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Let's jump into the talk. First of all a bit of background as Mike mentioned Ii'm working for

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SAP as well as being an adjunct lecturer from the University of Adelaide and this work I'm

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going to present here was when I was still a full-time lecturer in Adelaide in 2019.

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Since i assume that not all of you know where exactly Papua New Guinea is located

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I want to start with a brief overview of where PNG is located and some basic statistics. PNG is

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located in the Pacific close to Australia as you can see here the capital city is Port Moresby.

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There are about nine million people in PNG

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and when you look at the GDP and the HDI or the human development index you see that it's still

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a developing country. It gained independence from Australia in 1975 and at the same time

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it was also a German colony which made it quite interesting for me being German working

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in Australia. Back then when we visited we organized a workshop there in Port Moresby

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to to study the challenges and opportunities for software engineering in PNG. One of my co-authors

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is from PNG and he agreed to prepare a short intro video and I'm going to show that now.

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Hello my name is Raula Gaikovina Kula I'm an assistant professor at Nara Institute of

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Science and Technology in Japan. So today i was asked to provide some background into why

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we started the Bridges Initiative which was the first international workshop on bridging the

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divide between globally engineered software. So this workshop was - actually it started

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off - first I'm from Papua New Guinea and I've been fortunate enough to be exposed to different

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software engineering concepts or global software engineering research and also practitioners

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so I also wanted to go back to my country and see the differences. I saw some differences but how

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to characterize these differences was something that I was really interested in. So what i did is-

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we were able to get some funding with the Nara Institute of Science and Technology

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also with the UPNG which is the local university and different sponsors and

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we were able to hold the international workshop. We had some participants - I was able to invite

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different experts in the field especially in software engineering.

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As you know one of them is Sebastian Baltes so he's going to be giving the talk. We

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we had a two-day program - i won't go into all the details because i think Sebastian will give

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that - and these are the supporters. So we had a lot of - as well as academic we had a lot of

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industry support from the local industry so that was the main motivation and then we we planned to

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do 2020 and 2021, 2022. Unfortunately due to the corona pandemic we were unable to continue those

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but I'm hoping that this year or next year we can kick-start this project again. I hope you

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are interested in this and maybe you can come see us too as well. So thank you very much.

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Yes so Raula mentioned we organized this workshop. Our main question was as I said

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in the beginning to identify challenges of the opportunities for software engineering in PNG

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and just very briefly the results or the selection of results I'm going to present are based on that

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workshop. There are several parts like any large conference and we handed out surveys, did focus

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group interviews, and that's the data we used to distill those challenges and opportunities.

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So first of all there are very basic challenges infrastructure-related challenges. The economy in

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PNG is currently dominated by the primary sector. 75 percent of population rely on subsistence

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economy and internet access is a problem: only 30 percent of the population have access to internet

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and even though compared to neighboring countries such as Fiji there is improvement - recently

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there was a new sea cable installed to Australia to increase the bandwidth but

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also people usually don't have computers at home and they often access the internet via phones.

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So in summary internet is expensive and slow. It's really used on mobile devices and there

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are very few flat rates. I took this picture here on the right while we visited PNG and

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you see there for an actual flat rate internet connection it would be about 250 us dollars.

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Another thing we observed is the importance of school and universities because there are

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computers there. There's internet access there and people go to schools and universities to

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access the internet and to use computers and what we also noticed is that for quite a few people

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the internet is specific apps such as Facebook so then when they say they use the internet

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they usually refer to specific apps. And to provide some context for those internet costs

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it's hard to find numbers but i did an estimation. So let's say the lower

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threshold for middle income in PNG is 325 kina which is local currency and on the right you see

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a picture we took back then in 2019 about how much it is for internet connection on a mobile device.

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And so for 30 gigabyte for a month you already have to pay almost half of this monthly income.

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And this translates to about 22 hours of Zoom calls which is not that much if you

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think about how much you spend in Zoom or Teams or whatever video call software sessions every day.

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There's another challenge related to education and also trust. So adult literacy is quite low in png

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63% as of 2015 and actually quite a few participants mentioned that

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improving the school and university curriculum in terms of software engineering would be a good

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way to quickly improve the situation. And the education - in terms of software engineering and

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PNG, education and trust are also related because since there are these problems with education

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in PNG in terms of software development. The government and local companies don't trust local

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software engineers being educated in PNG and give the contracts to foreign companies and workers and

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this again leads to a lack of local expertise in terms of software development which could then be

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leveraged to improve the curricula at schools and universities so that's a bit of a problem.

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But despite these major challenges a local software engineering community community is

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forming so we visited the PNG digital ICT cluster and its small companies - startups - are working

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on the main of software development and there's also a Facebook group for ICT

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jobs in PNG so there is something starting up but it's limited to the urban areas and

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mainly to the capital city of Port Moresby because the infrastructure is better there.

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There is however a huge potential for software engineering in PNG because software needs to be

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adapted for example to local legislation in terms of the tax system etc. And the government and

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companies need software but as of now there are very few local software developers and therefore

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they depend on foreign companies - a foreign workforce - and this incurs huge costs because as

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we learned in PNG if you live in PNG as an expat developer you are paid quite well - competitive

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salaries on an international level - which as I mentioned increase huge costs for local companies

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and government. So there are opportunities first of all for the government to invest

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in building a local engineering community. And the way to start this could be focusing

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on customization of standard software to the local environment. And also in terms of development aid,

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the national universities can help revise the curriculum schools at schools and universities

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in terms of software engineering and this was something we wanted to kickstart but

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as I mentioned due to the pandemic it was a bit slowed down but we hope to pick it up again now.

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So what can you as an individual do? First of all if you have software that might be used in PNG

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think about customization adaptation of the software from the beginning.

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Make sure that your software and also documentation is accessible for users with

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limited resources. For example if you have auto playing videos on your landing page,

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that can incur quite a lot of cost for somebody in PNG. As i've outlined before provide alternatives:

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for example video tutorials and some form of written tutorials that people can access.

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And consider also these limitations in case you communicate somebody in PNG for example consider

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that a Zoom call might be quite expensive and sometimes a traditional phone call might be

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preferable. And jwhen you design your software or when you design your web app consider this

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persona of somebody living in PNG or another developing country with limited bandwidth and

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the internet being accessed on phones primarily and also on shared hardware because people have

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to go to schools and universities to use computers. So this shared usage is

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something to consider as well. Just have this persona in mind when you design your software.

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That's my main message for this talk.

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If you want to dig a bit deeper the paper is publicly available in the website of the workshop

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as well and feel free to reach out to me if you have any further questions thank you very much.