The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC)

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https://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/19251

The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC) is an academic journal published by the LINK Centre, School of Literature, Language and Media (SLLM), Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Accredited by the South African Department of Higher Education and Training (DHET), AJIC is an interdisciplinary, open access journal concerned with Africa’s participation in the information society and digital network economy. The journal does not impose author processing charges. AJIC's predecessor, The Southern African Journal of Information and Communication (SAJIC), was published from 2000 to 2008, before becoming AJIC in 2010.

Corresponding Editor: Lucienne Abrahams. AJIC Submissions

ISSN: 2077-7213 (online version)

ISSN: 2077-7205 (print version)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.23962/10539/19251

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 215

'Dazzling Technologies': Addressing the Digital Divide in the Southern African Universities
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Kotecha, Piyushi
The ‘digital divide’ is both an infrastructural reality and a metaphor for Africa’s position in the global economy. We live in an era that defines itself by the extent to which it interacts, creates and shares knowledge globally, using the network of advanced telecommunications, the Internet. Southern African countries, their universities and research communities, are recognising that focusing purely on basic network infrastructure is inadequate to the needs of scholarly research and higher education in the 21st century. Southern African universities must acquire the means to participate effectively in global knowledge production. In particular, they must adopt and use advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the form of National Research and Education Networks or NRENs and a regional REN to connect students and researchers across national borders. Yet the means to share knowledge is not sufficient to bring about a healthy knowledge economy. A paradigm shift has to be made from a purely technological view of the issues, to a full recognition of the interplay between technological infrastructure and the developmental and knowledge purposes to which it is put. This article provides an overview of the emerging NREN landscape, noting developments under way that are intended to promote and facilitate excellence in scientific networking in the region. It discusses the constraints and enabling conditions for overcoming the digital divide in the Southern African higher education context. Finally, it proposes a rudimentary performance indicator framework for assessing progress.
Institutional Review: Open Access and Open Knowledge Production Processes: Lessons from CODESRIA
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Nyamnjoh, Francis
It is common in discussions of open access to limit the issue to publications and dissemination. This conflates accessibility with recognition and representation, and supposes that competing and conflicting knowledge systems and ideas would be equally available and affordable if room were created for multiple channels of accessibility. Such enthusiasm and euphoria, while understandable, do not adequately account for the prevalent power relations that structure knowledge production into interconnecting hierarchies at local and global levels. CODESRIA has some lessons to draw on from its experience of the past 37 years – lessons about the need to privilege and prioritise recognition and representation of the perspectives, epistemologies, and contextual and methodological diversity that inform knowledge production globally and locally; and lessons about the need to widen our understanding and discussion of ‘open access’ to go beyond just enabling access to knowledge and research results through a multiplicity of dissemination possibilities. It is important to discuss opening access up to different races, places, spaces, cultures, classes, generations, disciplines and fields of study. This review presents CODESRIA, and its ever-evolving publications and dissemination policy, as a possible model to inform and inspire institutions interested in a comprehensive idea of open access in an interconnected world of local and global hierarchies, where producing and consuming difference is part and parcel of everyday life.
Book Reviews Compilation: Open Access Books on Open Scholarly Communications
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Rens, Andrew; Hodgkinson-Williams, Cheryl; Williams, Kevin; Gray, Eve
Editors' Comment
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Abrahams, Lucienne; Gray, Eve
Copyright and Education in Africa: Lessons on African Copyright and Access to Knowledge
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Schonwetter, Tobias; De Beer, Jeremy; Kawooya, Dick; Prabhala, Achal
Case Notes: Open Access Advocacy Workshop: Maximising Research Quality and Impact
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Kuchma, Iryna; Wella, Kondwani
Research Productivity-Visibility-Accessibility and Scholarly Communication in Southern African Universities
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Abrahams, Lucienne; Burke, Mark; Mouton, Johann
The project for the revitalisation of Southern Africa’s higher education sector is dependent on, among other things, the capacity of the region’s universities to produce research, to communicate that research to a broad public audience and to use the research output in the process of educating future generations of graduates. Given this context, research output in the great majority of Southern African universities is barely visible. While the introduction of new digital media may offer greater accessibility and expanded opportunities for the visibility of scholarly communication, this may be insufficient to meet the needs of the many scholars and other actors who seek to build on existing bodies of knowledge, whether to advance society or in order to create knowledge for its own sake. This article reports the findings of two 2008 studies – The state of public science in the SADC region and Opening access to knowledge in Southern African universities. Working within a frame which understands knowledge produced in universities as a public good, this article examines the issues at play in terms of the productivity-visibilityaccessibility of scholarly communications in regional higher education. The conclusion discusses a possible approach to improve such productivity-visibility-accessibility, through the adoption of a strategic vision of open access to knowledge and through consideration of two breakthroughs pertinent to achieving a vision of revitalised higher education in the region.
Access to Africa’s Knowledge: Publishing Development Research and Measuring Value
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Gray, Eve
This paper reviews, critically, the discourse of research publication policy and the directives of the regional and global organisations that advise African countries with respect to their relevance to African scholarly communication. What emerges is a readiness to use the concepts and language of the public good, making claims for the power of technology to resolve issues of African development. However, when it comes to implementing scholarly publication policies, this vision of technological power and development-focused scientific output is undermined by a reversion to a conservative research culture that relies on competitive systems for valuing and accrediting scholarship, predicated upon the systems and values managed by powerful global commercial publishing consortia. The result is that the policies put in place to advance African research effectively act as an impediment to ambitions for a revival of a form of scholarship that could drive continental growth. While open access publishing models offer solutions to the marginalisation of African research, the paper argues that what is also needed is a re-evaluation of the values that underpin the recognition of scholarly publishing, to better align with the continent’s articulated research goals.
Legislative Review: Review of IPR Act and Regulations: Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act, No 51 of 2008, Republic of South Africa
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2010-02-15) Chetty, Prialoshni
South Africa’s Intellectual Property Rights from Publicly Financed Research and Development Act, Act No 51 of 2008 (the IPR Act) was passed on 22 December 2008. The Act’s main object is to ‘make provision that intellectual property emanating from publicly financed research and development is identified, protected, utilised and commercialised for the benefit of the people of the Republic’ (IPR Act, 2008: s. 2(1)). The Minister of Science and Technology published corresponding draft regulations (the IPR Regulations) for comment on 9 April 2009 (DST, 2009b).1 To date, the legislation and its attendant draft regulations have been dogged by criticism from lawyers, academics and commentators, who have, inter alia, labelled the IPR Act ‘unconstitutional’ and ‘unworkable’ (Rens, 2009) and queried whether the IPR Regulations are a ‘death knell for open science in South Africa’ (Gray, 2009). This review explores critical issues that recipients of public finance for research and development, including academics, researchers and universities, are confronted with, arising from the IPR Act. The issue is raised regarding the compatibility of the IPR Act and draft regulations with South Africa’s position as a developing country. The review argues that, while the Act has many flaws and may require review, there is an opportunity for the regulations to address some of the identified weaknesses.
AJIC Issue 10, 2009/2010 - Full Issue
(2010-02-15)
Editors' Comment
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Kupe, Tawana; Abrahams, Lucienne
State of Competition in Zambia’s Telecommunications Sector
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Kaira, Thulasoni
Zambia, situated in the Southern African region, has a population of 13 million and GDP in 2009 was estimated at ZMK61.1 trillion or approximately USD12.8 billion. Economic composition of GDP by sector is 40.2% services, 38.2% industry and 21.6% agriculture. GDP growth averaged 4.8% in the decade between 1999 and 2009, with strong performance in the construction, mining and agricultural sectors. However, as a services-based economy, growth is constrained by, inter alia, slow emergence of a competitive telecommunications sector that can provide the platform for the national and international flow of information and communication required for further rapid advances in economic development. This article reviews the state of competition in Zambia’s telecommunications sector, with due attention to the fixed line and international gateway, the mobile telephony and Internet markets.
AJIC Issue 11, 2010/2011 - Full Issue
(2011-02-15)
Context-Aware VoIP Congestion Control Service
