In ten days five FOSSFA-members will embark on a study tour to Berlin Germany where a week full of appointments, events and receptions all on the topic Open Source awaits them.

During the week of the 22^nd of June - 26^th of June Berlin will become the Open Source Hub of Europe: The annual business oriented Linux Day, the academic Berlin Open congress, and LPI's 10^th anniversary are only some of the Open Source events taking place in Berlins capital.

This years e-Learning Africa took place in Dakar, Senegal from the 27^th - 29^th of May. Athough this report is both belated and short it is worth mentioning the outstanding contributions FOSSFA-representatives made during this conference – the largest on ICT and Education in Africa.

About three years ago, my house codeless phone got blown off by a bolt of lightening. The following six months I moved from company to company, and consulted several experts in an attempt to have it fixed but all efforts proved futile. One company I visited a well recognized telecom company (I will not mention the name) has a subsidiary company renowned for its technical capacity and expertise to fix all manner of telecom equipment.

Wanted: Future trainers on “Free & Open Source Business Models for
Africa” in East and Southern Africa!

    Application Deadline is May 30, 2009.

Are you interested in building a successful business in Free/Open
Source Software (FOSS), and in helping others to do the same?

Do you have a solid background in business and FOSS?

Do you have experience in training others, and/or are you part of
a training institution?

Then respond by MAY 30 to become part of an exciting training
programme on building businesses with Free/Open Source Software.


The call for participants in the Training of Trainers is now open
at http://ict-innovation.fossfa.net/call.

FOSSFA and OSIWA's FOSS for West Africa (FOSSWAY) project is set to invest in FOSS research in West Africa.  In the recently published Call for Tender both organisations are awarding a research contract up to the tune of 65 000 US dollars for a Study to be carried out in five West African Countries.

On March 10-12, 2009, more than 20 people gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, for the ict@innovation Content Creation Workshop. Hosted at Strathmore University, the group of experts came together for three days of intense work on training materials on the subject of African FOSS business models.

More information on the workshop is available here.

“How do your organize a workshop whose objective is to collect what those participating ‘know’ about a particular subject?” A colleague of mine once asked me during a workshop planning session. “The same way we organize all other workshops” I must have answered without much thought. It was soon after a five day workshop entitled ‘harvesting knowledge and experiences in content generation and adaptation’ that we realized how important the question was. That was almost threes ago.

The UK Public Review has accepted and published : Keeping the Options Open in their Online Review.  Here

There are also plans underway to explore the place of FOSS in business solutions in the light of the current global financial crunch..

Will be willing to talk with anyone willing to talk with me on this..

A friend of mine, a web developer, doing business with government once told me ‘business is slow but I can not complain.’ incongruous as it may sound, it is a very typical response among business people around here. ‘Sometime I only have one job in three months but when I do, I am paid in advance and a lot more than what others pay me’ he added. Well, wow! This is the market. But does Government really pay that well?