ESTIMA’s Reed House Systems

ESTIMA is a software factory concept which has the objective of creating an economically viable information technology business entity – called Reed House Systems – which will produce professional ICT4D software products.   This will allow direct application of modern software practices and innovations to marginalized contexts, in particularly rural ones, something which has until now been done in haphazard and fragmented ways and, as far as we are aware, absent in the Southern African region.

The three partners in this project are Telkom Centre of Excellence in Distributed Multimedia hosted at Rhodes University, the Telkom Centre of Excellence in ICT for Developent hosted at University of Fort Hare, and eKhaya ICT.  The software developed in the factory is predicated on the specific ICTD experience gained from the operations within the Siyakhula Living Lab since 2006.  It will also be supported by ten years of general software development in the Telkom Centres of Excellence at the two universities and the experience of eKhaya ICT, an Eastern Cape startup aligned with the vision underpinning ESTIMA.

Organisation and philosophy

The central organisation of the factory is based on agile programming and software development principles that have been tried and tested in commercial settings and which are well suited to large projects active in a dynamic environment.

About Reed House Systems

Reed House Systems began producing software on the 15th of March 2010. State-of-the-Art Open Source technology is used to achieve quality results within a quick time-frame.

The very first product being developed is a middleware environment, based on web services, which embodies workflows and logic relevant to a marginalised rural setting.  Into this environment, eServices relevant for the target market will be progressively integrated.   eServices implementations will be either sourced and adapted from the open source community or created in the software factory if none are available.

Reed House Systems has several years of insight into the rural business use cases through the Siyakhula Living Lab.  Some of the business use cases that will deliver tremendous value are:

• eGovernment – access to government information and online forms, as well as workflow to aid the process;

• eTourism – support systems for micro-tourism as well as rich content from the rural area which could boost tourism;
• eCommerce – applications to support art and crafts entrepreneurs from the rural communities; and
• Internet Info – general Internet possibilities packaged in a useful and rational manner to assist community uptake of the Internet.

Sample Use Case: Rural Craft
A crafter decides that she wishes to tap into new markets and she has heard about the local Reed House Systems powered digital access node, which has been running in the community for a few months. It is operated by a member of the community whom the crafter knows and trusts. Other crafters have made some sales using the system, which translated into cash for their families.

For more information contact the team here.

Visit the Reed House Systems website.