The Independent Electoral Commission will spend R3 million to fix its broken website as complaints mount.

Wow!

Allow me to first provide an overview of the events leading up to this latest development of absurdity in the IEC website saga, before I add my own thoughts.

In late August, Alistair Otter published an article on Tectonic (a popular open source-related technology site) about how the South African Independent Electoral Commission (IEC)'s website was denying access to visitors not using the Internet Explorer web browser on a Microsoft Windows platform. That in itself was nothing new: in January 2006 I blogged about their site, listed among others, pointing out that exact shortcoming - see State of South African political websites. Ian Gilfillan commented, bringing to my attention that South Africa's political web wasn't any better in 2004 either. However, the focus of that post shifted to the DA in particular, because I successfully compromised the security of their CMS. ;)

To date, over two months later, the IEC have made no discernible effort to correct this flaw. Visitors to http://www.iec.org.za ("www" subdomain required - WHY!?) using any browser other than Internet Explorer will receive this message:

Our server detected that you are using a browser or operating system (e.g. Netscape, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome etc.) which is currently incompatible with our website. The current website is only compatible with Microsoft Internet Explorer V4 (and upward) on the Windows operating system.

In the days that followed Alistair's Tectonic post, Aslam Raffee (chairman of the South African Government OSS working group), Daniel Mashao (the CTO of SITA) and Helen King (Principal Advisor of The Shuttleworth Foundation) laid a complaint with the Human Rights Commission (HRC) against the IEC for excluding non-Internet Explorer users from its website. Aslam has made the full complaint available on this blog.

The latest developments that made headlines today, in response to the HRC complaint, is that the IEC will be spending R3 million to fix their broken website. And when they say broken, they're referring to the fact that it was designed and developed (way back in 1998) using Microsoft's proprietary technologies - so in effect they will be redesigning and redeveloping it to support all their visitors. My response to this news echos what everyone else has said.

On top of that, Karl Fischer - a well-known open source advocate - launched the No Firefox! No Vote! campaign today:

...urging Internet users to email or fax IEC chief information officer Libisi Maphanga, to demand that the organisation make its website available to all users.

LYW Karl. Visit Stop Digital Apartheid to get in on the act.

Raoul Snyman, a fellow web developer, has published An Open Letter to Mr Maphanga, CIO of the IEC.

So where am I going with all of this?

Well, regular readers of this blog will know that in the past, I had a tendency to name and shame the big brand national websites that failed acceptable support for web standards (to the point that I even maintained an "Evangelism list" for a while), in an effort to get them to realise and admit their shortcomings, and as a result make the appropriate changes for the benefit of their users. I doubt it made any difference, but if anything I hope it provided some insight for those who stumbled upon it.

Six years on, with a wide variety of modern web browsers and technologies fighting a new browser war, there sadly still exists an ignorant mindset that internet user's best interests should be disregarded in favour of designing and developing for a specific browser, platform or device. This has got to change.

The IEC have become the new posterchild for the return of the evangelism list.

My resolution is this: a public wiki or blog that shames (in a constructive manner) the local websites that fail an acceptable level of support for W3C web standards (ie. they're browser/platform/device incompatible), accessibility guidelines, and potentially also best practices in web design and development.

Alongside this list, links to local designers and developers who are accredited with providing the relevant services that meet this demand - and are willing to do it for a budget well within R3 million.

And for good measure, a list of sites that showcase the multitude of benefits associated with a standards-compliant, accessible and usable approach to modern web design.

If you like this idea and think it has the potential for good, lets hear your thoughts in the comments below, or you can contact me directly. Thanks.

Starting Monday Red Hat will have an SA-based country manager who will be responsible for the Southern Africa market on behalf of the company.

Red Hat previously had no offices in Africa, preferring to work through local partners. Paul Holt, Red Hat regional director, says South Africa and Southern Africa is a market with growing opportunities for Red Hat.

And again via Tectonic, South Africans don’t understand OSS - Microsoft:

“Deep dev of the core OS” was not likely to happen in South Africa where students were “still grappling with coding skills”, says Matusow. They are “not going to dive into the inner workings of Linux”, says Matusow.

“Any innovation on Linux that is broadly applicable will immediately be picked up by Red Hat or Novell and commercialized globally with little economic benefit coming back to SA.”

One response to Matusow points out that a number of key open source projects have South African roots. Ubuntu, the most popular Linux distribution, was founded by South African Mark Shuttleworth while OpenBSD and OpenSSH are the brainchild of ex-South African Theo de Raadt.

What a gem. Dugg here.

Via Tectonic:

Technical development of the portal was done by Cape Town-based Jam Warehouse, working with Bytes Systems Integration as strategy partner and Durban small business AdaptIT.

