Hello everyone, my name is Daniel and I have the pleasure today to talk to you about
the process of open sorting your serum applications or customer relations management application
and as a demonstration a nice use case of why open source can be so powerful and helpful
in the energy access context.
Where am I? I'm a software engineer currently working at an access, worked in many different areas,
mathematics, state engineering, software engineering and throughout my career I always had the pleasure
to also contribute to the open source projects I've been using and see how nice it is and how powerful
if we have these open source communities in the various projects we use.
Yeah, this is our agenda. So first we quickly talk about what is that access actually does. So what we do we are a foundation
and what we want to do is we want to promote open source in the energy access space.
So for those of you who have been around when Akashah had her presentation, she talked about energy access, what is it like really reaching
providing energy to those people in the world who currently don't have access to reliable and
universal and jacks. And giving some of the parts here. So what we have observed for we have discovered is that local small companies in the countries where people don't have access
electricity actually super important in providing this access.
There is many players let's say around that due to the large cooperates but really the small companies the companies that work locally
with the people, with the villages, with the communities to provide that energy service are really really important and powerful in providing that service.
So for those small companies, many of them actually not all of them are 100% digitized.
So one process that many of these companies would profit from is like digitalizing their business models.
So quickly you want to go over what is it like, something that's called the off grid CRM. So what I understand from this.
So we're talking about off-grid use cases. So many grid solar home systems, so we need a software, we need a software that can manage these assets.
Also sometimes there's additional revenue models around us around appliances, things like fridges, TVs and fans.
So all these operations need a place where they can be combined and made efficient.
There's also various business models around like payers who go is very common, there's newer approaches of doing like energy as a service.
All these things the platform has to have these capabilities for the people that want to use it to be flexible enough to implement their model.
Also, yeah, we want to automate stuff. Another thing that is very important is the payment.
Mobile money payments can be quite tricky to implement like the providers have like complicated APIs, there's some network implications etc.
Also cash payments are things, so how if you collect your payments that cash with agents that need to be tracked somewhere and make sure this payment is actually received.
But then we can even go further and have like advanced features, advanced features like ticketing systems, business analytics, inventory management and you name it.
So cool, these systems already exist, so the question is why do we need an open source system like that?
So what we have observed there's a couple of pain points, remember I'm talking about really, really small companies, few people companies.
When they want to use like a commercial services, one, many of them I should trade from a like a vendor lock in, so what if the company, what happens if no longer exists?
Suddenly I migrated all my service to this platform and I'm stuck.
Some of the business models are very, very special, so the tools may not provide the full flexibility that companies need.
And also just the pricing model, sometimes it's just not targeted at very, very small companies, sometimes they have flat fees and what do you do it only, it doesn't really scale for you.
And what we observed is then some of the companies refused to like digitalize their processes and just stay with what works for them or just delay it.
In both ways they're the growth of them are hindered and like the paths on energy access is energy access is delayed.
But what we also saw at the same time is that many of the people active in the sector are actually willing to contribute, share their knowledge.
People are very, very open, so that's kind of an interesting situation.
So wouldn't it be great if we have like an open source here and where everyone that is willing to contribute can work on that?
The good news is and also like a community here. The good news is we actually can.
So there is a German company called Enensus which had developed, CRM systems specific for many groups.
And what they did is they, internally they shift the model mode of operation and kind of no longer needed the system they had developed.
But they are quite fans of open source. So they wanted to open source their system. So they approached us and said, okay, let's can we open source that?
And what else do we need to do?
So then we took over the CRM system that was developed by them.
Went over through some processes to really make it approachable and accessible by an open source license.
And then took over the maintenance and feature development for that project. In particular, the original system was very specific for many groups, but like in energy access sector you have multiple things solar home system was mentioned.
So we started implementing some additional features that really suits the entire ecosystem of companies in the energy access space.
For us the project we had two main goals. The first goal was to like make a knowledge transfer and make it so that we can actually start working.
And when I say we actually, I mean the entire community that includes me and our company, but really anyone who wants to contribute in that.
So that was the first goal. And the second goal is to actually start building the community.
So what did we do for that? This is just a list of very technical things that we needed to do.
So from the code base we needed to make sure that we actually can set up and run the code as a developer locally.
One thing that I found very, very important in this for applications like this is to have a set of reasonable demo data.
If people want to explore the application, it really makes it very, very important that you have a set of demo data, which you can actually use to understand the application.
For some code styling groups, we removed code that was no longer needed.
And also reviewed the documentation. Those of you are developers, you don't know like the documentation and so is the part that comes to the bottom of the list.
And also like the distribution workflows, how can you get the software, how can you use the software.
And once that was done, we felt confident. Okay, we are at a state now where we can actually understand the application and start working with this.
And the second goal is how can we now build a community around that.
So we started by doing just a list of features that we have open up like bug reports, feature requests, stuff like that.
Work on a roadmap to just give some visibility about the state of the project, what is happening.
