eSkills Summit 2010 Cape Town, South Africa

Final call for papers: end of February

The eSkills Summit 2010 will take place in late July in Cape Town with the objective of engaging and informing government, business and civil society with ongoing e-Skills practices and future developments in South Africa.

The call for "FOSS Certification Manager for the project ict@innovation" has officially closed. We are happy to announce that we have received a number of very interesting applications and are currently reviewing these. We thank everyone who applied for the position!

After the review process selected candidates will be interviewed before a final choice is made and all candidates notified personally via email.

Application deadline was 20th January 2010. Please see here for more information.

Dear FOSS Business Trainer community

Linux Fund and the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA) have pledged to work together to promote Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Africa.

[origionally published on http://linuxfund.org/press/fossfa/]

Portland, Oregon – December 14, 2009 – Linux Fund and the Free Software and Open Source Foundation of Africa (FOSSFA) have signed a landmark agreement to promote Free Software and Open Source in Africa.

All over Africa information and communication technologies (ICT) are gaining increasing importance and businesses realize the need for a secure and efficient ICT infrastructure. Although many businesses still rely on proprietary software solutions, the demand for Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) solutions and support thereof is constantly on the rise. As FOSS solutions are becoming more mature and often provide the same or better functionality as their proprietary counterparts, albeit being free of licensing costs, these solutions are very attractive for the African market.

From July to November four training of trainers (ToT) on "Advanced African FOSS Business Models" have been conducted in the ict@innovation  programme. Throughout the ToTs the participants and future trainers have been very motivated and eager to learn more about FOSS Business Models. The six modules of the training were very interactive and a lot of productive discussions took place.

Each ToT was held in a period of ten days in each host country, followed by a six-week online phase.

 

The UNESCO OER Toolkit is designed as a toolkit for developing country universities. It draws on experience from institutions around the world to describe in practical terms how universities can:

• •.identify Open Educational Resources (OER) and share them with academics and students; 

CENFOSS is currently supporting SOCREMO (www.socremo.com)a micro finance bank. SOCREMO have branches trough all Mozambique (South and Center to be specific), and is the first bank in Mozambique, and perhaps in all Southern Africa, that has migrated more than 300 computers from Windows to Linux. For the project CENFOSS is using Ubuntu 8.04. The banks servers, configured by CENFOSS, run on Debian.