Put another way, 80% of something can be accounted for by just 20% of the total possible reasons or causes for it. One common adage in the IT industry is that 80% of all end users typically use just 20% of a software application’s features. In software testing, 80% of observed errors are often caused by 20% of the entire pool of known bugs. And so on.

Depending upon who you ask, the 80/20 rule cruelly predicts that in every human endeavor effort and payoff are inversely related.

At Microsoft, the 80/20 rule was treated like gospel and frequently cited by software testers, engineers, group managers and even the CEO, Steve Ballmer. Microsoft applied the 80/20 rule to everything from balancing DHCP server usage to analyzing crash reports for Windows and predicting how Chairman Bill Gates would divide his time between Microsoft and the Gates Foundation.

In a memo to his employees, Ballmer wrote about an epiphany he had with his company’s error-reporting tool:

One really exciting thing we learned is how, among all these software bugs involved in the report, a relatively small proportion causes most of the errors. About 20 percent of the bugs causes 80 percent of all errors, and—this is stunning to me—1 percent of bugs caused half of all errors.

Applying logic to this statement, the inverse must also be true: 80% of the bug-free functionality is produced by 20% of the code.

If this is true, then software engineers—not just at Microsoft, but all engineers—are writing an awful lot of crappy code.

Enter the Zone of Suck
A similar distribution exists for the requirements of a software project. The project manager knows this well—it’s their job, after all, to understand the full set of requirements, keep a project on track, on budget and delivered on time to the satisfaction of the customer. The project manager’s mantra for their team, therefore, is to focus on the 20% that matters. I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard this phrase uttered during my career.

Every software team knows that projects begin with a set of requirements and proceed through a series of steps where the original specifications are compared with the end product for completeness and acceptability. Without going into the various software development methodologies, generally speaking it’s a process of refinement and revision. During each revision, if the requirements of the process follows a Pareto distribution, a few key issues will bubble up and need to be addressed, while old requirements will gradually fade away. Here’s an example Pareto distribution for a software project:

The left vertical axis is an arbitrary measure of the importance of a requirement while the right axis indicates a cumulative percentage. To apply an 80/20 rule of requirements management to a project, two lines (above) are added to indicate the 80% cut-off between the significant few, at left, and the insignificant many.

Another software adage which bears emphasizing here is that, in a given project, the first 80% is easy while the last 20% is hard. Early in the project life cycle, decisions are made about things like the choice of platform, database, data model, programming language and core functionality of the software. These decisions, once made, very seldom change. As with all things, the devil is in the details.

As one who’s worked for big software companies, small software shops and startups, it’s nearly always attention to the last 20% that makes a software project “pop” or fall flat. The engineer may report that they’ve coded the first 80% of an application according to the specification, but if the last 20% is rushed or neglected then code defects, poorly implemented features and performance bottlenecks can kill a project. Budgets are exhausted, deadlines missed, the customer is unhappy and the engineers are fed up. At this stage, the project may be said to have entered the Zone of Suck. It’s a place no one wants to be.

Failure to identify and respond to the last 20%—the significant few—near the end of a software project’s life cycle is what separates a usable, elegant, high-performing application from one that, well…isn’t. In the case of web applications, the ones that fail to impress usually reveal a similar set of problems: lackluster user interfaces, sloppy CSS, poor usability, missing features, slow response times and so on. Too often, shortcuts are taken to rush a product out the door and this critical last 20% (i.e., what the customer notices and expects) suffers as a result.

A Better Alternative
If we accept that the 80/20 rule has some merit, then it’s possible for software teams to anticipate the last 20% and avoid the Zone of Suck. Proponents of the Agile software development methodology will tell you that their principles are ideally suited to anticipating the last 20%. They’ll further tell you that changing requirements, even late in the process, are welcome so long as they satisfy the customer. Happy customers lead to repeat business, referrals and more revenue for the software makers. For startups, it can mean the difference between securing a second round of funding, a major liquidity event, or a lot of unhappy users and investors.

