On Saturday I noticed some dramatic headlines about a war involving DSTV in South Africa. Turns out it is a price war between DSTV and the new pay-TV operator. I’ve clearly been drinking too little coffee because I didn’t even know we were getting another operator in the pay-TV space. For the record we do now have one, TopTV.

What is even more AMAZING is that TopTV and DSTV are actually competing, TopTV came out with a number of bouquet options that undercut DSTV and suddenly DSTV reduce prices and increase their bouquet offerings. Excellent for consumers!

This is precisely what you would expect in a free market, competition gives the consumers more options and, possibly, better, cheaper options. As a South African though, you should be surprised to see this actually happening. We have MANY cellphone operators in South Africa and yet there is no competition at all! All of their pricing structures are still based firmly on daylight robbery, especially SMS charges.

I didn’t actually want to moan about cellphone operators, we have many experts on that in South Africa, I wanted to make a suggestion to DSTV. No, not TopTV, primarily because they don’t show the rugby. I still only have MNET, I want DSTV but I’d like the part that I will watch not the bazillion channels that irritate me.

My suggestion is: Don’t construct random bouquets that don’t make anyone happy, rather assign a points value to each channel and then sell bouquets of points and allow your customers to choose which channels make up their points quota. I know that this is technically feasible.

For example, I am only interested in watching MNET and Supersport. I would buy the cheapest points bouqet that would allow me to that. Now under the current scheme I would have to buy the most expensive DSTV bouquet – which I will not do as I am paying way too much for the two or three channels I will watch.

Clearly this is a very selfish suggestion, I want to see all the rugby and I don’t want to pay the premium fee but if I am not alone then there may be more profit to be made in allowing customers real flexibility in what channels make up their bouquet by adopting a points system, I would certainly sign up.

Just a suggestion but I think it might be quite popular. Any marketing campaign benefits from being able to honestly say that the customers needs come first.

I’ve just launched another competition on 99Designs to develop a cartoon character that I’ll use to brand this blog. I just can’t bring myself to post a photo in the heading and I felt that a cartoon would be reasonable given that I’m already mixing work and personal stories in one place. The distinction is rather vague anyway.

Here is the design brief (see the site for the full details and attached images if you are keen on having a crack):

brief overview

I’m a Fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation where I work on a bunch of projects all related to using technology to drive open education in South Africa. Projects like supporting communities of practice that share content online, developing open assessment banks of items to save teachers time and working with volunteers to write textbooks that are free and open.

I keep a blog related to all my projects and, contrary to popular wisdom, personal stories. I use categories to separate the two.

I can’t face using a “thoughtful” photo of myself as the headline image to my blog and a cartoon depiction would be more fitting, especially seeing as I’m mixing my personal and work blogs. I’m quite taken with this crowdsourcing idea so I’m here to try to get the cartoon made.

brand name

Mark Horner

target audience

The audience is the general public, a mixture of work related visitors, information seekers and those seeking personal updates. Some of the cartoon features will resonate with work related visitors and some will resonate with those interested in personal stories.

requirements

I want a cartoon that will ultimately be part of the header on this blog: www.markhorner.net

Cartoon content all clearly visible:

1) My cartoon self on a camping chair with a laptop (Lenovo T500 if it mattered ;)
2) A bottle and glass of red wine
3) A potjie on a fire in the background, this image captures the idea quite well:

http://www.south-africa-tours-and-t…africa.jpg

Cartoon styles I like:

http://media.smashingmagazine.com/i…/final.jpg

I’m not tied to the style, but I’d like something that will scale down reasonably well, not to an icon size but possibly to fit on a business card.

I’ve attached some pics and sketch to help out. I’m not a designer so please use your own judgement as to the best way to include the elements and don’t feel you have to stick to the attached sketch – its just an idea.

The final files need to be in a vector format suitable for printing purposes as I may need to include it on printed media as well as png files for web-usage.

I wrote a blog post a little while ago about crowdsourcing the OpenPress logo. That was before we’d actually finished the process and I just wanted to take a quick moment to reflect. This post is long overdue so I’ll keep it short and just hit the highlights. For the record, you’ll find a ton of people for and a ton of people against crowdsourcing, if you want a logo, its an option and the better you manage the process the better your result will be (paying more also helps).

The experience of crowdsourcing the logo on 99Designs was interesting, fun and ultimately quite exhausting. For the record, we are happy with the logo that we have and, as we’re moving forward with the project, here is the logo for your viewing pleasure:

As with anything design-related there are always going to be opinions so it will be interesting to hear what other people think of the logo. We had a total of 140 designers submit 840 different designs. Some extremely good, some incredibly bad. We prepayed a prize of $500 and, as soon as we had a number of logos we felt we could live with we, guaranteed the prize.

