Let's jump into the talk. First of all a bit of background as Mike mentioned Ii'm working for SAP as well as being an adjunct lecturer from the University of Adelaide and this work I'm going to present here was when I was still a full-time lecturer in Adelaide in 2019.

Since i assume that not all of you know where exactly Papua New Guinea is located I want to start with a brief overview of where PNG is located and some basic statistics. PNG is located in the Pacific close to Australia as you can see here the capital city is Port Moresby. There are about nine million people in PNG and when you look at the GDP and the HDI or the human development index you see that it's still a developing country. It gained independence from Australia in 1975 and at the same time it was also a German colony which made it quite interesting for me being German working in Australia. Back then when we visited we organized a workshop there in Port Moresby to to study the challenges and opportunities for software engineering in PNG. One of my co-authors is from PNG and he agreed to prepare a short intro video and I'm going to show that now.

Hello my name is Raula Gaikovina Kula I'm an assistant professor at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. So today i was asked to provide some background into why we started the Bridges Initiative which was the first international workshop on bridging the divide between globally engineered software. So this workshop was - actually it started off - first I'm from Papua New Guinea and I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to different software engineering concepts or global software engineering research and also practitioners so I also wanted to go back to my country and see the differences. I saw some differences but how to characterize these differences was something that I was really interested in. So what i did is- we were able to get some funding with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology also with the UPNG which is the local university and different sponsors and we were able to hold the international workshop. We had some participants - I was able to invite different experts in the field especially in software engineering. As you know one of them is Sebastian Baltes so he's going to be giving the talk. We we had a two-day program - i won't go into all the details because i think Sebastian will give that - and these are the supporters. So we had a lot of - as well as academic we had a lot of industry support from the local industry so that was the main motivation and then we we planned to do 2020 and 2021, 2022. Unfortunately due to the corona pandemic we were unable to continue those but I'm hoping that this year or next year we can kick-start this project again. I hope you are interested in this and maybe you can come see us too as well. So thank you very much.

Yes so Raula mentioned we organized this workshop. Our main question was as I said in the beginning to identify challenges of the opportunities for software engineering in PNG and just very briefly the results or the selection of results I'm going to present are based on that workshop. There are several parts like any large conference and we handed out surveys, did focus group interviews, and that's the data we used to distill those challenges and opportunities. So first of all there are very basic challenges infrastructure-related challenges. The economy in PNG is currently dominated by the primary sector. 75 percent of population rely on subsistence economy and internet access is a problem: only 30 percent of the population have access to internet and even though compared to neighboring countries such as Fiji there is improvement - recently there was a new sea cable installed to Australia to increase the bandwidth but also people usually don't have computers at home and they often access the internet via phones. So in summary internet is expensive and slow. It's really used on mobile devices and there are very few flat rates. I took this picture here on the right while we visited PNG and you see there for an actual flat rate internet connection it would be about 250 us dollars.

Another thing we observed is the importance of school and universities because there are computers there. There's internet access there and people go to schools and universities to access the internet and to use computers and what we also noticed is that for quite a few people the internet is specific apps such as Facebook so then when they say they use the internet they usually refer to specific apps. And to provide some context for those internet costs it's hard to find numbers but i did an estimation. So let's say the lower threshold for middle income in PNG is 325 kina which is local currency and on the right you see a picture we took back then in 2019 about how much it is for internet connection on a mobile device. And so for 30 gigabyte for a month you already have to pay almost half of this monthly income. And this translates to about 22 hours of Zoom calls which is not that much if you think about how much you spend in Zoom or Teams or whatever video call software sessions every day.

There's another challenge related to education and also trust. So adult literacy is quite low in png 63% as of 2015 and actually quite a few participants mentioned that improving the school and university curriculum in terms of software engineering would be a good way to quickly improve the situation. And the education - in terms of software engineering and PNG, education and trust are also related because since there are these problems with education in PNG in terms of software development. The government and local companies don't trust local software engineers being educated in PNG and give the contracts to foreign companies and workers and this again leads to a lack of local expertise in terms of software development which could then be leveraged to improve the curricula at schools and universities so that's a bit of a problem.

But despite these major challenges a local software engineering community community is forming so we visited the PNG digital ICT cluster and its small companies - startups - are working on the main of software development and there's also a Facebook group for ICT jobs in PNG so there is something starting up but it's limited to the urban areas and mainly to the capital city of Port Moresby because the infrastructure is better there.

There is however a huge potential for software engineering in PNG because software needs to be adapted for example to local legislation in terms of the tax system etc. And the government and companies need software but as of now there are very few local software developers and therefore they depend on foreign companies - a foreign workforce - and this incurs huge costs because as we learned in PNG if you live in PNG as an expat developer you are paid quite well - competitive salaries on an international level - which as I mentioned increase huge costs for local companies and government. So there are opportunities first of all for the government to invest in building a local engineering community. And the way to start this could be focusing on customization of standard software to the local environment. And also in terms of development aid, the national universities can help revise the curriculum schools at schools and universities in terms of software engineering and this was something we wanted to kickstart but as I mentioned due to the pandemic it was a bit slowed down but we hope to pick it up again now.

So what can you as an individual do? First of all if you have software that might be used in PNG think about customization adaptation of the software from the beginning.

Make sure that your software and also documentation is accessible for users with limited resources. For example if you have auto playing videos on your landing page, that can incur quite a lot of cost for somebody in PNG. As i've outlined before provide alternatives: for example video tutorials and some form of written tutorials that people can access. And consider also these limitations in case you communicate somebody in PNG for example consider that a Zoom call might be quite expensive and sometimes a traditional phone call might be preferable. And jwhen you design your software or when you design your web app consider this persona of somebody living in PNG or another developing country with limited bandwidth and the internet being accessed on phones primarily and also on shared hardware because people have to go to schools and universities to use computers. So this shared usage is something to consider as well. Just have this persona in mind when you design your software.

That's my main message for this talk. If you want to dig a bit deeper the paper is publicly available in the website of the workshop as well and feel free to reach out to me if you have any further questions thank you very much.