Regardless of which development methodology is used, a software business should never tell the customer, “it wasn’t in our contract,” that something which is clearly an oversight is “expected behavior,” or that it’s okay to release a beta version product with 20% of the bugs outstanding. This points to a major failure and is the quickest way to develop a poor reputation and kill off any hope of future business or funding.

Being involved in a winning software project feels great. The project managers, engineers and client are all stoked. If you’re lucky, the end-users you’ve designed it for will love it, too, and your application attains the Holy Grail of web software: the hockey stick moment.

The good news is it’s possible to change, if your team is willing to listen, engage with the customer and commit to the last 20%.

The much-anticipated arrival of the SEACOM cable, linking east and southern Africa to Europe and India, topped African tech news and sparked a great deal of controversy online. Rebekah Heacock collects reactions from the blogosphere over at Global Voices Online. Whiteafrican does a comprehensive roundup of the debate surrounding the event on tweets and blogs.

A group of Nigerian twitterers and bloggers started a movement called Light Up Nigeria with the intent of mobilizing Nigerians to demand reliable electricity from their government. Solomon Sydelle gives an excellent backgrounder on the problem and provides a growing list of social media contacts related to the movement. Blacklooks collects critical reactions to the online campaign and suggests that what Nigeria really needs are flyers and a Banksy to address the problem at the street level.

TED Africa Director Emeka Okafor has a short post and YouTube video link about the Eden Campus, a school that teaches business skills and entrepreneurship to marginalized South Africans.

StartupAfrica offers some technical tips for building an African micro-blogging platform with a listing of existing services and an interesting discussion by a variety of Africa tech heads.

Africa Rural Connect teams up with the NPCA to ask the question, “What’s your best idea for Africa?” with a focus on improving the lives of farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. The ARC launch party was held on July 21st in Washington DC. Here’s Molly Mattessich describing the inspiration for ARC in a video presentation.

I’d be remiss without mentioning something about TEDGlobal 2009 in Oxford. Trying to follow the live stream of mind-blowing presentations online is like drinking from a fire hose. Brainpicker filters the stream with some selected highlights. Among all the talks, an unexpected favorite came from Brother Paulus Terwitte, a German friar who thinks we’ve become like primitive hunter-gatherers, preoccupied with collecting information, instead of taking in less and deepening our lives.

The irony of Brother Terwitte’s message in the context of this post is not lost on this blogger. With this, I am going outside for a Sunday stroll.

Naijaborn is not a Nigerian Facebook
Nor is it a Nigerian clone of LinkedIn, MySpace or any other social network, as Mambe Nanje Churchill was quick to point out in a recent interview. Naijaborn (or “Nigerian born”) is a uniquely African web venture built without any external code or whitebox social networks. The site aims to be a people/business directory designed specifically for Nigerians at home and abroad. Says Churchill:

Naijaborn is a naija talents database, a people/business search engine for Nigerians, a business marketing tool, magazine, media platform, and last but not least Naijaborn is proudly Naijaborn. It’s built from scratch, making it unique and very easy to adapt to future market trends. So we stand out because we will be able to rewrite our system any day anytime while most won’t because they don’t build from scratch.

The ability to deliver custom features is one of Naijaborn’s great strengths. This stands in contrast to many online social hubs, which nearly anyone can have up and running in no time with Ning or Flux. The downside to these sites is customization is usually limited and they often end up looking like one of hundreds of others. Moreover, Flux and Ning sites aren’t optimized for low-bandwidth connections, making them slow loading in most of Africa. By comparison, Naijaborn.com is snappy even in a crowded cyber cafe.

Mobile, Maps and Music
The public beta is only the beginning for Naijaborn’s founders, who have plans to integrate mobile features by partnering with iYam.mobi (reviewed here and here) to enable on-the-go SMS searches for people or businesses. iYam.mobi would permit anyone with a mobile phone to send a query such as “find doctor lagos” to the Naijaborn.com SMS gateway and get the top results returned via SMS.

The founders also want to add map search functionality to Naijaborn, whereby users might plot their locations on a world map with links to their profiles. Churchill reports that they’re still actively developing the search module, which will support both geolocation and features like natural language queries to enable searches like “web developer in nigeria using php.”

