open source principles
• Open collaboration and project management based on lessons learned from open source development