On ramp IT an Ethiopian mobile solution provider held a successful Google Developer Group Bar Camp, as part of the continent wide African Android Challenge (AAC), on the 27th April at Addis Ababa University. The day was attended by around 40 students, professionals’ entrepreneurs and lecturers. Ethio telcom Deputy CTO and CIO also attended.

From September 16th till September 21st the programme team will meet in Tanzania for a week of workshops.
We have a full week ahead: Monday: Pillar C - Evaluating the Internship Programme
Tuesday - Wednesday - Evaluation Workshop
Thursday - Volunteer Community Workshop
Friday - Steering Committee Meeting

ict@innovation has been running successfully for the past four years.

Look what ict@innovation has achieved so far. Today, we have
111 trainers on Business Models and 69 on certification,
Over 300 members on the FBT mailing list and more than 150 on the LPI mailing list
750 individual members and 500 FOSS-related organisations registered on the ict@innovation website

As the GIZ-funded phase of the project is coming to an end, the project management team is finding new ways to make sure that ict@innovation will continue to be managed after 2012.

SFD 2012 – Invitation to Participate

The concept of FOSS is very appealing especially for those that embrace the spirit of the open movement. However, we all must eat or we will surely die and/or get kicked out for not paying rent. This fact slows down the growth of the FOSS in general and sometimes making FOSS products not be as appealing as their proprietary equivalents. We all are aware of the strides Ubuntu has made in the past few years, well I suppose this was possible with funding from Canonical.

In life we all have to deal with the Meaning Vs Money dilemma.

This will be a continuation of MIP program started last year in Tanzania, this time steered by InCo Technologies. Stay tuned.

On Thursday, 21. June, some open source initiatives will host an event in Berlin that aims to talk about "South Sudan and Open Source Culture" ... This might be of interest to some members of the ict@innovation community: You may then check the website, which also says, that the event will be livestreamed. Some more infos on the event coming from the organizers below:

"Challenging and Identifying Open Source Approaches

Not long ago, Frank Tilugulilwa tweeted a link to an article about the efforts of Tanzania`s government to soon provide the citizens of Tanzania with „fast, efficient and affordable data traffic to support a range of industries.“ No wonder that this information matters to Frank Tilugulilwa. He is the head of the Free Software Innovation Unit at University of Dar es Salaam Computing Center Ltd, and one of the trainers of GIZs and FOSSFAs pan-african FOSS Business Trainings.

Dear All,

I am currently working on the newsletter  of FOSSFA and it will be a special one since Idlelo was the main event of March.

So feel free to send me your inputs (thoughts, pictures, etc.) or quotes that you will like to share (you can let me know if you want to write about something special).

Have an excellent week.

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Bonjour à tous,

The German Government via its Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) released a call to fund research partnerships between German Research institutions and partners in Subsaharan Africa. One of the main goals is to build  African ICT study courses and to fund exploratory measures / pilot measures in  "Applied information and communication technologies (ICT)"  via German-African research partnerships.