GitHub's Social Impact and Tech for Social Good team has released a new report titled Open Source Software in India, Kenya, Egypt, and Mexico. It follows 3.5 years of work by the team on open source software (OSS) in the social sector, beginning with an April 2020 research report that examined OSS built in high-income countries such as the United States. That earlier work surfaced recurring difficulties for the social sector: budgeting for required labor costs, sustaining projects on limited funding, and recruiting volunteer support.
The new study moves the geographic focus. Much of the OSS the social sector produces, digital public goods included, is deployed in low- and middle-income countries, so understanding OSS communities and their challenges there is a precondition for inclusive design and development. Four low- and middle-income countries with strong tech ecosystems were chosen: India, Kenya, Egypt, and Mexico. Conducted with research partner OBI Digital, the project drew on 53 experts and 578 survey responses.
Findings by country
- India: individual tech entrepreneurs are personally funding major open source initiatives that support vulnerable communities.
- Kenya and Mexico: the social sector in Kenya and civic tech projects in Mexico have each been a key driver of OSS.
- Egypt: student perceptions of OSS have shifted considerably in recent years.
Across the set, all four countries have at least one federal policy on OSS.
We cannot think without data...Our clients are poor, and we needed good data sets to understand what was missing or lacking. But data is not cheap….and the requirements keep changing with each project. There has to be a certain amount of flexibility and I found that with the open source community.
Learning OSS makes you not dependent on a tool, but you are learning a process instead. You can easily adapt to anything, and people who graduate from Tunapanda have a benefit over other people because of the learning process.
Perceptions among computer science students in Egypt are changing. Previous generations of software developers hacked into software because they couldn’t afford the licenses. “This generation of students doesn’t want to spend time cracking software or steal anything.” Instead, with the proliferation of OSS, they can turn to code that is meant to be repurposed and/or modified.
In rural communities and indigenous communities, especially where they have resistance communities, you will find more OSS utilization. It’s the communities that have the least that tend to experiment with OSS.
The Latin American community was especially closely knit during the pandemic. People were coding and building things together. The remote aspect of it got more people involved.