Perhaps the most compelling feature is one that will enable Nigerian artists to showcase their music online. Churchill from the Naijafeed interview:

Naijaborn already has music upload and we will strive to make a vibrant way for indie artists to showcase their music and later on it will include a sales system where someone can launch his/her album exclusively on Naijaborn. So www.naijaborn.com/beta/music is something that will evolve beyond the naijaborn.com domain. So sure, we’re going to get something like Myspace but it will be a 100% naija way of doing it.

With Nigeria’s burgeoning music scene, it’s not difficult to imagine a near future when singles or entire albums are launched exclusively on the site.

Final thoughts
Naijaborn borrows elements of a social business directory (LinkedIn), a social network (Facebook) and a hub for artists/musicians (MySpace) and remixes them with Africa-appropriate tech to suit a specific target audience. It makes sense to use proprietary code to achieve this, but support for Google’s OpenSocial standard could further enhance the site with add-ons for external services such as Google Profiles, Twitter or Gatorpeeps.

Either way, it’s an impressive start for an African web venture. With creative young netrepreneurs like these at the helm and millions of web-savvy Nigerians looking to connect online, this will surely be one to watch in the coming year.

Follow Naijaborn online
Twitter: naijaborn
CruchBase: Naijaborn
Facebook: Naijaborn
Startup rank:

Africans increasingly depend on mobile telephony and information technologies for both social and economic interactions. Pan regional giants MTN, Vodacom, Orascom and others, together with smaller regional telecoms, are rolling out 3G and EDGE-based mobile data services to their subscribers. Despite this, handheld devices with Internet access remain a comparative luxury for most Sub-Saharan Africans. SMS is still the most popular, and affordable, non-voice value-added service. Meanwhile, broadband penetration in Africa continues to hover at around one percent.

Given these factors, wouldn’t it be nice if there was an intuitive method for mobile users to find, connect and interact with one another?

The First Mobile Mobile Phone Directory
This was the question posed by Fritz Ekwoge, the enterprising coder behind Kerawa.com (interviewed on this blog and profiled here). He noted that there was no mobile phone directory in Cameroon, not to mention for most of the continent. Without an easy way of contacting businesses in his country, Fritz set to work prototyping Africa’s first mobile mobile phone directory. That’s not a tautology, Fritz points out. His new directory service, iYam.mobi, is purely SMS-based, which means that any handset is capable of creating a profile and querying the iYam directory with a simple text message. Thus, it’s the mobile directory that goes everywhere you do.

iYam is a targeted, wholly appropriate solution designed specifically for African mobile users. It’s also the sort of service that, after using it the first time, leaves you wondering, “why didn’t I think of that?”

I was fortunate to give iYam a test drive during the private beta, along with Erik Hersman and others. During this time the iYam prototype was running on a modest hardware platform consisting of a pair of Samsung mobile phones connected to a laptop with Bluetooth. My impressions are given below. The service enters its public beta today.

Using the iYam Directory
The beauty of the iYam directory is its simplicity and ease-of-use. Since the service is entirely SMS-based, getting listed in the directory is as easy as sending a text message. iYam permits you to use only 155 characters to describe yourself. With this constraint, you’re forced to make those characters count. Twitter users are already familiar with this concept.

Fritz sent me a pointer to some simple instructions on using iYam’s service. Less than a minute later my profile was registered in the iYam directory and searchable by anyone in Cameroon—or Africa, for that matter. I simply composed the following SMS:

…and sent it to iYam’s MTN number. iYam replied with an SMS indicating that my profile had been created. Next, I sent a request to iYam to see who else was listed in the directory. This took the form of the straightforward query, “find engineer limbe” which returned an SMS with the contact information for the top five software engineers in my area. I found several new people who I might then contact for an impromptu meetup, or hire for their services.

Directory results are returned as an abbreviated list of names and corresponding phone numbers. Want to view someone’s profile? No problem. Simply send “whois [number]” to iYam and you’ll receive additional details for that individual or business. The fourth and final command you can send to the directory is “me” which returns the profile associated with your mobile number.

