The session was an opportunity for non-government organisations (NGOs) who had successfully implemented open source software to share their experiences and wisdom with their peers.

The first to share was IT manager for the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (IDASA), Cassim de Bruin. De Bruin shared with the audience challenges he faced in trying to integrate IDASA’s IT system shared between their Cape Town and Pretoria offices.

He said that his vision from the beginning was to have one IT system that serves his organisation. De Bruin said that getting his organisation to change their attitude towards open source software was a challenge initially but he had secretly thought about “weaning” the organisation off the Novell Groupwise System they clung to.

William Lester, Chief Information Officer for EngenderHealth, echoed De Bruin's sentiment saying that user acceptance in adopting open source software was a challenge for his organisation. EngenderHaelth is a multinational NGO which has offices in most parts of the world.

De Bruin said that he eventually replaced the Novell system with an open source system called Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP). “With open source there are no limits”, said De Bruin.

Tshepo Thlaku, Programme Manager for Ungana-Afrika, an NGO that offers ICT support to other NGOs, shared a case study on five community radio stations in Mpumalanga. 

In his introduction Thlaku took the audience through the philosophy behind open source software. Thlaku told the audience that this software, in contrast to “Closed Source” which is embraced by industry juggernaut Microsoft, was free and could be customised and modified by users. 

Thlaku added that the software was developed by “A whole community of developers” throughout the world. According to Thlaku one of the biggest insights gained during their radio stations case study was that people who were not computer literate adapted much easier to Open Source software.

Thlaku also labelled one of the biggest successes of their campaign as that of creating awareness around software licensing issues. During the session Platform Strategy Manager for Microsoft Paulo Ferreira, after apologising for being the “enemy” in the forum, said that the same software applications that are used on Linux could also be used on the Microsoft platform.

“What people do not know is that Microsoft has the biggest open source lab in the world”, said Ferreira.

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