News
2006
December 2006: Enclusion launches at ITU Telecom World 2006 - Hong Kong heralds Aptivate's extended GSM network project, a communications evolution for rural villages.
December 2006: Aptivate - the new name for Aidworld.
September 2006: Aidworld begins a programme to develop better bandwidth management tools.
June 2006: Aidworld invites anyone interested in low bandwidth connections to join us at the Workshop on Optimization Technologies for Low-Bandwidth Networks hosted by INASP and ICTP in Trieste, Italy, October 2006.
April 2006: Guidelines published for low bandwidth friendly websites.
March 2006: An Aidworld team goes to Ghana to work with UNFAO and the WHO.
March 2006: Aidworld team member Alan Jackson invited to speak at the Bandwidth Management and Optimisation workshop.
February 2006: Our report on Optimising Research Websites for Low Bandwidth is now available online.
2005
November 2005: Aidworld launches the email service idea (later rebranded as Enclusion) at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunisia.
October 2005: Ethiopia Field Trip begins.
October 2005: Aidworld joins the ITU Connect the World Initiative .
September 2005: Loband version 2 released with new features, including the ability to handle international characters and improved usage analysis tools, and support for more websites.
August 2005: A year after its initial deployment, Loband usage has reached over 27,000 hits a month from developing countries.
July 2005: With the addition of four volunteers through the Engineers Without Borders summer placement program, we now have a 2:1 volunteer to staff ratio!
June 2005: EPSRC confirms Alan Blackwell as the director of the group which has responsibility for apportioning the IDEAS factory funds, and confirms Aidworld as a stakeholder at the sandpit, in addition to our roles as a mentor and panelist.
June 2005: Prototype of platform capable of delivering a lightweight email service tested in Haiti.
May 2005: EPSRC awards £1 million of research funding to academic work that will contribute to building an appropriate computing platform for the developing world. Aidworld is currently helping them to identify the critical areas of research required.
April 2005: Loband 1.2 released - this includes a new parser, and is smaller, faster, and more robust.
April 2005: Loband is discussed in a Slashdot article, and the service receives nearly 60,000 hits within 24 hours.
March 2005: Loband is well received at the SANGONeT "ICTs for Civil Society" conference in South Africa.
March 2005: BT joins the Email Service consortium.
February 2005: ARM and the BBC join the Email Service consortium.
January 2005: Aidworld begins the Email Service project.
2004
December 2004: Kenya case study ends.
1st December 2004: Aidworld's first birthday!
November 2004: Kenya case study starts.
October 2004: Aidbase rebranded as Loband
The Gatsby Charitable Foundation agrees to provide the entire match
funding of £55,000 for Aidworld's DTI SMART Award.
September 2004: Aidworld begins collaboration with Thoughtworks, who donate free software development and business analysis skills.
July 2004: This site goes live!
June 2004: Aidworld wins £75,000 DTI SMART Award for research into improving our software. Aidbase pilot project starts in Kenya.
2008
June 2008
Bandwidth Management Strategic Planning Report
The actions and recommendations from Aptivate, INASP and KENET's workshop in April have been collected and agreed by the participants. Representatives from a range of African RENs, institutions and supporting organisations found that bandwidth management remains an urgent requirement for universities and research institutions in Africa. As a response to the workshop findings, Aptivate has begun putting together a plan of work with partners.
Read the 15 page report here
(pdf, 159.4 kB)
April 2008
Forced Migration Online
Aptivate is working with Forced Migration Online to port their research archives storage system from a proprietary platform to Fedora Commons. Aims of the project include securing the long-term viability of the archives, and making the content more accessible to internal site searches and external web search engines.
http://www.forcedmigration.org/ http://www.fedora-commons.org/
Bandwidth Management Strategic Planning Workshop
Aptivate will be leading a strategic planning workshop in bandwidth management and optimisation (BMO) in African institutions, in partnership with INASP. The workshop will take place Apr 29-30 in Nairobi, and will be hosted by the Kenya Education Network.
BMO is an essential practice in maintaining a network of connected computers. Without it, the link becomes useless, filling up with viruses, peer-to-peer traffic and spam. A number of organisations including Aptivate have been working in this area, but in 2006, 60% of surveyed institutions still conducted little or no BMO.
The objective of the workshop goes further than issuing recommendations to actually constructing a holistic, concrete plan of action, gathering together key organisations who are active in supporting university ICT access in Africa.
March 2008
Aptivate joins UN-GAID high-level advisers
Aptivate has joined the advisory board of the Global Alliance for ICT and Development - a UN initiative launched in 2006 to promote a people-centered and knowledge-based information society.
February 2008
Camfed EpiSurveyor Survey
Aptivate has been working closely on data collection processes with Camfed, an NGO dedicated to fighting poverty and AIDS in rural communities in Africa by promoting female education and empowerment.
We have been providing technical support for Camfed's baseline study across schools, students and community stakeholders in Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The study involves conducting surveys on PDAs using a version of DataDyne's EpiSurveyor, an open source tool for simplified data collection on mobile devices. Our work involved customising EpiSurveyor to make it field-ready, and provided PDA and software usage training in each of the countries. The baseline study went live this month.
UN Research Access
Aptivate has completed the second phase of an authentication project for UNFAO and WHO's HINARI, AGORA and OARE research access programmes, improving the capacity of their authentication system to deal with increased numbers of users. This project was a result of Aptivate's previous in-country work, which identified server load as one of the key factors affecting the user experience.
January 2008
BGDD Plenary
The Bridging the Global Digital Divide Network, which Aptivate manages, held their second annual plenary event at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Key discussions among the four projects revolved around research ethics, formulating a community-centred design methodology, engaging with scientists and engineers through remote user research, and sustainability of projects in both a research and developmental sense.
Over the past year, the BGDD network has organised a number of workshops around HCI and development, and an international community has begun to form around this. Given the interest to date, the network is currently exploring cross-project evaluation and dissemination of learning, wider engagement and the development of a second network based within developing countries.
2007
November 2007: Aptivate starts interface project for UNFAO and WHO's research access programmes, integrating the programmes under a central database admin interface.
August 2007: Aptivate produces the INASP-backed web design guidelines. Development and maintenance is ongoing to keep the guidelines a living document.
June 2007: Aptivate releases report, in partnership with INASP, on the effects of implementing remote email filtering.
Feb 2007: Aptivate begins web design guidelines project with INASP.
April 2007: Aptivate develops website for the Network for Information and Digital Access (NIDA).
March 2007: Aptivate completes first phase of the UN Research Access project.