Prepaying and guaranteeing a prize are incentives for designers to participate in your competition. We felt that guaranteeing the prize about half-way through the competition would be a strong, positive indication that the designs we had not yet eliminated were serious candidates.

The fact that design is very subjective is a key thing to bear in mind when using a crowdsourcing tool like 99Designs. That is not to say there are aren’t some well established guidelines for design. We found this list of 45 Rules of Great Logo Design to contain a number of good basic checks even though we broke a few. I’d recommend looking through that list (or any list for that matter as there are many) and then making as specific a specification for your logo as possible before launching your competition.

To get the most out of 99Designs do:

• realise that not every designer who will submit a design is really a designer (an amateur with MSPaint can still sign up)
• specify your constraints very clearly including things you’re not sure about (they need to know what parameters they have to play with)
• provide regular feedback (to guarantee convergence)
• be consistent in your treatment of logos
• update your specification early on if you want to stop trends developing
• eliminate designs that you don’t like in a timely manner
• make a checklist of basic things and stick to them, things like:
  • must work in B&W
  • must scale well
  • etc.
• prepay your prize

and definitely don’t:

• don’t spend the first day refreshing your browser, we were really excited by the first 20 designs discussing them all in detail but when you’re going to get 840 its not worth getting too bogged down early
• get involved in any offline discussions with designers about their designs
• consider designs not submitted through the 99Designs site
• try to provide a detailed response to everyone
• get too excited in the first day

If you provide regular feedback that is consistent and you make it available to all the designers by keeping it in the competition you are more likely to get something you like as well as keep the designers interested and keep frustration levels down. If you oscillate and are inconsistent designers will get irritated and move on. The designers definitely feed off each other and the whole contest becomes a dynamic system you get to prod and with many designers tweaking/riffing off each other tempers can flare-up. As long as you’re consistent and following the rules it should converge.

If you do embark on a crowdsourcing experience brace yourself for a busy week and have a look at this post on bad logos to keep your humour up.

Today Samuel finally met the criteria to come home from the Neonatal ICU. All he had to do was demonstrate that he would be able to continue to grow in our care.

During his 9-day stay he was progressively required to do more and more on his own as his breathing apparatus, heater, drip and then feeding tube were removed. He ripped his feeding tube out himself which was great to see. For his last 24 hours in he had to breast feed (only) and still gain weight. Which he did, a whopping 30g, so he left hospital today weighing in at 2570g. His birth weight was 2645g and, for those interested in the statistics, his length was 48cm and his head circumference was 32,5cm and he was at 37 weeks.

The thing people are most interested in are photographs so here are the snaps we took today:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

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He was born at Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic and our experience was great (all things considered). The NICU staff were incredibly helpful, supportive and, although I cannot judge their expertise, they inspired confidence that he was being properly taken care of and he improved steadily. When making judgements about such things it is probably more important to know how things are handled when they go wrong rather than when everything is going according to plan. In our case, any sort of plan went out the window pretty quickly and things were handled quickly and efficiently, yet with empathy.

Some photos of Sam for everyone to see, detailed commentary to follow:

Album of his progress in the Neonatal unit, hopefully he’ll be home soon.

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 1

7 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 2

8 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 3

Highlights: removal of CPAP

7 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 4

Highlights: removal of drip.

9 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 5

Highlights: removal of heater, first ever bath.

23 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 6

Highlights: two attempts to feed properly, soiling 3 nappies in one go, awake for more than 1 hour.

6 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 7

Highlights: second bath (first by a parent), 3/4 grandparents visit.

26 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 8

Highlights: feeding properly all day, ripping out his feeding tube by himself (that's my boy :).

11 Photos

Samuel Newlyn Blyth Horner - Day 9

Highlights: mom slept over in the ICU, got moved to a private room (in ICU), fed properly all day.

18 Photos

I’m writing this from the SAA lounge in Nairobi’s Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on my way to Kigali, Rwanda. It was worth the $20 to get into the lounge to watch the final 10 minutes of the Bloemfontein test match between the All Blacks and the, victorious, Springboks. I called it, Heinrich
Brussow was man of the match.  But before I get side-tracked, this post is actually about Rwanda (map).

I’m visiting Kigali for all of 48 hours to participate in a meeting involving, primarily, the Open Learning Exchange (OLE), OLE Rwanda, and
the Rwandan Ministry of Education. From my perspective, the meeting is about how they can most effectively use the content that Siyavula
has made available as part of their One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiatives. Truth be told, I knew very little about Rwanda, apart from
the horrific events that transpired 15 years ago, and wasn’t every excited about the trip.