Thoughts on iYam’s Future
Needless to say, the potential for this application is huge. I demonstrated iYam to friends and business owners in my neighborhood, all of whom grasped the value of the service immediately. The first response from nearly every Cameroonian business owner was, “how do I get listed in the directory?”

Currently, finding a product or service in Cameroon depends on local knowledge, referrals from friends, luck or some combination thereof. For example, searching for a specific laptop model in Douala may involve an exchange of phone calls and text messages with a half dozen well-informed friends. Imagine instead sending “find laptop douala” to iYam and getting a list of results back. One might then send an SMS with specifics to each of the top five business listings and receive replies on pricing and availability.

One obvious usability question has to do with accessing paged results, as the directory currently returns only the top five listings. Fritz indicated that he’s heard several suggestions for how to handle this, so expect to see an update in the near future.

There’s the bigger question of how to shape iYam into a business. Erik Hersman tackled this side of the equation with Fritz in our email exchange, so I’ll defer to him in his parallel coverage of iYam.

That the service requires nothing more than a low-range mobile phone and SMS is perhaps its greatest strength. This was clearly borne out by the informal product testing I did with local Cameroonian business owners. People genuinely appreciate that a computer or Internet access isn’t required to create a profile or query the directory. It’s a powerful democratizing service built on an inexpensive, familiar, widely available device.

I think iYam also succeeds in just about every way by capitalizing on the philosophy of small software, in which a competitive advantage is gained from the unique challenges posed by Africa—challenges that are typically perceived as hindrances rather than conditions for innovation.

Fritz reports that availability of the service will be 20-24 hours every day during the week, and 24 hours per day on weekends. Beta testers in Ghana, Gabon, Niger, Benin, the UK and Cameroon have tried the service so far. With increased usage during the public beta, Fritz says he will scale the hardware accordingly.

iYam currently operates from two servers: one for MTN, and a second for Orange. MTN requests are served by iYam MTN (00237 7487 3391). Orange requests are served by iYam Orange (00237 9626 5496). International numbers are served by iYam MTN.

We ascribe beauty to that which is simple;
which has no superfluous parts;
which exactly answers its end;
which stands related to all things;
which is the mean of many extremes.

- The Conduct of Life, Chapter VIII, Beauty (via TinyApps blog)

Doug McIlroy, one of the founders of the Unix tradition, may well have drawn inspiration from Emerson when he summarized the Unix philosophy with the following three tenets: “Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.”

This philosophy placed a special emphasis on the use of a large number of software tools—small programs that could be strung together through a command line interpreter using pipes, as opposed to a single monolithic program that includes all of the same functionality.

An approach like this worked well because, in the late 1970’s and early 80’s, programmers had to work within the confines of relatively small and expensive resources. While difficult to conceive of today, 16KB of RAM was common and 64KB was considered expansive (I remember writing my first assembly program on the Commodore 64—I thought I was in heaven). Likewise, storage in the megabyte range was a luxury. Programmers created small software with tiny allocations of storage and RAM that ran on processors that were Lilliputian by today’s standards. Every byte and clock cycle counted, and thus a lot of work was done to make programs fit into available resources.

The rise of bloatware
Nowadays we have thousands of times the processing power, memory and storage yet, from the user’s perspective, software for the desktop, web and mobile seems to run slower than it should, or used to. We’ve been conditioned to accept long load times for applications, Ajax delays in Gmail, adware, automatic updates and the scourge of bundled third-party software.

Nathan Myhrvold, physicist and former CTO of Microsoft, once compared software to the physical properties of a gas for a keynote address in 1997. In a marriage of Moore’s Law and the Ideal Gas Law, he declared that “software always expands to fill whatever container it is stored in,” but its growth is “inevitably limited by the rate of increase in hardware speed.” So what happens when software hits the upper bounds of the hardware it’s contained in? Myhrvold’s response: “People buy new hardware because the software requires it.”

What Myhrvold succeeded in defining with his four Laws of Software, intentionally or not, is a Unified Theory of Bloatware. In one sense, his Third Law kept the PC business thriving by requiring bigger, faster hardware to run increasingly bloated software.

