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The following letter was posted to the I-Network mailing list by Joyce Kyeyune Tonda following the Open Source Journalism event we held on 2010/11/02:
Disclaimer: This is not an ad or a marketing message - its just something that needed to be said.
It's not often that you go to tech events that think outside the box- are superbly organized and best of all offer practical usable tools.
The invite said: "We promise that the event, will be nothing like you have experienced before. We go beyond the traditional facilitated workshop approach that is prevalent in Uganda. We are unique.The event will be interactive, active and intense."
That alone- was intriguing.
Those that attended this Tuesday event ("Where Technology Meets Journalism") will agree that:
1. Choice of speakers (Johnny Long-'I hack Charities', Reinier Battenberg, Kyle Spencer, Simon Vass, Matthew Griffths and Lydia Namubiru) was definitely on the money. Very conversant with their topics and technically sound. Thank God there was no presentation with 100 slides as is so common in workshops.
2. The facilitator (Kshitij Gheewala) of Bringing Being into Business was what you'd call an Innovative Event Manager in the true sense of the phrase- the interactive nature of the event, the activities, got every participant engaged, involved and learning.
3. Practical, practical , practical. For the Enterprise Technology media team this was key for us because we were introduced to a whole array of great Open source journalistic tools that were easy to access and use from Ushahidi/SwiftRiver-CrowdMap, TrueCrypt, Social Engineering-(Google hacking, electronic deduction, dumpster diving), journalisttoolbox.org, DropBox-....
Overall, it was a fun way of learning about Open source tools- I think Kyle did mention that the presentations will be posted on LUG website this week- please take a moment to view them if you did not attend this event.
My personal thoughts are that- Open source needs to be marketed more and more in this manner to mainstream audiences to break the geek myth and lead to increased adoption.
We captured some of the photos of this session and you can view them here:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Enterprise-Technology-magazine-East-Africa/113126218735304?v=photos#!/album.php?aid=23056&id=113126218735304
Thanks to the LUG team and Gregory Branch (whose details are below) who was the brainchild of this great initiative.
String Reporter - CNN International, CBS News
Uganda Correspondent - www.globalpost.comCheers,
Joyce Kyeyune Tonda
Managing Director
Enterprise Technology Magazine: East Africa editionhttp://joycetonda.blogspot.com
https://twitter.com/technologyEA
Find us on Facebook too!http://www.ictcreatives.com
Subscribe online: subscribe@ictcreatives.com
Here's a great blog post by Joseph Ssenyange about our March 2010 LUG event w/ Facebook developer Greg Dingle: http://zenu.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/facebook-greg-dingle-at-linux-user-...
Do you have a poor internet connection? Worry no more, You can still continue Facebooking on Facebook Lite. Its a lighter version of Facebook we people in Africa will be happy with. It performs well on slow links. You can try it at lite.facebook.com. Also Greg Dingle gave an overview of how Hadoop, Hive and MapReduce can be used for distributed processing of large data sets on compute clusters.
There's lots more detail and tons of photos in the full post (linked above). Thanks Joseph!
Stephane Boyera posted an awesome write-up of our November 2009 event w/ Tim Berners-Lee here: http://www.webfoundation.org/2009/12/first-day-in-uganda/
The rest of the day was dedicated to attend the Linux User Group meeting hosted at UNICEF (see also the Uganda LUG official site). It is a great occasion for me to thank again Reinier, Kyle, Simon, and Jon who did a great job in the organization of this event and also worked hard to meet our constraints in terms of agenda. This meeting was great for many reasons. First, it was very exciting to see all these passionate young entrepreneurs in the room, and to hear about projects happening all over the country. Lots of very interesting discussions, particularly on topics the Web Foundation is interested in like languages, illiteracy and so on. It was also a good opportunity for me to introduce the Web Foundation mission and objectives. The format of the meeting, with lots of group work was also very productive.
Be sure to read the full post linked above. Thanks once again to Tim Berners-Lee, the Web Foundation team, Kshitij Gheewala, Daniel Stern, and everyone else who helped make this event such a wonderful success.
Here's a link to Victor Miclovich's blog post about the June 2010 LUG event at Mountbatten HQ: http://vicmiclovich.wordpress.com/2010/06/19/lug-uganda/
A collection of about 15 people gathered at Mountbatten, a web hosting firm in Uganda. It was a meeting we had all probably been waiting for. The LUG event or just the “LUG” is held on a monthly basis. And in this event, a few of the many Linux users offer themselves up. They tend to speak about all sorts of topics; from basic networking, writing software, to more complex features. There was a time we even gamed… Open Arena is a cool game to play over a distributed network.
We also did a direct video conference with MUST (Mbarara University of Science and Technology) and were very surprised by the speed. There’s a chance that we’ll do video conferencing in future LUG events in Uganda. In the photo, are the folks at MUST.
Check out the full post to read more (including a few photos!). Thanks Victor!
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