Then I did a little research which has made me very very excited about the prospects for Rwanda. First I’d like to set the scene with
some of Rwanda’s vital statistics. The country has a population of just over 10 million people but is quite small (26 000 km²), making it the
most densely populated country in Africa. The perimeter of the country is 893km – for the South Africans that is less than a drive from Cape
Town to Kimberley. That’s the perimeter – the country is approximately 150km across at its widest point. So it’s a small country. 70% of the
country is literate, despite 60% living under the breadline ($1 per day).

So what is there to be excited about? Rwanda has committed itself to moving from a subsistence- to knowledge-based economy. So has South
Africa (at least moving from resource- to knowledge-based) but the thing that is exciting is they’re actually doing something about it
other than just making pronouncements.

Rwanda is committed to deploying fibre-optic infrastructure so that schools, universities, government offices and institutions have
direct access to fibre. Not only that, they’ve already laid more than 2000km (~2300km) of fibre! Now go back to my earlier comments
and think about what that really means given the size of Rwanda. If Rwanda put down a star-network of fibre emanating from Kigali then it would have 24 spokes with about 400km of fibre to spare, and each spoke would arrive at the border of the country less than 40km away from the adjacent spokes. You’d need to lay at most 20km of fibre to connect to a comprehensive backbone. I have no idea what their network actually looks like but no matter how you slice it, 2300km of fibre in a country that is 150km across is incredible.

The government intends to connect to the Seacom cable before the end of this year. If you have broadband in Rwanda in December this year, you may
have the best broadband in Africa! I’ll ask Steve Song to correct me on this one but you’d be MUCH better off than having broadband in South
Africa.

Just laying fibre doesn’t solve any of the countries problems but it opens up amazing opportunities for innovative solutions to solve those
problems. Fibre is the ultimate foundation for communications infrastructure. The Rwandan government teamed up with one of the most
wired countries in the world to roll out their fibre, Korea. Korean Telecom (KT) is doing a lot of the implementation.

Now all of sudden my meeting to discuss putting content on laptops in a Rwandan school is a lot more exciting. I’m starting to imagine all the things
I wish we could try in SA:

• a class of African school children that can actually stream video from open courseware sites or teacher tube
• run simulations online
• communicate with learners elsewhere in Rwanda and the world
• teachers video conferencing across the country forming lots of niche communities of practice
• extensive, rapid development and deployment of OERs ensuring content used in Rwanda is as up to date as possible
• effective use of national databases for learners and their assessments
• on-demand one-on-one tutoring for learners online
• learners really embracing content creation and their own creativity
• and so much more!

Thats a far from comprehensive list and each item requires a little more than just fibre but none of them works well without fibre, something else that Rwanda probably tops the density list for.

Just browse the projects they’ve got listed on the Rwanda Information Technology Authority – they’re embracing e-government, e-health (OpenMRS for example), etc. and I think that they will leap frog many other developing countries. The full benefits will still take years to appear, as the benefits of education for example always do, but I am convinced that if the Rwandan government sees this through, and embraces openness and innovation, then the sky is the limit not only for education but for the country as a whole!

Despite always being a proud South African, I’ll be forever jealous that SA has spent years suppressing our telecoms industry and hasn’t adopted a comprehensive broadband strategy like Rwanda. The silver lining is that at least we’ll have a shining example in a year or two of what is actually possible. Lets just hope Rwanda manage to pull it off.

For over a year now a new project has been brewing, OpenPress. It isn’t a secret but nobody took the bait and built it so we are going to do it, something that I am over the moon about. The ‘we’ that I am talking about is Roché Compaan, Steve Song, and myself. We’ve just started out on this journey and there will be a lot more written about this in coming months.

We need to establish a bit of a brand identity and we’re currently sourcing a logo. Rather than tying ourselves to one designer, we want to access the largest possible creative pool we can find to try to come up with something inspired. Given that we want to run this project as cost-effectively and efficiently as possible and an army of designers doesn’t come cheap, we’ve agreed to try the crowdsourcing (a definition I like) approach. In this approach one essentially makes a bounty available for the final product and makes an open call so that any and all can have a crack at the problem.

There are web-services that facilitate the process by managing the bounty, providing a central location where a community of designers convenes and provides a loose framework for managing the process, keeping things roughly fair. We decided to use 99 designs for our process but also considered crowdSPRING. I was dragging my heels a little bit about getting the competition started but Roché jumped straight in and ran a contest for a new web-site design for Upfront Systems. The results of which you can see here.