In a challenge to Moore’s Law comparing installed disk usage of Microsoft Office and Open Office (see above), we find that, “at this rate of growth, Microsoft Office Standard 2013 will be 5000MB, and the Microsoft Office Premium Platinum Plus 2013 edition (a larger edition than the Standard edition) will come on a set of Blu-ray discs.” The take-home message: “Microsoft Office Standard edition’s growth is more closely in step with maximum disk capacities.” Myhrvold was right, at least insofar as Microsoft Office is concerned.

One of the best attacks on bloatware ever, Thank you, Adobe Reader 9!, comes from Ben Hoyt, one of a trio of Kiwi brothers behind Brush Technology. His post is acerbic, hilarious and gives Adobe a well-deserved thrashing as a prime example of what’s wrong with contemporary software. Ben posits the question, Can Modern Software Be Snappy? and draws on some examples from coding for embedded devices and graphics programming. Both are great reads on this topic.

Incidentally, if you haven’t yet please do take Ben’s advice and replace Adobe Reader with Foxit’s PDF reader. You’ll not only save yourself disk space and headache, but avoid some rather nasty security vulnerabilities at the same time.

Small is the the next Big Thing
In an ironic twist, with the rising popularity of netbooks and rapid growth of mobile devices as the default computing platform, software is returning to a focus on “do one thing and do it well” within the resource constraints of these small devices. Moreover, as consumers and businesses alike tighten their budgets during the global economic downturn, extending the life of old hardware is becoming a necessity.

The good news for end-users is that alternatives to bloat do exist. If you want to go really small, the single best resource for apps that run will run on nearly any PC hardware has always been at TinyApps.org. Peruse the list, try a few out (none is bigger than 1.44 MB and many are contained in a single executable), link them up with some keyboard shortcuts and you’ll be working smarter and faster than ever. Trust me, it works.

For the engineer, designing small software that can run efficiently with limited resources was, until recently, a dying art. One of the best resources for programmers is the excellent (and free) book Small Memory by Charles Weir and James Noble. You can also listen to the authors interviewed on Software Engineering Radio.

I’m probably preaching to the choir here, but along with this book it’s worth considering some small software maxims for the engineer. Among the best are Eric Raymond’s design rules in The Art of Unix Programming, Mike Gancarz’s The UNIX Philosophy, and Rob Pike’s Notes on Programming in C. They’re summarized nicely here.

Included with the “small is beautiful” software design ethos is an emphasis on performance analysis, code profiling and refactoring. Too often, in my experience, this step is sacrificed under time pressure to deliver a product to market, yet it’s a crucial phase of any project. Bottlenecks often do occur in surprising places and speed hacks seldom work without solid metrics. It also never hurts to run an app through a processor emulator like QEMU to get a feel for how it will perform on older hardware.

Implications for African software
Citing the challenges brought by bad governance, poverty, low bandwidth, and some of the harshest environments and use-cases in the world, Erik Hersman noted that, “If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.” If “do one thing and do it well” may be said to capture the philosophies of Unix and small software, Hersman’s declaration is the battle cry for a legion of cottage industry African software entrepreneurs.

By adopting the philosophy of small software, the developers crafting solutions on the African continent are in a unique position to reap opportunity from their environment. Witness highly specialized, targeted applications such as FrontlineSMS, MobilePress, Kerawa, Afrigator, Maneno, Zoopy, Ushahidi and countless others—all created by Africans and distributed online, often for free. One of the most interesting recent applications built for the developing world, FrontlineForms, is targeted specifically at low- to mid-level mobile devices.

These applications (and a lot of others I’ve surely overlooked) are at the forefront of what Samuel Dean called a “knock down, drag ‘em out renaissance…involving guerrilla apps, widgets, and many other software offerings that don’t happen to come from Microsoft or other gorilla-sized providers.”

The future of software is small. The implications for Africa, and the developing world at large, are huge.

Community radio is an enormously powerful ICT4D tool for the developing world. The BBC World Service Trust has worked with NGOs on a range of these projects, from emergency response following disasters such as Cyclone Nargis in Burma last year, to post-conflict zones like Sierra Leone, promoting government transparency in Nigeria, training reporters, and improving women’s rights in Afghanistan. It’s often a two-way exchange—engaged listeners call in with news and opinions and some host their own programs.

