Ecommerce: When The Lights Go Out

There is a story that Zambians like to tell.

Amusing as it may be, the joke cuts to the heart of serious matter. All over the continent countries are struggling with unstable power supply. In the last week, South Africa has had to close down many of its major mining operations due to load-shedding. In this climate, leveraging digital technology is a very real challenge. Can we innovate around this or are we content to staying in the dark?

South Africa is where web entrepreneurship has shown the most promise on the continent. They have a World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) office and have given us Ubuntu Linux and even Verisign. We have Mark Shuttleworth to thank for the last two, but the fact is that South Africa's stable power supply made it possible to create and deliver web applications that thrived during the dotcom boom. Now though, even South Africa is showing signs of succumbing to the same malaise that is stunting economic growth across the rest of Africa. Can we expect world-class innovation and service in this climate, or does the unstable supply of electricity mean that intermittent service is acceptable? The way we answer this question will have a long-term effect on how our digital services fare on the world stage.

An Example From The Industry

On Friday, January 18th the 37signals servers went down. I use their project management solution to collaborate with clients and on that particular morning, I could not login to my projects or any other of their services meeting only blank pages. Checking the site twenty minutes later, I was presented with a status report on what had happened at their operations headquarters and what they were doing to rectify the situation.

This intrigued me, to say the least. Which African website informs or even apologises for unavailability of service? In this particular instance, 37signals was not at fault for the disruption but the management handled the situation by taking responsbility for what had happened. They even offered to accept client requests for compensation on a case-by-case basis.

I frequently get blank pages and errors when visiting news websites from my country (Zambia). No explanations. No apologies. The 37signals incident revealed to me that I have low expectations of what an African website can provide. No more!

Embracing Constraints

The fact that the power goes out every so often is a part of our reality. It is a constraint. If we learn to embrace that, we allow ourselves the opportunity to innovate and grow solutions that benefit us.

Intelligent Redirection

Communication played a key role in my account with 37signals. Even though the site was down, the team had a contingency plan that kept their clients informed. It is embarrassing that most of our newspaper sites communicate their status so poorly given that communication is their business. The idea behind intelligent redirection is that the user is, at the very least, directed to a status page. At best, the client could be directed to a fully functional alternate server outside of the power-outage zone.

Source Code Control

Source code control allows a team of contributors to share in the development process and gracefully recover from detrimental changes made to a project. The basic idea is intelligent backup and may have been a key influence behind Time Machine on the current version of Apple Mac OS X. Source code control adds communication and documentation to the backup process to keep people up to date of changes to their project. Examples of such systems are Perforce and Subversion.

During a power outage, provided that the source code repository server is still live, changes to the a project, say a website, can still be submitted by contributors who still have access to an internet connection. Contributors whose service has been disrupted can still work on a local copy of their assignments. The source code control system will allow them to conveniently apply their updates once service and connectivity is resumed.

Innovative Service Packages

In order to implement the above two ideas, our internet service providers need to look at the possibility of sharing their business across geographic boundaries. As an example, a Tanzanian site could re-direct to a Ugandan server during load shedding or a Zambian news publisher could host their source code in South Africa. In that way we are providing dependable services and making effective use of the connectivity that the Internet so effortlessly provides.

A Light In The Darkness

Africa will always be the dark continent if we let it stay that way. Now more than ever, we have a generation of technologically astute and design-savvy men and women with the skills to create a new E-economy on the continent. They can make a difference like none before us and we should not let energy shortages hold them back.

If we can finally learn to innovate around the very real constraints that we face, it may just be that the darkness may be the best thing that ever happened to us. It will have taught us how to solve our own problems.

Photo by Repoort