Yesterday at around noon we launched a competition for the OpenPress logo. In the web-site design contest Roché launched it took a few days before designs really came in. Logo contests are a little simpler and in the first 24 hours of the competition we received 72 entries, which I thought was a phenomenal response. They are definitely not all in the running, it is clear that some people didn’t even read the brief. However, there are already some that I could probably live with and we’ve yet to give any feedback.

I am now a complete convert to crowdsourcing. Given my experiences with the Siyavula logo and web-design processes I think that a site like 99 designs, that has a critical mass of designers, really provides a light-weight, cost-effective and rapid solution for most of my design needs. I will launch a contest, in the near future, to start improving the look of this site I just need to bolster the content so the purpose and scope are clearer :)

Originally, it was my intention to get a designer to build a theme for this website. However, budgetary constraints have dictated that I either do it myself or use a free theme. Themes never seem to do quite what I want, or, if they do, they’re so popular that I can’t bring myself to use them. They’re always tweak-able but that usually just ends up getting messy as the tweaks are usually counter to what the original designer had in mind. So I decided to just build one from scratch. This isn’t hard at all and there is nothing remarkable about doing it. Budgetary constraints turned out to, in fact, be a blessing in disguise!

Good web-design is going to be key to the success or failure of some of my upcoming projects and so spending some time immersing myself in trying to apply some of the ideas to my own site allows me to kill two birds with one stone, build my own theme and really engage with some web-design principles so that they sink in. I’ve bookmarked too many articles thinking I’ll come back to them and I never have, so now I’ll apply them to my own site as I find them. My general rule-of-thumb when getting into something new is to work very slowly through the basics and the first few articles so that after a while all other articles are minor increments on what I already know.

I simply followed the tutorial from WPDesigner.com in building my theme, once completed I moved things around a bit. This site currently has the categories in the header rather than the sidebar and 4 widget-enabled areas in the footer. I tried to use widgets wherever possible so that I would hard-code very little.

I know that we need to aim for cross-browser compatibility and floating div’s never seem to work the same way on IE as they do on Firefox for me. I’d never used a CSS framework before but stumbled across Blueprint just before starting this site (courtesy of an article on Smashing Magazine). The frameworks allow you to manage your layout (and typography) very simply and effectively from scratch and take care of all browser idiosyncracies. In the end I actually used Bluetrip as my framework, it is built on Blueprint so the transition was painless for me. That took care of the layout.

I’d never intended to have independent sites for my work and personal blogs because there is too much overlap for me. I just wanted to use categories to separate things a bit and make sure that users could immediately select articles on the project of their choice by selecting the icon based on the project logo from my header. I made some simple icons in the GIMP which can be seen in the graphic below.

The original header for the site, showing the icons for the categories.

I’m gonna skip the rest of the details about the basic site structure and move to my activities for today. I’m following Smashing Magazine on Twitter and this tweet was released today:

Apple vs. Microsoft – A Website Usability Study – http://tinyurl.com/mkjm4t – An interesting read.

The article has a nice comparison, from a designer’s perspective, of the websites in question and is much more objective than I expected. One point that web-designers keep driving home, as in this article, is that users need to know what to do next. They must quickly and easily know what options are available to them on your website. I want users to immediately make the choice of whether or not they want to know more about FHSST, Siyavula or my personal posts. However, if they’re not familiar with the projects already then my icons are meaningless to them.

I decided to try to do something about this immediately. I can’t rely on the mouse-over text to explain what the icons mean so I need to do something more. The GIMP and I attempted to incorporate the category name into the icon. My header now looks like this:

The header including the new, more explanatory, icons.

They certainly aren’t masterpieces but I think they’re better than they were. Of course, visitors to my site are still faced with knowing what FHSST and Siyavula are, but they’re more likely to know that than be familiar with the icons I made from the logos.

Some things that are priorities on my to-do list are:

• make custom category pages so that the project description and full logo are included in the sidebar when a user selects the category
• integrate the RSS feeds for the categories into the theme in some way (perhaps just in the sidebar when one selects the category but I’d prefer to get them into the header somehow)

I’ll also have a very good spec for a designer should I ever have funds for professional help on this. In the meantime, I think tinkering with this site will be fun.

I am currently a project manager at the Shuttleworth Foundation, in charge of the Siyavula project, where I co-ordinate the development of a comprehensive set of Open Educational Resources (OER) supporting the South African National Curriculum. This relies on the development of communities to create and support the OERs as well as the provision of platforms for development. I believe in the liberation of information and supporting education in South Africa. Along with Sam Halliday, I co-founded the Free High School Science Texts (FHSST) project which launched in 2002.

I have a PhD in physics from the University of Cape Town and conducted my research at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California on the results from the STAR experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

My blog highlights the progress on the Siyavula project and contains thoughts on the OER space as well as life in general.