Staying connected to the outside world
One of the best case studies of a community radio project enhanced with Internet was recently revisited by Matt Berg (born in Cameroon, incidentally), who helped build Radio Beeray with Geekcorps Mali. He describes how their project leveraged Internet with radio with a weekly connection to the outside world. Using a Desert PC coupled with an R-BGAN Satellite Modem, the station was able to periodically connect to the Internet to collect local and regional news of interest to their audience. Says Matt, “Using a lot of clever engineering, we were able to limit the radio’s bandwidth consumption to about 200K/day or $6 (1MB) a week, which the Radio Director was able to use to connect his community to the outside world—certainly a lot of ‘bang for the byte’.”

This “bang for the byte” is the key to sustainability, and one of the principal reasons satellite-based connections fall short for rural connectivity projects. VSAT stations can be potentially transformative in bridging the digital divide. There was a recent inspiring account of bringing Internet to a remote Kenyan village, but this was an experiment backed by Google, who covered the equipment costs and monthly subscription fees.

The costs of a dish and related hardware (minus the solar equipment used in the Google experiment) can be upwards of $10,000 with monthly fees starting at $700 for a 128 kbps connection. Google itself is uncertain whether VSAT stations can pay for themselves in rural areas, given these prohibitive costs. Communities may surely benefit from the connection, but at these rates affordability is out of the question.

Surely mobile is the future, but until cheap iPhone knockoffs and WiFi penetration arrive in remote villages, something is needed to fill the gap. One promising cost-effective alternative for rural areas involves asynchronous Internet access.

Good dog, Fido
I’m probably exposing my age here, but back in the day before Internet there was FidoNet. For die-hard BBS users in the 1980’s like yours truly, FidoNet did something extraordinary; it enabled the exchange of emails & attachments between bulletin boards. This was achieved by using a point-to-point, store-and-forward WAN that used dial-up modems and plain old telephone (POT) lines. Later on, FidoNet was connected to the Internet, typically with the UUCP protocol. Interestingly, FidoNet and UUCP became popular for bridging the digital divide that once existed in remote parts of the United States and Europe.

                   __
                  /  \
                 /|oo \
                (_|  /_)
                 _`@/_ \    _
                |     | \   \\
                | (*) |  \   ))
   ______       |__U__| /  \//
  / FIDO \       _//|| _\   /
 (________)     (_/(_|(____/

Original FidoNet ASCII logo.

FidoNet solved the “last mile” problem of Internet access for BBS users in rural communities. Today, this store-and-forward concept has been modernized and adapted for the developing world. The pioneer in this space is United Villages, who has commercialized their “drive-by WiFi” service. The service uses what they term cached WiFi intelligence, which relies on couriers who act as digital postmen by carrying queued data (emails, web searches, downloads, etc.) between rural telecenters and access points. Motorbikes equipped with a mobile storage device serve as a mechanical backhaul alternative to miles of cables or a costly VSAT connection. It’s an elegant and cost-effective solution.

Not online, but still connected
Asynchronous Internet may not be instantaneous, but it’s capable of moving gigabytes of data to rural communities at a fraction of the cost of an always-on connection. What’s most interesting, in my view, is how communities have responded to the service. Katherine Nightingale reported on an innovative use of United Villages’ service in rural India.

Rather than use the service for sending emails and surfing the web, villagers “prefer to email their questions to someone who will do the surfing for them and return the answers in a pdf (portable document format) file.” This is not unlike how Question Box is used, which also had its origins in India.

Implications for Village Diary
As we prepare for our work in the community with Village Diary, I anticipate that we’ll leverage a combination of asynchronous Internet, SMS, community radio and citizen journalism to help bring stories from the village to a global audience. Our primary focus remains on empowering women by recording cases of abuse and providing access to social, legal and health services. At the same time, we hope to help provide a window into cultures, communities and individual stories from the village that might otherwise go unnoticed.

We’re actively looking for partners, so if you or your organization is interested feel free to drop us a note. You can also grab a button for your blog or website.

In the meantime, comments are welcome.

