Collaborative Software Development

Collaborative software development is not new to the public sector in areas like water or energy distribution, waste management, hospitals, etc., where different administrative entities combine their efforts and share costs towards achieving a common goal. The collaborative software development approach model fosters a sustainable development by relying on collaboration and sharing of expertise and resources.

This Collaborative Software Development approach, while widely adopted in developed countries, is particularly suited to Africa because it provides the framework needed to gather the critical mass required to create synergies for high quality systems developed on sustainable foundations. It is also ideal and easily adopted because it embraces the traditional African collaborative and sharing model as the best approach to deal with paucity of resources by sharing them in order to create synergies and maximize the output.

The collaborative approach together with the use of open source applications overcomes the hurdle of license fees and allows all parliaments, big or small, rich or not, to have access to the same high quality platform of applications that can then be localised to the specific requirement of each parliament.

Through collaborative development, reinventing the same solution multiple times can be avoided thus eliminating the waste of precious resources. These resources can then be more usefully deployed to build human capacity that after all is the most strategic asset in the parliamentary organisation.

Collaborative development not only provides greater independence from IT service providers but it also enhances applications' consistency among African parliaments fostering the exchange of information; promoting learning and capacity building of Parliamentary staff.

All this will foster the "integration" and "harmonisation" agenda of Africa Union and Pan Africa Parliament since the collaboration approach promotes application sharing between different national administrations. This then addresses integration at the level of information systems by removing the multiple trans-border barriers to the exchange of information and data that are at the base of a fair and transparent economic and social integration and harmonisation of the and economic environments.

Technically the development of AKOMA NTOSO has provided a common interoperability framework for exchange of electronic information at the African level while allowing each country to then adapt to its specific requirements and traditions. Africa is both culturally and technologically ready to move on and reap the benefit of a collaborative approach.