I was not surprised at all when Michael Trucano, a senior ICT & Education specialist at the World Bank, explained the outcomes of a survey done in Nairobi with HR managers looking for diverse IT profesionals as database administrators, programmers or graphical designers. The method for finding the most suitable candidate was going through their curriculums and compare their grades and working experience together with specific technical skills required for the job description. However, in order to take a decision in the eventual situation of a rather similar profile, those managers would look at the personal involvement in open source communities and projects.
In a similar case, in Kampala, the Director of an IT company told me that the critical questions to identify employees with great potential were the kind of websites and blogs he or she was interested about.
Why all this interest on open source communities and personal blog interests? Welll, mainly because the added value of an individual is, needless to say, the real interests and motivations he or she has about technology and how those interests will work as incentives when hired.
The open source communites around the world are decentralized, self-motivated and self-incentivated communities which main aim is to self-explore and learn without being obliged to do so. This paradigm offers to their employers the ability to invest on those individuals in a way that others could not do, only because they don't believe how long they will stay in the company before leaving to a better paid job.
Money is not the only thing after all. Working in a learning environment, with managers that 
understand your interests and cope with some of your learning expectations is a much better rewarding future that a well-paid job with no motivation after 6pm. Open source communities are, in some way, the place where real learning is done through exchange of opinions, technology experimentation, feedback on tips and tricks and much more, on a voluntary basis and self-leaded.
As for non-profit organizations or foundations like the one I'm working for (IICD), being a sponsor of open source communities can have multiple effects such as promoting innovation in the solution finding process (through an active and motivated community) or filling a learning gap providing another source of inspiration for thousands of graduate students that find themselves unemployed and without experience on the ICT sector after completing their degree.
All software has source code. Open source software grants every user access to that code. Freedom means choice. Choice means power.
That's why we believe open source is inevitable. It returns control to the customer. You can see the code, change it, learn from it. Bugs are found and fixed quickly. And when customers are unhappy with one vendor, they can choose another without overhauling their entire infrastructure. No more technology lock-in. No more monopolies.
We believe open source simply creates better software. Everyone collaborates, the best technology wins. Not just within one company, but among an Internet-connected, worldwide community. New ideas and code travel the world in an instant.
As a result, the open source model often builds higher quality, more secure, more easily integrated software. And it does it at a vastly accelerated pace and often at a lower cost.
In the proprietary model, development occurs within one company. Programmers write code, hide it behind binaries, and charge customers to use the software--then charge them more to fix it when it breaks. The problem worsens when you become tied to a company's architecture, protocols, and file formats. Bruce Perens calls this the addiction model of software procurement. And we think a model that puts customers at such a fundamental disadvantage is conceptually broken.
Open source is not nameless, faceless, and it's not charity. Nor is it solely a community effort. What you see today is a technology revolution driven by market demand.
And the revolution is being recognized. Red Hat has teamed up with the Georgia Institute of Technology to look into the causes and the worldwide growth of open source. They created theOpen Source Index to better measure its progress.
Imagine if all past knowledge was kept hidden or its use was restricted to only those who are willing to pay for it. Education and research would suffer. Publishing books or sharing information of any sort would become difficult. Yet this is the mentality behind the proprietary software model. In the same way shared knowledge propels the whole of society forward, open technology development can drive innovation for an entire industry.
