Long flight, no see

Developers meetup on the way

After my last post I got stated with Ghanaians Developers Meeting. Ben introduced us the gtk+ and gnome libraries and we had the chance to get some code written Then I gave a talk on Fedora’s latest technologies and fedorahosted.org and how can someone contribute to fedora project. I also showcased some projects that were developed within Fedora Community like Moksha and Transifex. Then it was time for me to talk about Mozilla Labs, Everyone was excited about the structure of the project and the new technologies that we are working on right now on the Labs. Weave, Raindrop and Concept Series were analysed and unfortunately I had a plane to catch so I stopped there.

Issac and Maddog escorted me to the airport and when the wheels stopped touching Africa it was time for me to sleep.

On Kotoka International Airport

Three flights, two layovers and 15 hours after i was setting my foot in Skopje, in a rush to catch up with Mozilla Balkans 2010 that was already started.

Working with the guys on Goals proposals

Gorjan was kind enough to come by the hotel and pick me up When I finally reached the venue the Friday events were kinda over and William had the idea of me presenting Fedora Ambassadors Project as we are interested as a Mozilla Community to probably set up a similar Project (that would be great!)

Gorjan in our meetup room

Finally we had a great brainstorming session about Specific Goals and Roadmap we will have for the next months as the Balkans Community. Our initial thoughts can be found here.

This is what you can find if you walk around Skopje!

Beer and food (real Balkan one ) was something that I totally needed and I got satisfied going to a traditional little tavern with all of the guys and had some great beer

Kadir and William discussing over EU EMU EC and over stuff with Rakji

Cant wait for the Day 2 Sessions (Mozilla Balkans 2010 open to public day) !

Classical foss meetup with beers and food

Yesterday was the day he had our presentations We had some hard time finalizing where the Fedora Localization would be and apparently none was there to help us on that

After a couple of hours we managed to get assigned a spot about the workshop during the lunch time.. It was the auditorium and of course we did not manage to fill it up but he had some nice guys from all around Africa and they were hooked by the presentation of our l10n team and our tools we use Akan is now up and running in Transifex and we are in communication with Swahili people to get their locale in Fedora also

Then it was time for our panel on “Non-profit Administration”. Ben Konrath was first and he gave an excellent inside view of the organizational structure of GNOME and Gnome Foundation.

Being on panel with Alex and Ben

Next it was time for Isaac and me to present “Non-profit Administration” the fedora-way I started with some introduction and then it was Isaac’s time to present the “Four Foundations” and he did it in the most flawless and smooth way I have ever seen ! He jumped from one foundation to another expanding them a bit more and then it was my time to explain the Governance structure within the Fedora Project Then Alex from the Kenya ICT Consumers Centre enlightened us about the work that they do and on how they are engaging more people around foss.

Unpaved road and a bunch of foss guys

Next it was beer time! (at last!) We took maddog, Jack , Jojo, Ben, Isaac and a couple of guys from Linux Accra to a nice beer place in Osu and had a *lot* of beers… maddog and Jack wanted to continue and so I joined them to the Monsoon Dinner place for some Single Malts (i stayed on beers though). Finally after a long drinking night hearing to interesting stories from maddog we ended up on our hotels to have some good sleep.

Me, Jack anfd Davide

Taxi to Osu = 2 Cedis, Star Beer = 5 Cedis, Having maddog ordering you to drink it = Priceless

Today I woke up early so I could pack my things and check-out form the hotel. We just had a nice launch and we are waiting for the Ghana Developers Meeting to start in which Ben and I are going to present our projects and the ways that someone can contribute Essentially it is gonna be a pool of potential contributors and i have to make sure that we will get a bunch of those great guys working on our fabulous project.

Main auditorium today

After that Isaac is driving me straight to airport cause I am leaving today heading to Skopje for Mozilla Balkans 2010 (which I am very excited about it also !) I will probably post about how the Developers meetup went tomorrow night from Skopje (and how was my travel…not that anyone cares…anyway I am protected from a penguin )

Local food spinach-like and banana-like

IDLELO has been for me a strong life experience, and I want during the next weeks to write a post summarizing what we have done, how efficient we were and what’s next out of the moves we made I want once again to thanks publicly Issac for all his support down here and Fedora project for enabling me to help the development of Africa Fedora Communities. We need to work on many things (media, culture, l10n, events, people etc) and we have a long way to go… but the best are yet to come for Fedora, let’s all make it happen!

See ya in Skopje!

