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This article was supposed to run in Linux Magazine, but the Editor-in-Chief felt the style was too different for the magazine (which I actually agree with). He's been kind enough to provide me with a copy, since I had lost mine to a hard disk failure.
Egypt has a history stretching back some 5,000 years. Sadly, open source had not figured very prominently in Egypt for 4,994 of these years, though to be really fair there's at least 4,800 of those 4,994 for which Linus, Babbage, and the Egyptian people are guiltless.
Linux adoption and penetration has lagged in Egypt. Today, people are just discovering with the typical euphoria of a movement just hitting the fringes of mainstream the wonders of Linux and open source, and yet it has been a long road from zero to Penguin. The story starts with a LUG, or rather without a LUG.
The Egyptian Linux geek has much in common with his or her counterpart in other parts of the world; the same passion for this wonderful operating system, the same enhanced awareness of issues regarding intellectual property, the same appreciation for hackish endeavour, and schedules persistently free of commitments involving the opposite gender. Ical files must be filled with something, of course, and since the open source community had been thoughtless enough to neglect developing command line apps for development of amorous involvement, the geek contingent of Egypt sprang into concerted action. Many bedrooms and basements were abandoned and many mothers and fathers saw their Linux-loving children for the first time in ages as they emerged from their technological caves and faced the unknown beyond the front door known as "The Mysterious Outside". All were on their way to an event which had been announced on a Yahoo mailing list; some were eaten en route by a grue (the Egyptian variety is particularly perilous) and they were mourned - fortunately for the Egyptian technological environment, many made it to the appointed location at something approximating the appointed time.
At the a popular cafe in the first week of December 2000, the waiters noted a gradual but marked change in the demographic of the clientèle; laptops were springing up and indecipherable techno-babble was dominating. As more and more people came, the cafe staff - with considerable courtesy - arranged a make-shift conference arrangement with tables and chairs, took orders, and went away to check if they had that much coffee. The turn-out was unexpected for a casual posting on a mailing list; Linux geeks became brethren instead of tinkering away in solidarity, and the Egyptian LUG was born.
For a few years, LUG activity was sparse to non-existent; the LUG was centred around a web forum (http://www.linux-egypt.org) where Egyptians and other Arabic speaking Linux users could find support and discussion in their native language. There was no real off-line activity; there were several reasons for this. Back then, there were not many LUG-friendly companies or organizations to perform as hosts and the group had no proper place to meet. In a society where age tends to imply seniority and seniority prompts initiative, most young LUG members were not accustomed to assuming leadership roles (outside bzFlag, of course).
But with the emergence of /dev/cabal, all of this was about to change.
Starting around 2003, a core group of members acknowledged a certain degree of torpor in the LUG's existence. Now that the Linux community in Egypt had found one another, the lack of off-line activity was beginning to become an issue. One member started a programming sub-group, another started a team dedicated to distributing Linux copies. Both groups met up once or twice, group members showing up more out of curiosity and desire for caffeine than anything else, and both groups floundered like an emacs weenie trying to get any actual work done (in Egypt, we don't have editor wars, we have editor jihads).
The seed was planted, however, and a core group of four friends and LUGgers began devising a nefarious scheme to lure the geeks back outside (rumors of the existence of womany things in The Mysterious Outside were planted but proved ineffective; the notion was too outlandish). This organization was to become known as /dev/cabal, a secret society dedicated to plotting the future of open source in Egypt, conducting frequent and exhaustive beer assessments, and combating criminal elements in garish spandex costumes using clever and relatively short shell scripts (we never got around to that last one).
In May of 2004, the Egyptian LUG held its first ever InstallFest and it was a resounding success. A young cultural
center called the Culture Wheel which had been built under one of the busiest overpasses in Cairo served as the venue (if you have a quip about trolls and bridges, we've heard them all before). 25 LUG volunteers laboured overnight to set up a network and to arrange some forty odd machines to run demos on. Being the first event of its kind in the country, there was no clear idea what the turnout would be like, but the best guess of 150 had been matched and surpassed a full 30 minutes before the official opening time at 10 in the morning. The centre operators estimated a 3,000 visitor head count for the day, which is impressive given a "marketing" budget which isn't likely to have exceeded the equivalent of 20 quid.
While the volunteer to visitor ratio was so high that very few actual installations occurred, most people were simply curious about Linux and spent good deals of time on the demo machines. There were a series of themed demos such as desktop usage, graphics editing, the LAMP stack; plans to do live Debian installs on a placid camel were foiled by the distinct lack of Demand for copies of our special editions of Mandrake (customized to emphasize desirable applications and to more fully support Arabic) was so high that two unfortunate souls were assigned to permanent marker duty, spending all day in addition to all of the night before scribbling CD1 and CD2 over and over again (we had offered them the option of demoing emacs instead, but they had enough sense to run for the markers). There was a solid turnout of female techies, a fact attributable to the devastatingly handsome LUG volunteers (and, closer to this universe, to the relative Egyptian social acceptability of a young woman studying CS).
