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Monday, March 26, 2007

Software success in Ghana

The BBC posted an article on software success in Ghana. (I copied the picture from there). What you see in the picture is the way it works. Guido Sohne, a Ghanaian software developer (through his blog I learned he has some German blood somehow) developed the software for this system. If you make a picture of this black and white design with your internet-enabled mobile phone, it will give you all the needed information about the building in the background, linking you to wikipedia.

Guido played a role in developing the semacode necessary for this technology. From the article: However, any example of African-created technology being used in Western cyberspace still proves the exception rather than the rule.
"If the size of Africa's IT industry corresponded to the edge of a wheel," Sohne says, "each turn would show just how far and how fast we are being left behind."


It is a nice example that it is possible to design technical software solutions in Ghana. So I'd love to see more appropriate design for the Ghanaian context, probably by linking development workers and software developpers. But who is going to pay for that?

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