We have a discord server where people can talk if you want to exchange and thought on that that also exists.
And now we are basically trying to grow community and provide more visibility.
That is working progress right now, just spreading the work.
Yeah, and that's already most of what I wanted to say, so quick conclusion recap.
Or maybe you want to understand how can you, if you want, have out and engage.
You can check the project out on GitHub, you can explore the demo version, the demo version is hosted, you can just log in, it will actually automatically log in, play with the demo data.
Spread the word, press the star button on GitHub, which is the like button for developers.
Join our discord server, explore the resources or the inaccess site.
And yeah, quick recap, so open source.
Sorry, small and medium enterprises, very important on the path of to universal chief universal energy access.
And these companies specifically really provide benefit from open source communities.
And yeah, open source thing, any existing project provides a lot of benefits for the project itself.
And I don't know, I think it's also a fun little exercise to do.
Yeah, explore the project discord, if you want to take some pictures, click the QR codes.
That's it. Thank you very much.
Okay, turns out I was way too fast.
So we have time for questions.
How many actual users do you have to use this software?
The question was, how many actual users do we have that are currently using this software?
So there's two ways to answer the question, because it's open source.
Of course, you can just go and run the application yourself.
So I don't know how many people are doing this.
This is actually true that we have, we do provide some servers, like a hosted version of that.
This is still shaping up.
We want to, as our foundation, we also want to provide the servers of running the application at a very, very low cost.
And we kind of see this as an adoption support.
And there we have like four of five companies that are using that.
So it's not that many, again, these are small companies, but yeah.
Let's see, like we're hoping to grow this as well.
But yeah, the goal really is, or the vision really is to enable people to also run this for themselves.
And, but yeah.
I don't know.
How have the needs of the small media enterprises changed over the last few years?
Because we've seen it a million Nigerians.
You've seen a lot of fossil fuels are no longer subsidized in the same way.
And we've seen renewables become slightly cheaper for themselves.
As that, you've seen that manifest in the software role, the stories people come to and I'm going to request they have.
Let me reveal the question. The question was how the changing demand for SMEs,
smaller media enterprises has manifested and requests we get.
I will admit that I don't know for sure.
My background is more from the software engineering side of things, not so much in the energy access side of things.
What I have seen is a shift in running hybrid systems.
And we see that in applications like this, where originally it was targeted very specific at many grid use cases.
And which are good in some sense, but lack in others.
So we have seen, like from the talking about a micropromen just specifically,
we've seen the demand of being able to run different business models together,
based on the circumstances of the particular geography or place you are interested in.
So that's what I have said.
Any other questions?
Yes, please.
The question is what language is spoken and if it needs to be translated?
Yes, basically.
Currently, it's available in English.
What is the other language?
It's available in three languages. I actually don't know about hard.
So we do have some very basic way of localizing the application, which is this better ways out there.
It's kind of one of the features in our agenda to actually have an easier way of localizing the application.
Not everyone speaks English, of course.
Currently, most of it is an English and a French for sure.
But we do have system in place where you can localize the application.
So one of the goals we have, because we do get some funding to work on the application.
So one of the things we want to do is really localize it again using small companies in the geographies that we are using.
For example, we have one project in Mozambique.
So we want to translate it to Portuguese.
And this time, it's not me, but it's like a company in Mozambique that is going to use the application, translate the application to Portuguese.
More questions?
Thanks a little talk.
What would you say, because you said about transitioning from existing software into both the software and the source contribution,
what would you say that particular pain points here in the middle of that, particularly if you're all I'm thinking of,
people who've made up their feeling very well, they really want to develop in it.
So the question was, what were the pain points in the transition process from a transition process to an open source software?
What were the pain points?
I think the pain points, most of the pain points were kind of the legacy of the code base, because it was developed with one goal in mind,
and part of the open source project was a process was to also open up the use case of it.
So we have had some very specific implementation and designs, let's say, for that use case.
So to transition kind of back from that and make it available to a broader use case is one of the main pain points.
And unfortunately, this is true because now when you do want to contribute and you don't necessarily have all the knowledge about legacy of the project, right?
So it can be challenging at times to, okay, why do I need to do this in this way?
It's unintuitive and the answer is because it's a legacy of the project.
So my personal take on that is to work in small incremental steps.
So whenever we identify things like that, you can't fix everything at the time, right?
Then you essentially rewrite the application, which no one has the time and willingness to do.
But I'm a believer of the approach of saying, if we identify these kinds of things, try to improve them one at a time,
because we have something that is available right now, and it works with the caveats that are there.
And I'm kind of incrementally trying to improve this.
And this is also why we focus so much on the community, because at one point, for example, me having worked with this for a while,
it's not to get a little bit like horse-blinded, right, to no longer see these things.
That's why I think having community open source together is so important to really get aware of these things that they exist.
And because only then you'll be able to actually address and fix them.
Welcome.
Any more questions?
There's not none. Thank you very much.