Alex, Pierros and me on the panel (photo by Isaac Sanni-Thomas)

After the panel, Dorothy K. Gordon, Director General of the Advanced Information Technology Institute (the place the conference was being held) helped us arrange a meeting / training session for interested people in the Ghanaian software developer scene.

When we were done with the booth on Thursday evening, about 12 local software developers gathered into one of the rooms for the training session. I presented an overview of the GNOME development platform and tried to walk everybody through fixing a small bug in Caribou. (Yeah, I know I’m not really working on Caribou any more but it’s a small program that I know well so I thought it would provide a good real world example).

GNOME development training (photo by Pierros Papadea)

I was able to walk everybody through cloning Caribou and started building it when hit a snag. The 12 people all trying to pull down the dependencies from the Ubuntu mirror crushed the internet connection. I spent the remaining portion of my allocated time trying to get Caribou to build instead of working through any actual software development. As much as I was frustrated with the situation, this is the reality of trying to develop software in Ghana. I’m disappointed that I didn’t get farther with the bug fix but at the same time, I’m glad that I was able to have this experience so that I can relate a little bit about how slow the internet connections are in Ghana.

Pierros used his time slot to give a technical presentation on the latest developments in Fedora and Mozilla Labs.

presidential palace in Accra, Ghana

Friday proved to be a slow day at the booth. The Fedora side of the booth had been taken down because Pierros had another conference to attend. I still had the occasional person drop by and ask me to burn them one of the distros that I had on my hard drive. I guess some of the attendees had already left too because this was the first day I was able to reliably connect to the internet with my GSM modem and write a blog post.

The conference ended at around 1pm so I arranged to meet with Jojoo Imbeah, a developer with the Kasahorow project, Henry Addo, a Ushahidi developer, and one of their friends (sorry I forget his name). We were able to spend about 3 more hours hacking on the Caribou bug we had started trying to fix on Thursday night. I’m hoping to help these guys get a patch submitted to bugzilla so that they can have their first piece of code contributed to GNOME.

The mini-hackfest was cut a little short by my poor planning. At 6:40pm I told them I was flying out that evening and was quickly whisked to my hotel on the back Henry’s motorcycle. I endured a tense 40 minute shuttle to Kotoka International Airport in some pretty heavy traffic but I made it to the airport just in time to catch my flight home.

I’ll post some final thoughts about the conference in the next couple of days. It was a pretty hectic 12 days so I’m going to take some time out for a little R&R.

There weren’t too many conference people around on Monday because the day was scheduled as a meeting for FOSSFA members. Buuuttttt … the conference was hosted in the AITI building which also hosts a big ICT training centre. As soon as the students caught word that we had media to give out, the booth was swamped. Thankfully I had a copy of all the ISOs on my hard drive so I could burn media on demand throughout the week.

Tuesday was the first day of the actual conference. Our booth was busy all day. I had some pretty awesome conversations with many people – from local OEM computer manufactures asking questions about how to use Linux to NGOs trying to figure out how to kick start an African Free and Open Source Software development movement.

a busy time at the booth

On Tuesday night the conference hosted a gala dinner at the banquet hall in Ghana’s parliament building. We were asked to dress in formal attire from our native countries but I didn’t know about this so I bought a formal Ghanaian shirt from the market. Jon Hall (Maddog) was dressed in his old hippie attire. It was a pretty funny sight .

dance troop at the Idlelo gala dinner

We had some time on Sunday evening to visit the ocean and catch some nice ocean air.

Isaac, Pierros and me relaxing after a long day in the heat

I’ll try to post a summary for Wednesday and Thursday as soon as I can find another 30 mins with internet.

I was really happy to meet Sabra Asante from Linux Accra. Linux Accra is a Linux Users Group that meets up every Saturday to help people install and use Linux. Sabra assured me that GNOME is very popular as it’s the default desktop environment in Ubuntu. Sabra is really good at explaining things in term that new users understand. I was very impressed.

Sabra Asante talking to new Linux users

I was also able to participate in the discussions about starting an effort to translate Fedora and GNOME into Akan and Ewe, two Ghanian languages. The people involved seem really motived to get started. Pierros Papadeas, a Fedora L10N Commit group Sponsor, is doing a great job facilitating this work. I hope to touch base with the GNOME i18n team tomorrow to get the ball rolling on the GNOME side of things.

talking about translating Fedora and GNOME

Tomorrow morning I’m going to set-up the GNOME booth at the conference. The GNOME booth has been placed beside the Fedora booth which I’m sure will lead to some great collaboration.

I have to admit that I’ve been bad about taking pictures of Accra. I’m going to work on that and hopefully have some pictures soon. In the mean time, check out Pierros’ blog if you want to see pictures of Accra – he’s doing a much better job at documenting the trip than me. More updates to follow.