Winner of the ‘Best Paper’ award at IST-Africa in May 2010, Kerryn spoke to Ron Wertlan from ESTIMA, to find out more about the project.

What is ESTIMA?
The ESTIMA initiative is a spin-off from the work being done within the Siyakhula Living Lab project in the DWESA region of the Eastern Cape. The Living Labs initiative provides a platform for universities, the private sector and communities to identify emerging innovation and develop solutions using information and communication technologies.

The initiative has been billed as a win-win scenario in that it enables industry to find new strengths and help create local solutions whilst at the same time providing students
with solid working experience in the field. The local concept is closely aligned with working practices at various European computer science departments in universities such as at the Helsinki University of Technology and the Freie Universität in Berlin.

Within this context, ESTIMA has been established by Rhodes University and will consist of the construction of a software factory called Reed House Systems which will produce Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) software products. Reed House Systems is situated in the Rhodes University Innovation Attic, which is a project of the Centre of Excellence in Multimedia at the Department of Computer Science. As an extremely new initiative, Reed House Systems began producing software in the first quarter of 2010, using state-of-the-art Open Source technology in order to achieve quality results, as quickly as possible. The middleware currently being developed is based on open standards and is technology- and platform- independent. (more…)