sponsoring a GNOME developer training session at Fedora Action Day Ghana

[Ben Konrath <ben bagu org>]

Hi board members,

Isaac Sanni-Thomas, one of the Ghanian Fedora Ambassadors that I met
at Idlelo [1] last year, is organizing a Fedora Action Day (FAD) [2]
in Accra, Ghana:

http://d3vnulls.blogspot.com/2010/12/fad-2011-in-ghana.html

As part of my continued interest in GNOME related outreach activities
in Sub-Saharan Africa, I would like to help setup a GNOME developer
training session at this event. This is a great opportunity to promote
GNOME in this region because the primary organizors of this event are
from Ghana and are already working within F/OSS communities. We have a
good chance of attracting people to the GNOME community at this event.

What are the possibilities for getting travel sponsorship for this
event for 1 or 2 people (not necessarily me)? Here are suggestions for
sessions I would like to see but it really depends on the
person/people going:

* tour of GNOME 3
* hands on session working through the GNOME development work flow
(bugzilla, git, fixing real a bug or two, etc)
* hands on developer training - work through adding a small feature to
a GNOME module

I think it would be appropriate to have GNOMErs who have already been
doing outreach work in less economically developed countries run these
sessions but this is not required. I attended the 'GNOME in Asia and
Brazil' session run by Emily Chen and Jonh Wendell this year at
GUADEC. I think both of these people are good candidates for running
these training sessions at the Accra FAD. I haven't actually spoken to
either them yet so I could also post a request of volunteers on my
blog. Or one of you guys could ask for volunteers and pick an
appropriate person/people.

One of the challenges I see with this proposal is that Ghana is a long
way to travel in terms of time and money for only a one day event. One
of my personal goals for my outreach activities is to make this kind
of situation disappear by having GNOMErs in Sub-Saharan Africa. But
since we're not there yet, we're left with this situation.

Thanks for your time. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Thanks, Ben

1. http://www.idlelo.net/
2. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD