Africa Telecommunications License OSS Home page

In 2004, GreenNet was commissioned by the ‘Catalysing Access to ICTs in Africa’ project (component 1a), to design a technical solution for a telecoms licensing ‘One Stop Shop’ – basically everything you ever wanted to know about telecommunications regulations and licenses across Africa under one roof. We designed the system with a distributed database built on ActionApps, which comprises 64 independent nodes. It streamlines the process of gathering up-to-date information from each national regulator, and publishing it for satellite service providers, license applicants and researchers in a single location. So far we have handed over about 30 installations to individual regulators and taught them how to use the system in a series of workshops in Western and Southern Africa. The data gathered in each region can be viewed on the West and Southern regional sites.

Web projects with Drupal

GreenNet’s current CMS of choice is Drupal. It is an open source system for developing websites and publishing content to them. A Drupal website has at its heart a database of the site’s content (articles, reports, profiles, events etc..). The system serves content from the database to the right pages of the site in the appropriate style, as they are called for by site users. Site authors can add, modify and manage their content in that database using simple private online forms.

The advantage of this system for GreenNet members is that their sites can be updated by anyone who has authorised access from any internet connected computer. All they need is an ordinary web browser such as Firefox, Internet Explorer or Safari. Once they have mastered the simple art of filling in the Drupal forms, resources and...