In fact, just within the last week three early implementations have already surfaced:

1. Kiva WordPress Plugin – by Connor Boyack and David Miller. Released on February 4th, the same day the API debuted, this plugin is a simple and effective use of the loans API. Watch for this popping up around the blogosphere in coming weeks.
2. KivaWorld – I’m a sucker for applications that make use of mapping, so this quick n’ dirty mashup gets a nod. Currently, it simply plots open loans as data points on a Google map. There are dozens of potential ways to extend this, including enhancing it with images, mapping relationships with lenders, partner organizations, historical data with loan return rates (perhaps by country/region) and so on.
3. How We Know Us – Erich has done a fascinating data visualization of the Kiva loan network which appears to explore the linkages between lenders and borrowers. Like the previous two, this is an early effort but it already shows a lot of promise. It doesn’t require too much imagination to see something like this evolve into an interactive Flash-based tool for exploring interconnected data, alá Digg Labs.

These are only three early and admittedly rough examples, but they underscore the fact that open APIs like Kiva’s are here to stay. In fact, I’d say they represent the future. In the past, monolithic APIs were the exclusive domain of large, often proprietary software companies. Today, the standards and technology have both matured in such a way as to provide the potential for real richness in data integration, both within organizations, between organizations, and with bigger entities such as Google.

Using these tools, an engineer today can bring to market a lightweight, smart mobile app that leverages cloud computing and Kiva’s (or any other organization’s) data by mincing together API calls to create something entirely new and on a comparatively short dev cycle. This is assuming, of course, that the APIs are well-documented, well-supported, and truly open.

It’s natural that some organizations would resist the move toward opening up their data for public consumption, as it were. For one, there are (valid) security concerns. This always seems to be the first issue that arises in these discussions. However, speaking as a programmer, openness and security are not mutually exclusive. In fact, exposing and documenting an open API keeps a dev team on its toes and leads to more robust code in the end, in my experience. Ask any hacker to prove me wrong.

Another (less valid) concern has to do with losing control of how an organization’s data gets manipulated “out there” in the world. To this I’d simply point out that not long ago RSS feeds once presented the same concerns to website owners. A good number of content producers were slow to adopt this standard, fearing that syndication (and thus control of presentation, including advertising) would sound their death knell. They were wrong, of course, and today it’s unthinkable not to syndicate your content with RSS.

We’re already planning to release the Village Diary with an open API to enable third party plugins and extensions. As a free an open source software product, it simply makes good sense.

Open APIs often make good business sense in the case of for-profit, proprietary software vendors as well. Rather than concentrating on client implementations, they can instead focus on their core technologies and allow others to build entire businesses off of serving different vertical markets. For-profits with open APIs like Kintera, Salesforce and Convivo spring to mind.

Other examples of successful open APIs used in the nonprofit world? Comments are welcome.

Around October of last year Roland Musi, the director of the Link-Up Development Group, mentioned his idea for something called the “village diary” to me. Link-Up has done exceptional work providing direct assistance to orphans and vulnerable children throughout the southwest of Cameroon (see The Hard Road to Nguti and Human Terms as examples). Over the years, Mr. Musi has noted a common thread in many of Link-Up’s cases. Namely, a substantial number of the children assisted by them were deprived of their rightful inheritances. Following the death of one or both parents, in nearly every case guardians lost control of the homes and property left behind. Access to legal services for the poor is almost non-existent, so documents such as wills, property titles, birth certificates and so on are rarely established in advance. As a result, most children either end up in orphanages or are forced to abandon school for work.

The concept is simple: work with families in the community to help them secure legal records of inheritance, thereby protecting the future of children by preventing them from falling into this abusive cycle. In the event of the death of one or both parents, the diary will be used to direct assistance from social workers, state attorneys and local NGOs to the survivors. At the same time, the diary will serve to record the culture and histories of families and, ultimately, entire villages.

What Mr. Musi described is essentially a tool for aggregating and disseminating information. Moreover, we realized that the problem that exists here in Cameroon is common throughout much of Sub-Saharan Africa. I suggested that the best solution was to make it into a software initiative that we could provide for free to any organization who wanted it. The Village Diary was born.