In the aftermath of the successful event, there was much discussion amongst /dev/cabal concerning how to maintain
momentum for the grass-roots Linux movement in Egypt. Once conclusion was the need for a more flexible and inclusive LUG structure. Since the old community focal point of the linux-egypt.org website was owned and operated by people unwilling to change much, the cabalists forked the community.
A new parallel LUG was formed called EGLUG, a new Drupal site was thrown up instead of the proprietary vBulletin which was running linux-egypt.org, a charter was written mandating a hyper-democratic community, and a few nano users were sent to a forced re-education camp. While there was some acrimonious episodes during the fork of EGLUG from Linux-Egypt, all in all it was a success. Administrator and moderator elections were held (there are no non-technical posts in EGLUG, only editorial or administrative; this was a reaction to the imposition of a "LUG President" by the Linux-Egypt.org domain owner), most people gradually moved over, and now in 2006 and almost two years after the community fork, the Egyptian Linux movement has never been healthier under the aegis of EGLUG.
In the two years since the community fork, the list of initiatives and activities is respectable.
EGLUG has engaged in advocacy in five different cities, for NGOs and also for universities. The LUG has helped set up Linux labs in poor areas and has been represented in conferences in Jordan, South Africa, Uganda, and other countries. We now count 1,500 registered members on the eglug.org site; of course, only a percentage of these are active but the figure is nevertheless satisfying for an organization so young. EGLUG members have contributed to many different open source projects, including Drupal and Arabeyes (a project aimed at centralizing efforts for localization and internationalization of open source software). The LUG is responsible for most of the Arabic Linux documentation available online - one approach for translation is something which has come to be called "Do or Die", a distributed translation effort where several volunteers lock themselves into one lab and swear not to leave until the target document is fully translated (the "From Powerup to Bash Prompt" HOWTO was translated entirely in 8 hours in this brutal fashion). We have taught classes on iptables, content management systems, networking, debugging, and other topics for which attendance has generally been oversubscribed.
From a community perspective, the LUG has more than stood on its own feet. As if to reinforce the lessons learnt from the fork, the administrative team has been subjected to a no confidence vote and a new team of younger second-generation EGLUGgers voted in - the democratic model has worked well and the community is stronger for it. This makes a nice departure from the Linux User Group HOWTO, incidentally, which suggests the necessity of benign dictatorship.
One very significant way in which Linux adoption in Egypt has differed from Western countries is in the awareness cycle. As David Wheeler noted in the Why FOSS? study, what has tended to happen traditionally is that, by the time the management levels become aware of the Linux and open source alternative, they will already have the internal capacity to work with it. The engineers will already have worked with Linux and open source, so the organization will be able to get up and running faster. In Egypt, this form of enlightened engineer is altogether more rare; although decision makers and other non-technical levels of organizations and even society have become aware of the Linux option at about the same time as their Western counterparts, they lack the experienced pool of implementing engineers who have tinkered with Linux for a few years.
As a consequence of this, the adoption cycle in Egypt lags behind the general trend in the West. More significantly for EGLUG, however, this means that there are no grizzled veterans to dish out the gruff RTFM, STFW, and "cat /dev/urandom | lp" directives. The average age in EGLUG is low, but the prevalent culture is novel by the very traditional Egyptian societal norms: seniority through competence and not age.
It has been considered good practise since the creation of EGLUG to steer new users in one direction distro-wise regardless of the LUGger's preference (this has always been Mandrake/Mandriva, for small values of always given how young the LUG is); the idea is to widen the base of support and to try to foster an environment where people are using the technological path of least resistance and greatest peer support base until they are experienced enough to make their own choices (such as using emacs for which they atone by writing emacs-bashing literature thinly veiled as LUG histories in Linux magazines). Many people who try Mandriva stay with it, so it is likely to be the most popular distro in Egypt at an end-user level.
The community EGLUG has created can in many ways be considered more than a simple agglutination of people with shared and specific technological interests. On many levels, the EGLUG experience has an educational effect transcending this role. The overriding precedence given to direct community involvement in the form of democratic processes is in many cases the first time members see phenomena such as officials getting voted out or charters being amended to reflect the will of the community.
EGLUG today is a strong and vibrant community. It is in many ways more than a LUG, and it differs in many ways from other older LUGs worldwide. For the future, EGLUG has many plans. Plans to afford menial jobs to top executives of proprietary software vendors when the revolution does their companies in. Plans to work with Klaus Knopper to get Linux running on the Sphinx. Plans to debug this mysterious Outside thing, since it doesn't appear to run as well as our computers. But above all, plans to continue to have fun getting more people to consider the Linux option.