Humidity is rising… barometer is getting loowww…. (no testosterone monsters are not going to fall from the sky) .. just trying to get used to foggy glasses

Ben and I collaborating on the booth

Today we tried to get as early as possible at the venue because we had to make sure that our booth is polished and nice for the first day of the event. Registration was done and Isaac did a great work on the booth Many people were asking and getting some freshly burnt CDs and DVDs. We even had the chance to meet the Minister of Communications that came by the event.(kinda disappointing cause we were informed about VP coming over). We also made a great contact (which will probably end up in a meeting) with a computers assembler and distribution company that were enthusiastic about the OEM solutions that Fedora can provide to them.

Ethiopia was also a trageted country today

Keynotes were on their way and I finally had the pleasure to meet John “maddog” Hall in person just before his keynote.

Street markets are commonplace in Ghana

We then left the event for a while just to go to the nearest road market and buy some really nice local formal dresses that we would later use on the Cultural Dinner.

John "maddog" Hall giving his speech

Returning to the venue again just in time for the inspiring talk by Maddog and the really funny “counter-m$” part of it

When we were done we all left for the Cultural Dinner dressed up but unfortunately without Isaac (we was kinda sick, take care my friend!).

Can I be a citizen of Beerland too Mr. maddog?

Apparently the Dinner was held in the State of House of Ghana and on the main Hall Ben and I joined Maddog who was dressed up in his “culture” (peace-love-linux!) We had some great time talking about all sorts of stuff and the dancers and singers were a great show. Unfortunately we had to leave early cause we needed to make the final changes in our presentations, which we did after we adventurously returned to my hotel.

View of the Ballroom

Tomorrow we are going to have a workshop and a talk to give and i hope Isaac is well again to be on his finest fedora-mood

Rainy day today And we are talking about some *heavy* rain…

Rain and Hammer

Day started late cause everything was stuck on the traffic. We got wet going to the event and started building our booth. He had some problems (no A/C, no extension cords, no suppotive stuff) but they were some nice guys helping as with the setup and Ben and Isaac made some nice job decorating the booth.

Isaac doing his magic on the booth

In fact we did not enjoyed our initial setup so much, ’cause everyone was coming to get some “freebies” and we had to update our policy and our setup. We were surprised by the excited people ready to hear everything about our projects and we gave them what they wanted

"First" in crowding also!

FOSSFA General Assembly was on the way so not having access to it we took some time off and went to prepare some flyers about the Gnome Project and hit the Mall (yeah there is mall in Accra) for some food.

The day ended with brainstorming and building up some nice marketing stuff with Ben back at the hotel.

Isaac and Ben on the mall (in Accra! )

So today we made many contacts with virtually every country in Africa, local LUGs, and companies and some it seems that more locales are coming for Fedora Swahili (or Kiswahili) is one of them and we are pretty excited about that

Tomorrow is going to be the start of the conference and we have to be sure that we have enough swag and power for coping with that! So goodnight!

So today was the day for The Community Summit. We got to the venue at 10am and people started gathering up.

Outside AITI center

The spirit of this “un-conference” (sic) was to get to know each other and exchange knowledge in an informal way That sounds as the fedora way of doing things and so was it!

The Main auditorium

Firstly we were given 2 minutes to introduce ourselves and why our project is on IDLELO. I introduced Fedora project and me and stressed out the localization potentials through Fedora, Transifex and foss in general. On the next phase people chose what ideas presented would like to be expanded in group talks. Guess what! Fedora Localization Project was one of the 4 groups I presented hands-on the workflow of our l10n and got some nice feedback and concerns from the people.

The great thing about today was that for the first time in those regions someone presented them a way to have a whole operating system localized and everyone was pretty excited about that! I worked closely with Ben (from Gnome) to make sure we can enable them to do so and I we even managed to get a roadmap on certain cases!

Namely we are speaking about Akan (Twi etc), Ga and Ewe to say the least On Akan we have a handful of people ready to get started and I make the final arrangements on infrastructure side (Tx, MLs etc) to make sure that we gonna get started on the localization workshop on Wednesday Ben is also in contact with Gnome guys to make this happen in Gnome side too…

Accra LUG was happy to be introduced to our local Ambassador Isaac Sanni-Thomas and I pretty sure that now that they are going to have Fedora in their language they gonna embrace Isaac and Fedora!

Chilli Food right ahead!

I had some really interesting conversations with many people ranging from enabling local LUGs to distributing media and  low cost bandwidth solutions.. Comment if you want me to write more about these..

Isaac gets ready for his next events!

