Gael Hernandez

Since January 2009, I work for the International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD). Our office is located in The Hague, The Netherlands, although I am the officer for Capacity Development in the Zambian Programme. In IICD, we support the use of Information and Communication Technologies in development projects.

Personally, I do believe on the potential of Open Source as a philosophy, business model, and entrepreneurship motivator. During the Telecommunications Degree, back in 1998 I started programming in Unix/Linux environments with C, C++. My final project was a software system developed for FreeBSD, a pure open source distribution of the Unix core.

With the time, I became more and more interested on how free software products can be taught and "sold" to a wider community of users, not only linux geeks with administration levels. I've seen in the last years clear improvments in the Desktop and Usability of Linux and some distros are now reaching the public. Even though we are less than 4% of the total users, we now find Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse and Mandriva at the top of the linux distros.

As a complement, I later specialize on Development Studies and how technology can make a difference in the development process.

Interesting resources

Slahsdot, http://linux.slashdot.org/

White African blog, http://whiteafrican.com

Many Possibilities blog, http://manypossibilities.net

Google Africa blog, http://google-africa.blogspot.com/

African IT Industry news and culture, http://appfrica.net/blog/