GNOME at Idlelo 4

On Wednesday I have the pleasure of travelling to Accra, Ghana to run the GNOME booth at Idlelo 4, one of the largest Free/Libre and Open Source Software conferences in Africa.

A couple of years ago, I volunteered as an ICT Support Officer for 6 months in South-Western Uganda. Besides learning how to work with people from a different culture and coping with the unreliable infrastructure, I also found it challenging to work with mostly Windows based software. I had been working professionally with Linux (and to some extent with GNOME) for several years before I went to Uganda. Throughout my time there, I felt that many of the organisations that I worked with would have benefited from the advantages to using free/libre software but unfortunately none of them seemed too interested.

I was pretty excited when the opportunity to help GNOME have a presence at this conference came up. I’m really looking forward to sharing my experiences in Uganda and my thoughts on how using GNOME can help serve people in this region better than proprietary alternatives. I’m also going to be trying to show people that GNOME is a great community to work with at all levels – from developers and translators all the way up to users.

As part of the conference, I’ve been asked to sit on a panel about non-profit administration. Right now I don’t have any details about this session besides the title but I would really love to get poeple’s thoughts on the various kinds of GNOME software that could help with non-profit administration. I would like to present a community perspective along with my own perspective. Please comment on this blog post or send me an email (my first name <at> my domain name) if you have any thoughts to share.

Preparations for the trip have been going well. I’ve completed most of my pre-conference todo list:

• flight and hotel booked
• medical stuff sorted out
• valid visa in my passport
• CDs and stickers to hand out at the booth
• GNOME booth posters …

I printed the ‘Official Desktop of Happy People’ and the ‘Preferred Language? All of them’ posters on heavy duty vinyl and plan to send them to the North American GNOME event box when I’m back from Ghana.

I’m going to try to post updates and photos throughout the week and a half that I’m in Ghana. I’m not sure how good my internet access is going to be so things might be sporadic until I get back. Keep your eyes peeled!