We also did some nice brainstorming about what a collaboration between Gnome Fedora and existing translation memories would be and I think that we can set up a process of collaborating and making sure that the end-user in this region has a completely translated system.

I have even brainstormed about community portals (I am very proud about our beta one) and even showcased Fedora hosted Moksha framework (neat and fast

Ocean , beer and foss... and not exactly in that order...

Later on the afternoon we had the wonderful chance to drink some beers by the Ocean in a calm cafe by the sea… We also had dinner in the same pace we did last night (sticking with the safe choice i guess )

Crazy and busy town.. Accra in the night

Tomorrow is booth setup time so stay tuned for some really nice pics!

See ya all!

First day is always the reconnaissance day

The night before was a nice one. I guess if you are used to sleep with full A/C above your head you are used to sleep the Ghanaian way

Isaac came by to pick me up and we went to the venue where IDLELO is going to happen to see the space where we gonna set up our booth. Thats always a wise move so you can prepare for things like small walls or windows and columns.

Road markets are everywhere

Next it was time for me to change some money to Ghanaian Cedis We then hit the markets searching for some local shirts and getting some nice market views…. Hopefully I will take some nicer pictures next days downtown.

Me drinking/eating a strange ice cream :S

Isaac is a huge fan of Chelsea so we managed to find a restaurant that got the FA Cup final and grab some water and food…

Hot for Fedora, Chelsea or because of weather? I guess all three...

On our way home we got a little moment.. the battery run out and so did a swap-thing (dangerous by y west standards but ok to them) and we got going.

yeah mom.. this is not tap water

Back to my hotel it was swag time! I exchanged gifts with Isaac and introduced him to the beautiful world of fedora Swag! We are both excited to have possibly one of the best booths on the event… at least we will try so!

My day ended with a nice meetup for lunch with Ben Konrath and Fernando Herrera of the Gnome Project who are also here for IDLELO. Ben and I are going to be on the same panel so we discussed about this and about some exciting possibilities of cross-distro bug reporting platforms in which Fernando has some nice ideas! Finally we talked about translation platforms and they where impressed by the transifex workflow in so many ways that they are going to talk about it to the guys that now maintain Damn Lies and persuade them for Transifex migration (thats gonna be excellent!)

Tomorrow is the community meetup event that will act as an informal welcome-meetup session before the *actual* conference. I am going to grab some much needed sleep

See ya!

Sitting on my hotel after an exhausting day on flight! The A/C is working on full as the Ghanaian climate seems to feel rather hot these days (hot enough to surprise a greek guy )

Day started early in the morning, speeding with the car to catch the airplane Flight from Athens to London was quick enough (or it seemed quick as i was ready for the big next one).

During the flight a watched over and over again Max’s speech on FOSDEM on Fedora Governance,while taking notes and trying to visualize them Hopefully those will be helpful for my participation on the panel titled “Non-profit Administration” on IDLELO 2010. Still we (Isaac, me and the other panelists being Ben Kornath from Gnome and John “maddog” Hall) have not figured out what this “session” will be… We will sort it out possibly on the Sunday Community meetup.

Four hours in Heathrow, some Architectural siteseeing and a bsod in a checkin machine later I was on my final flight to Accra. It was a pretty crowded one and the cabin crew did an excellent job in serving us (I am sticking with BA for now on I guess.. previous choice was Swiss)

Sahara Desert on sunset from the vantage point of 36000 feet is something that all people should experience… Just magnificent… it’s a pity that my compact camera is not capable of catching that moments right.

Arriving at Accra I was pretty sure that I was in another world. Even the way people act and move around in the airport “feels” different … and I like it! Isaac and his brother were kind enough to speed me to my hotel and make sure that I got the best room i could get! (thanks Isaac!). He was so anxious about his Ambassadors’ polo shirt that he got me giving it to him today I think he is happy with it!

See ya tomorrow then.. with more news and photos!

Meeting day yesterday, so I did not got much time to write an update

Everything is set for the departure day (tomorrow morning)!

DHL unfortunately did not meet our expectations and the swag didn’t make it on time… So I set in motion the back up plan and borrowed a Ambassador’s polo from Costas and got some t-shirts printed locally

Posters are printed and I just checked in! Next stop Accra and by lovely friend Isaac is gonna wait there for me.. so Ghana here I come…. GET READY for FEDORA people…

next update tomorrow night from my hotel in Accra!

UPDATE : I just broke my glasses…. Damn! I hope there are some optic shops on London Airport