The idea gathered momentum and we were soon introduced to Mambe Nanje Churchill, the young CEO of the AfroVisioN group, located here in Buea (I recently interviewed Churchill for this blog). He came on board without hesitation and offered to perform the principal development on the project.

If you’d like to learn more about the Village Diary project, visit our website, find out who’s working on what, get an overview of how it works, or dig into the details of the software platform over at the developer’s wiki. If you’re a software developer with a desire to get involved, find out how you can help. Current news is available on our project blog. You can also follow our up-to-the-minute project status, breaking news and announcements on our Twitter feed.

Wise Man is just nineteen, and the youngest cyber café owner in Buea, probably the southwest of Cameroon—maybe even the entire country.

Simon was a gangly kid of seventeen when I first met him, back in the tail end of the rainy season of 2006. He lived with his family in a ramshackle house in Sandpit surrounded by avocado, plantain and banana trees. We were practically neighbors, so I saw Simon and his family nearly every day. His father is a retired prison warder and his mother does what many Cameroonian women do, which is cook and care for the extended family living in the house. Simon’s parents, I learned, had invested their modest means in his education and imbued him with a strong sense of morals and responsibility. He struck me right off the bat as an unusually sharp, curious kid.

The job market for young Cameroonians like Simon isn’t the most promising, to say the least. Back then, he found occasional work hauling water to mix cement at construction sites. It was hard going even for a young, able-bodied teenager. The pay was meager at best, and the builders had a habit of postponing payment for his work, often indefinitely.

Simon had a strong interest in computers, so I waived the enrollment fee for the computer training program I’d started at the Teachers’ Resource Centre. He jumped at the opportunity. He sped through the required coursework, took additional classes and earned the first-ever computer training attestation issued by the centre. His thirst for knowledge was something to behold. To this day, he remains my star student—an Outlier in the truest Gladwellian sense.

Attestation in hand, Simon landed a job working at a busy cyber café near the University of Buea. In time, he was managing the place and earning a respectable salary. But he didn’t stop there. No, Simon had his sights set on bigger things: he wanted to take what he’d learned and open his own cyber café.

With a vote of confidence from Hans and myself, Simon was permitted to join a traditional savings group called a njangi which met once a month in a dusty outdoor courtyard. Members included police commissioners, tradesmen, business owners and the like. Simon’s age pegged him as the youngest member by nearly a decade. Even so, he committed a healthy portion of his salary to the pool each month and eventually walked away with 75,000 francs (about $150). This, together with some small personal loans, served as his startup capital.

Many months of hard work later, Simon is now the proud owner of a cyber café called “Master Planner” located on a busy footpath in the heart of Molyko. Since he opened last year, he was forced to abandon his Camtel dial-up connection (too slow and problematic) in favor of WiFi broadband. This required the purchase of an antenna mast (pictured) and networking equipment which he financed in installments. The red and white painted mast is a symbol of achievement that marks his business as a serious venture. Simon couldn’t be happier with it.

Along the way, he’s learned the ropes of owning and operating a small business; keeping books, promoting his café, maintaining equipment, hiring people and often working around the clock. He sleeps stretched out across chairs in his café when he can.

Simon’s also achieved something remarkable that very few Cameroonians his age can claim: he’s created jobs. Master Planner’s generates enough revenue to pay a very livable monthly salary of 30,000 francs (about $60) for someone to fill his shoes as cyber café manager. Simon also engages local hardware technicians, software consultants, network engineers, painters, builders, carpenters, laborers and other tradesmen for contract work.

Recently, Simon donned a suit and was asked to speak at an event focused on entrepreneurship at the University of Buea. Assembled in the amphitheater were the top 5% of students drawn from the business, finance and banking departments along with professors and dignitaries from Yaoundé. Simon ran a PowerPoint presentation and told his story to a rapt audience of academic elites about how he became a successful entrepreneur, against all odds. Today, they seek him out for business advice.

Not too shabby for a young kid from Sandpit. Wise Man, indeed.

Update: If you were inspired by Simon’s story, why not drop him a note saying so? He’d love to hear your feedback: masterplanner01@gmail.com