Innovation in Software

Source: Wikipedia

Somaliland is an autonomous region that is probably very much like your pre-conceived notions. Its 3.5 million people have struggled through warfare (many suffer post-traumatic stress disorder), the economy is “in early stages of development” and it has suffered greatly to gain recognised independence.

Few people know of its existence, fewer still care about its future. But we should. The Horn of Africa has seen great misery and human suffering over recent decades, and whilst it is a country that has many faults including widespread corruption, it is at least a better attempt at democratic, peaceful governance than anywhere else nearby.

Alas, the entire country is now at risk, thanks to a technical “solution” to a problem that never really was.

The current edition of Private Eye has in its column “From Our Own Correspondent” a story from Hargeisa that should make all involved ashamed of themselves. Emphasis throughout is mine:

Somalialand is the only place in the Horn of Africa that is democratic, stable and tolerant. Yet because of misplaced fears of the mushrooming of micro-states, we remain unrecognised by the international community, 18 years after declaring our independence. As a result the world keeps us at arm’s length and has instead forced on us consultants so greedy and inept that the very peace we now enjoy is under threat.

Elections in an impoverished, nomadic society are never easy, but our record of closely contested polls compares pretty well with our neighbours [Somalia, Ethiopia, et al]. Our friends faraway nevertheless thought that what we really needed was a state of the art biometric finger printing and facial recognition system to compile a voter’s roll. But an operation of such complexity – not to mention the $10m funding – could not possibly be trusted to us natives.

[...]

Alas, this model [...] has somewhat underperformed. Presidential elections have been postponed four times now and are 18 months late, and now we have the prospect of civil war as our politicians cannot agree on a way forward.”

It’s a stable country that has a reasonable record on electoral fraud prevention. Who then thought that an advanced biometric system was what this country needed?

I’ve left out from the Private Eye piece the criticisms of how NGO Interpeace are (mis-?) handling this, how Britain and the US are washing their hands of it, and the details of who is blaming who, but the error was there at the start: they placed the country’s future in a technology system that wasn’t needed. No doubt it was profitable for somebody.

This is a country with a GDP per head of $226 – the vast majority of the population are living on less than $1 per day. $10 million could have helped address woeful statistics such as only 25% of Somaliland adults are literate, and just 17% of children go to school. The funding could have even helped the 72% of the population without access to clean water get some new wells.

But it gets worse.

The nomadic culture that dominates Somaliland (any two citizens can work out how they are related by sharing their names and clans), is culturally sensitive to finger-printing. That of course makes a biometric database a fatally flawed model. The problem they are attempting to address – that people from neighbouring countries could vote – has been “solved” with a system that introduces new problems, that means not even all of those entitled to vote want to necessarily register.

To cap it all off, the people who went about delivering the system didn’t just do a bad job at implementation, but a thoroughly awful one. According to some sources on the ground:

The current voter list is neither accurate nor can it form the basis of a fair and transparent election. The only alternative is to go ahead with the election without voter lists.
Interpeace stated in a controversial and a very contradictory press release dated July 25, 2009:

“The Voter Registration system was seriously abused during its implementation, with widespread corruption and systematic fraud, resulting in the failure to record the fingerprints of more than half of all registrants. In other cases, over 150 registrations were made with a single fingerprint at the same registration centre, or through photographs instead of in person.”

Say what? There are voters walking around with 150 polling cards, and others who got registered without ever actually turning up? That sounds like the kind of thing the project was meant to protect against. But the systems can spot all that and deal with duplicate registrations, right? Well, according to another source close to the action:

IT Professionals advised the hardware of the server should be upgraded and software to be reexamined to be fit to handle database of 4 million voters in Somaliland. The testing phase must include plan for next 20 years according to population growth rate.

They called for upgrade of both hardware and Software including the operation system, which should have latest security and performance tuning patches. The hardware upgrade should include Hard Disk, RAM and the Processor. They highlighted that majority of the data captured in the server are not in text [but in] binary format like picture and fingerprint, which needs massive storage area. RAM and Processor helps the server to boot and run quickly particularly during filtering the duplicates. [sic throughout]

Failures then, include:

1. The whole project has several fatally flawed assumptions under-pinning core choices
2. The money could have been put to more effective use elsewhere
3. The software was designed incorrectly and therefore its output is unreliable and can’t be trusted
4. The server infrastructure is under-equipped and under-managed so now they need to add more storage, more memory and increase processing power (and by the sounds of it, whack on a few service pack upgrades).

These are all failures we see in IT projects on a regular basis. If this were a new ERM or accounts platform we’d sit around the board room table, gravely shake our heads, talk about “lessons learned”, and put it all down as a bad job. We’d move on, avoiding the compulsion to try and “fix it” due to our own notions of “sunk cost”. This is in essence, like thousands of IT projects that have happened over the last few decades.

