JEDIS: In search of Jozi’s own Mark Zuckerbergs
27-03-2015
The City of Johannesburg now has its very own squad of digital knights, known as the JEDIS.
Unlike their namesakes in George Lucas’s epic decades-spanning Star Wars movie franchise, the JEDIS are firmly grounded in the day-to-day realities of a big city such as Johannesburg trying to keep abreast of the rapidly growing pace of technological innovation and development.
The JEDIS are tech-savvy young men and women who have been recruited into the Johannesburg Educating Digital Interns (JEDI) programme, launched by Executive Mayor Councillor Parks Tau earlier this year with the aim of empowering them to boost their employability or to start their own businesses.
Johannesburg Member of the Mayoral Committee for Economic Development Councillor Ruby Mathang summed up the objective of the R20 million programme when he told the first wave of interns at Sci-Bono in Newtown on Thursday: “We want you to be the new Mark Zuckerbergs.”
Computer programmer Zuckerberg co-founded social network website Facebook while studying at Harvard University in the United States in the mid-2000s.
The group of 250 was selected from a pool of 600 hopefuls via online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. The number is expected to grow to 1 000 by the end of the year.
MMC Mathang also explained the City’s plans to roll out free Wi-Fi.
“We want people to be able to have Wi-Fi access on buses and at taxi ranks and on the streets of Johannesburg – and you are the ones who are going to be responsible for implementing this,” the MMC said.
MMC Mathang said the City and its partners – including technology giant IBM, Wits University, Joburg Centre for Software Engineering and training institutions such as Seed Academy – were doing this because information and communications technology (ICT) was one of the priority sectors central to improved productivity, economic development and job creation.
The selected candidates will now all have to choose between studies in network engineering, web development or fibre engineering.
Over the next few months, they will undergo “boot-camp type technical training and take part in an exciting six-month in-service training programme – gaining invaluable practical experience working within the City and at some of South Africa’s most prestigious digital institutions.
According to Zolani Matebese, the City’s Head of Broadband, the JEDI initiative – the single largest learnership programme the municipality has embarked on – represents an important step forward and shows the City’s commitment to enriching people’s lives.
“Once the initiative is rolling, the job of the digital interns will be to spread out into their communities,” he said.
Ravi Naidoo, the City’s Executive Director for Economic Development, said efforts to “accelerate visionary entrepreneurs in the ICT sector” were evident from the success of its #Hack.Jozi Challenge.
According to Matebese, the JEDI and #Hack.Jozi programmes will contribute to “improved productivity, economic growth and job creation”.
Matebese’s optimism is shared by IBM’s Indran Naick.
“IBM has always been a very innovative company at heart, and supporting this type of innovation is a big part of what we do all across the globe,” said Naick. “This is a very exciting initiative, of a kind which is absolutely vital to what we do as a business.”
Andile Ngcaba, chairman of FibreCo, told the interns how much his company was looking forward to “clubbing with you in making Johannesburg a world-class City.