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Handasa Arabia: The embodiment of
challenge
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Growing
intolerant to the current state of the high technology sector in the Arab
region, three young Arab engineers are seeking to sow the seeds of change.
Hence, Handasa
Arabia (or Arabic
Engineering), a non-profit, open-source organization, was born.
When
it comes to scientific research or high technology, the Arab region is always,
and perhaps justifiably so, assumed a desert. This region, however, is not
deficient in a rare breed of people who want to turn the situation around –
with financial return not being one of their aspirations.
The
founders of Handasa Arabia (HA) have a lot in common. They are all familiar with
the hardships of being hardware design engineers in an Arab country where, like
almost all developing countries, the industry, if any, is primitive, the funding
is extremely limited, and governmental support is minimal. In the meantime, they
all hold it as an article of faith that in this seemingly desert region, and
similar to other developing countries, skilled, well-educated hi-tech engineers
are not in short supply. They were also well aware that the lack of proper jobs
for young engineers leaves them with little choice but to succumb to a job in
sales and marketing or, at best, in hardware maintenance.
HA's
founders came to believe that the only way to push this region out of its
current status as a technological laggard is by countering, or at least
limiting, the negative effects of career deviation. They decided that if they
can develop an educational tool or platform that keeps the minds of hardware
design engineers sharp and ready for the challenge of a job in the demanding
hi-tech arena, then multinational companies might be enticed to come to invest
in the region, as they realize their need for a pool of qualified and skilled
engineers to run their operations at international standards.
Mohamed
Aldesoky, a systems engineer with an Egyptian internet service
provider and the youngest of the three HA co-founders, harbored the idea (and
domain name) of Handasa Arabia for quite some time. But it was not until he met
the other two founders,
Jamil
Khatib and Mohamed
Salem, in an e-mail list for engineers, that the concept of HA
clearly evolved. Their idea for HA was to develop an online educational platform
for engineering students and engineers from around the world in all disciplines
that gives them the opportunity to share knowledge, contribute to projects, and
be updated with tools, tips, techniques and news relevant to their career
development. The primary dedication, however, was to developing microchip
designs based on the open-source model. This is perhaps because chip design is
the field of expertise of two of the three founders of HA; Khatib and Salem.
Handasa Arabia's website was launched on March 18, 2003.
In
Praise of Openness
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Handasa Arabia is the brainchild
of Mohamed Aldesoky
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From
day one, HA's founders knew that they would not be able to move a step forward
without adopting the open-source model (originally a model of software
development, in which the code written by one programmer is passed on, through
the web, to other developers who can modify, take, add, or build on it for their
specific needs, such that they too pass their contributions back to the
community of developers, and so on).
In
fact, HA’s founders have taken the open-source model a step further.
"After the open-source model gained ground in the early 1990s, two
important analogies became apparent between hardware and software,"
explained Salem. "First, like software, hardware was starting to be
described in what is known as Hardware Description Languages. As text, it
could easily be shared through the Web." The other analogy, Salem added, is
that similar to software where you use a general-purpose processor to run the
code (or program) you (or others) have developed, in hardware too there's now
something similar: the programmable logic device or board that enables
you to run different hardware designs on the same 'board', time and time again.
Combining
the feasibility of describing hardware in text code with the ability to run
different codes on the same piece of affordable hardware gave rise to what is
now called "open-source hardware", which is defined as
"publishing all necessary data about the hardware – the design
specifications, [the] hardware description language files, [the] simulation test
benches, [the] synthesis results, [and the] utilization instructions and
interface – to other systems."
It
is true that the HA founders are not the inventors of the open-source hardware
concept, but they are certainly among the pioneers. Salem, now a teaching
assistant at the German University in Cairo, and Khatib, now pursuing a master's
degree in technology and innovation management at Brandenburg University in
Germany, published in July a paper titled
An
Introduction to Open-Source Hardware Development in one of the
esteemed magazines in the field,
Electronic
Engineering Design. In this paper, they outlined how open-source
hardware can be used to the best interest of developing countries. In addition,
Khatib is undisputedly an open-source hardware pioneer as the first to produce
and release a package of hardware design tools and hardware designs. This
package was distributed by OpenCores,
also co-founded by Khatib.
With
the simple trio of a Web connection, a programmable board and an educational
platform (like HA where the engineer can have, and contribute, new hardware
designs), the student or the young engineer can go through the whole experience
of designing, running and testing an electronic circuit design, with minimum
set-up and from the comfort of his/her bedroom, achieving a huge educational
benefit, explained Salem.