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Agutu, Gordon; Djouani, Karim; Biermann, Elmarie; Noel, Guillaume
IP networks can have difficulty coping with delay-sensitive VoIP traffics during emergency situations caused by fires and related disasters. During emergencies there is a huge increase in voice and video traffic, causing a huge strain on the network. The strain on the network is as a result of both essential and non-essential traffic. In such crisis situations, calls originating from or destined for rescue personnel, such as doctors and police, are considered essential. Any other calls from eyewitnesses and the public are considered non-essential, since they degrade the quality of service for the emergency response teams by consuming the scarce network resources. Providing the rescue team with the quality of service that they require necessitates network access restriction for non-essential traffic. In this paper, the authors present a voice and video service that uses Context-Awareness and Semantic Web technologies to restrict network access to privileged users during crisis situations. The service monitors the network for crisis conditions, enables the network to respond appropriately when a crisis occurs, detects the end of the crisis and reverts to its default state.
Book Review: Fransman, M. (2010). The New ICT Ecosystem: Implications for Policy and Regulation
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Madizika, Lucky
Book Review: Tapscott, D., and Williams, A.D. (2010). Macro Wikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Hanna, Nagy
Servicing Advocacy in E-Government: Small Business Development Services in Cape Town
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Mitrovic, Zoran; Bytheway, Andy
Small businesses are widely regarded by national and international bodies, including the South African government, as an “engine of economic growth”. However, much available evidence suggests that establishing a new small business in South Africa is difficult because of a lack of appropriate support. The research reported here sets out to examine the actual support that has been available, and the viewpoints of both the support service providers and the intended beneficiaries – small business owners and managers. It was found that government-based support services were predominant in the minds of small businesses and other involved parties, and that much of the interest in these services was based on accessibility via the Internet, a form of electronic government service. However, despite claims of success by e-government service providers, it is found that many small businesses are not aware of available support services, and that, where they are known, there is scepticism about the benefits of engaging with them. As the problems have been found to be centred around a lack of awareness of available services, this article reports on a possible solution, based on a concept referred to here as Servicing Advocacy.
International Mobile Roaming: Progress and Challenges in African Markets
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Sutherland, Ewan
The persistence of high prices for international mobile roaming services, in contrast to falling national mobile prices, has been a recognised item on the global regulatory agenda for half a decade. In Africa, there have been studies and discussions about regulatory options in regional economic groups and in the various networks of national regulators. As yet, there has been no transnational regulatory action. Yet the initiative of one large operator saw the introduction of transnational tariff schemes (ie without a surcharge for roaming), forcing competitors to collaborate in order to respond, if they wished to attract and to retain customers. This has both saved money for consumers and greatly reduced the need for regulatory interventions that might have proved counterproductive. In some countries this type of offer remains impossible, because international gateways are a monopoly, having yet to be opened to competition.
Book Review: Hanna, N. (2010). E-Transformation: Enabling New Development Strategies – Innovation, Technology and Knowledge Management
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2011-02-15) Moyo, Last
Grassroots Community Participation as a Key to e-Governance Sustainability in Africa
(LINK Centre, University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, 2012-12-15) Ochara, Nixon Muganda
This article explores the theoretical sustainability of e-governance in Africa by assessing the nature of participation of stakeholders. It adopts an explanatory critique, drawing on perspectives debated in scholarly literature and based on reviews of country approaches. The exploration takes into account historical antecedents to participation in e-governance in Africa, revealing that dominant stakeholder interests effectively lock out the majority of citizens from active participation in e-governance, except as consumers of public services delivered through e-government. It considers the nature of attachment of stakeholders to e-governance projects. Global stakeholders increasingly have a low degree of attachment, while there is a relatively high degree of enrolment of local actors. The concept of e-governance remains solid, but is dispensable, since although government agencies have “embraced” the message of e-government, certain local actors are weakly mobilised. The policy process has failed to nurture the heterogeneity of actors, specifically grassroots actors, that is required for effective e-governance.

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