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 | IslamOnline.net
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
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.
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?
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.
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