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Khatib: the strength of the
open-source model is in its efficiency in knowledge-transfer
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Khatib
believes that the strength of the open-source model is in its efficiency in
knowledge-transfer. "Through international open-source cooperation, experts
(Arabs and non-Arabs) could be attracted to the projects where they can provide
valuable information and techniques that will help in the design and development
of new ideas."
To
get the users of Handasa Arabia to have the feel for what hardware design is
like, the founders launched two mail lists for two projects open to
participation. The first is OFOQ (Horizon) for the "design of a digital
system on chip of a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)", and the other is
NOUR (light), a project for the "design of a Bluetooth baseband hardware IP
Core". Bluetooth is a short-distance wireless communication technology.
Plus a third general mail list.
International
Recognition
Not
long after the launch of HA, a
report
about the Handasa Arabia initiative was published in the Electronic Engineering
Times; the famous newswire of the field.
"The
reporter titled the story as ‘Arab Engineers Launch Open-Source
Organization’. I'm sure that the word 'Arab' placed together with a
technology-oriented word like ‘open-source’, would sound to readers like an
oxymoron; something completely new to the ear," said Aldesoky, "but we
purposefully wanted to trigger that little surprise," he said. "We
wanted to convey the message that in our region there are skills and talents in
the hi-tech sector and they want to interact positively with the world
technology community," said Salem. "That we have called our
organization Handasa Arabia doesn't have anything to do with this portal being
restricted to Arabs alone; it's open to everybody in the world," Salem
added.
The
message seems to be getting across. Engineers from the USA (specifically from
Silicon Valley), Pakistan, China, Egypt, France and Malaysia are now
participating in HA's ongoing projects.
Shortly
after the Electronic Engineering Times report was published, a person who said
he was a market analyst from Intel, the biggest microchip manufacturer in the
world, contacted Aldesoky and interviewed him a couple of times over the phone
from the USA. "He asked me if there are specialists in chip design in the
Arab region, what engineering students learn at colleges, what the proper salary
for hardware design engineers can be, and that stuff," said Aldesoky.
Obviously, this has been one of the targets of establishing HA; to draw the
attention of the big high-tech corporations and institutions to the fact that
there is a form of humming life beneath the tranquil surface of the region.
What
is more, HA has taken a giant step towards international recognition by
organizing an international student
contest,
in cooperation with Waterloo University in Canada and the Institute
of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
a professional society for engineers. The winners in this contest (the first
from Lahore University, Pakistan, the second from Modern Science and Arts
University, Egypt, and the third from Université Claude Bernard, France) were
granted international exposure to their persons and works in the 16th
International Conference on Microelectronics held in Tunisia, December 5th –
8th, 2004.
What
Then?
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“We are gradually gaining
international recognition," says Salem
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All
three founders of Handasa Arabia agree that their non-profit organization is
still small, and that time is needed to build confidence in the initiative, both
from the students and engineers on one side, and from the industry and official
institutions on the other side. "More often than not people register in the
email lists and just view, without interacting or contributing. This will change
with time when people are assured that we're serious, that we're absolutely
non-profit, and that we are gradually gaining international recognition,"
said Salem.
That
HA is small, however, does not impede the organization's founders from thinking
big. They have recently embarked on a new phase that is intended to make their
organization carry on the job of an
incubator
to new and creative ideas, and helping them – non-profitably – along the way
until these ideas become products. In other words, they want to become a
free-of-charge mediator between the pools of talents (mostly universities) and
the industry. This is how Khatib wants Handasa Arabia to evolve.
"The
ultimate and absolute fate of any idea should be that it gets transformed into a
product of value to people," said Salem. He sees a similar mediating role
for HA in the future, but on a more international level. "I see HA as
becoming a regional standardization organization that's accredited worldwide,
perhaps like the IEEE, and thus a worldwide cooperation between industry and
pools of talents can be achieved." The third of the HA trio, Aldesoky,
hopes the fledgling open-source organization will be a helping hand to
developing countries that can't stand the huge financial burden of Research
& Development expenditures that the technology companies incur to stay
competitive. He "like[s] to see Handasa Arabia as the motivator for Arabs
and Muslims to develop their countries."
Big
as these ambitions may sound, they do not seem impossible. Though single-handed,
the enormously dedicated founders of Handasa Arabia are irrevocably determined
to take their organization to where they want it to be.
Waleed
El-Shobaky is an Egyptian journalist. You can reach him at: shobakky@yahoo.com.
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