Jam Warehouse's Denham Trollip:

We've built a solid, flexible and highly scalable portal using only open-source software and open standards. This project has proved that it's feasible to build enterprise-grade platforms using only open-source tools. We hope it will be an important demonstration project for other municipalities and government agencies.

Check out eThekwini Online - The official site of Durban. Nicely done! Also take a look at our other major municipal portals: Cape Town, Johannesburg, Tshwane, Mangaung (Bloemfontein), Nelson Mandela Bay (Port Elizabeth..).

"Wired News is reporting that Mozilla downloads have surged following advice from the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) to avoid Internet Explorer for security reasons. Download numbers approximately doubled in the days following the US-CERT recommendation, which was made in the form of an update to an earlier vulnerability note and comments to the press."

UPDATE: Mozilla Gains on IE - Study shows Microsoft has lost a percentage of market share to open source browser.

You'll have to submit a proposal and some references, if you want an advance on the bounty. My budget for these bounties in 2004 is USD 100,000. I'm open to proposals for projects that will further the goals laid out...[snip]

...which creates the streaming character effect out of 'The Matrix' on your desktop. The program will blend with an existing background or be drawn overtop of it and does not impede normal desktop operations.

It works suprisingly well on my archaic Pentium 266 - highly configurable, and doubles as a screen saver. You gotta love OSS!

Near the end of last month, Business Day posted an article confirming that the Government had decided to adopt OSS and develop support programs with local research institutes and universities.

For months the State IT Agency had winced at the incessant expense of buying software licences for hundreds of thousands of staff spread across government departments. Now the agency has declared that it will ditch expensive brand name software in many cases and switch to opensource alternatives.

This story was slashdotted, the result of which started numerous debates from the site's readers about the decision, South Africa as a country, a continent, other countries, patriots, ex-patriots, Apartheid, Microsoft, and panties.com.

It's interesting to read how we are perceived as a country (in some cases a continent) and the naivity of most of the site's users. The Government's OSS site rightfully reports that most of the comments are ignorant, for example:

How will this affect apartheid?

to which was replied

Hey - wake up dude! Apartheid died in '94...

What bothers SA is that they buy licenses of software, but yet not one company develops software in SA.

to which was replied

Not one company develops software in SA? I wonder what I have been doing for the past years. FYI South Africa has a vibrant software industry with some very innovative developers.

SA is a 2nd world country at best. It's very violent and corrupt. Bullets are flying all the time. SA's short golden days have ended.

to which was replied

I live and work in South Africa, and I'm white. Nobody's demanding extortion money from me. Nobody's shooting at me. In fact, things are better than ever. We still have a deeply corrupt government, but at least we elected them for a change. And for all their embezzlement and lunatic AIDS policies, their decision to go the OSS route gives me renewed hope for the future. Come visit us. You'd dig it.

What is the population of Africa? You'd think with a population the size of that, they will never run out of programmers.

to which was replied

You can't count every one of a billion Africans as a potential programmer. Not everyone has electricity, for one thing. Of those who do, not everyone can afford a computer -- and there aren't a lot of libraries with public Internet access.

Other comments simply made me smile:

Kudos to South Africa. It's turned into one of the most unenlightened regime to the most forward looking government in 10 years or so. I hope Cape Town becomes a high tech Mecca and Redmond becomes a bantustan for crappy software developers.

We have an economy poised for a major upturn where as most of the rest of the world is teetering on a depression. If you are no longer living in South Africa then good riddance, if you are then get off your whinny butt and do something for your country or emigrate if you think the rest of the world is going to be so much better!

CNET's Paul Festa, who has received criticism in the past from the Mozilla community, joined the party yesterday announcing Monday's release of the final version policy document.

The detailed strategy document was made public by the Government's OSS Work Group, having been accepted by the GITOC. The working group, composed primarily of government agency representatives, holds the primary responsibility for formulating the government's open source policy. The government is the largest single buyer of computer technology in South Africa.

The project aims to give learners, pensioners and all citizens of South Africa access to computers in their mother tongue. Firstly with tools for email and web-browsing, then office productivity tools and lastly with a completely translated desktop.

Since that post it appears that the translation project has received widespread publicity and has had prominent coverage in recent months. And they've kept true to their mission: Mozilla has been translated into the following six languages: Xhosa, Zulu, Venda, Northern Sotho, Siswati and Tswana. The language packs (and the progress thereof) are available for download.

The Internet, the earth’s digital commons, is of increasing importance in our lives. The key to its vitality is interoperability – open development, open standards and open source software are what led to the birth of the Internet in the first place, as well as to other important universal systems such as global e-mail addressing and delivery.