Except in this case, the consequences are more serious: the country now faces civil war.

As you go about your daily work rolling out technology to your clients and customers, you may not think that your potential failure to deliver will result in human fatality. However it will have consequences.

Iit’s important we think carefully as our industry takes a greater hold on the workings of civilisation and shapes ever more its potential, about what our lust for automation and control can do to lives if we fail to live up to expectations. Somaliland is an extreme – but sobering – example.

As an early supporter of NO2ID and long-term member of Liberty, Amnesty International, and others, I have heard enough stories about technology tampering with elections that even as an advocate of the power of software to improve society, I am perfectly happy that my native democracy requires nothing more than pieces of paper and some pencils to conduct an election. I sincerely hope that somebody decides it’s good enough for Somaliland too, before it’s too late.

One of Vagueware’s more established clients has developed a product called CAESER to help organisations understand how their suppliers behave in terms Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

In order to try and raise CSR as a topic within the business community as a whole, the team have recently been blogging and twittering their thoughts, and an article this morning by Miana Capuano caught my eye:

Whilst unemployment in Britain rises as the nation struggles to deal with the current economic climate, it is no surprise that companies are cutting their corporate giving and charitable support. Research in the UK has shown that while donations to charities have dropped, demand for their services has grown. In such turbulent times the impetus for responsible business practice is now even greater than ever before. With a lack of funds, companies need to move away from philanthropy and explore more innovative ways of supporting their communities. By integrating CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities to core business objectives, engaging in partnerships with organisations such as other businesses, social enterprises and charities, adopting environmental strategies that save energy (and money!) and engaging in pro-bono work, it will help to ensure that responsible business practice is not swept aside in these difficult economic times.

Over the last few years I – through Vagueware – have attempted a few projects aimed at engaging with charities, social enterprises and community groups, including:

• Substantially discounted rates for charities and non-profit organisations for larger projects
• Discounted rates for local businesses, in order to increase take up of new technologies locally
• Support for community technology groups in general
• Training/Development of school kids who don’t have access to technology mentoring – a project that has stalled but “watch this space”
• Speak to a Geek. I loved doing this. I think all of us on the panel did
• Co-working groups, encouraging collaboration within the scene, etc.
• The occasional charitable contribution to community groups in need of some technology to keep going

And yet, what has it amounted to? What impact have I actually had on the local charity/non-profit sector? Offering to throw some money into a pot for a new motherboard for a community cybercafe is one thing, actually helping to run the cybercafe and turning up to do some training on technology is something quite different.

We could collectively as a community be doing a little bit more. “Software runs civilisation”, as they say, and most of you reading this blog post are in the higher priestly order of “alpha geeks”, armed with knowledge that could revolutionise a charity or non-profit for the better. We could help with social media, development of technology, general IT literacy and support, and more.

I’m not suggesting we start to wear hair shirts and abandon our business plans in favour of forming a socialist utopia, but we can start something interesting.

There are notable existing efforts, of course. We could all put some 20% time into Circuit Riding and get a warm glow every time we get on a bus to Hulme or Cheetham Hill, but isn’t there something more we could do?

I think there is. I think you have ideas too. So I’m going to bully you into sharing your ideas.

Whilst the services idea bank has stalled a little over the last few months, I think the concept of collating and voting on ideas is perfect for brain-storming and prioritising what we could do together as a community.

I’ve kicked off a Geek Social Responsibility forum to collect ideas and votes, and seeded it with a few simple ideas of my own. For the next few weeks my 20% time will be spent in part trying to drum up interest in these ideas and getting some of them rolling.

For me there are a couple of key areas we could address:

• Increased access to technology
• Increased access to knowledge about technology (including empowering groups and individuals with the ability to create new technologies)
• Better collaboration and co-working for community and charity groups (i.e. adopting working practices we’ve pioneered as a sector)
• Substantially discounted/free access to specialist skills and knowledge for charities and communities

P.S. – one of the next areas to be addressed by the CAESER team is Equality & Diversity. I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, how broken we are as an industry in that regard, but the industry is currently so heavily dominated by misogynistic pricks, I don’t even know where to start on that one.

Simon Owens dropped me a line to point out that when Huffington post linked to him, his traffic rose dramatically

In other words, I was right the other day when I pointed out that links are currency.

This played on my subconscious a little more than normal, having read the story about Murdoch in this month’s Wired UK magazine. I am becoming increasingly certain of something that would have sounded ridiculous a year ago and might still sound insane. However, you may quote me on it:

News Corp will file for bankruptcy/bankruptcy protection within five years. Probably less.

Putting content behind a pay wall is an action designed to kill audience. Without audience, they will fail. And if News Corp can fail, so can anybody else who has a similar business model and cost structure.

All is not lost however. I think I’m starting to see how the next breed of media organisations will emerge and take over from the old guard has let down society. More on that later in the week.