Re: sponsoring a GNOME developer training session at Fedora Action Day Ghana

[Brian Cameron <brian cameron oracle com>]

Ben:

This sounds like a wonderful opportunity.  Thanks for continuing to
help us in this valuable way.  Some questions:

- When is the date?
- Considering it doesn't make sense to travel to someplace like Ghana
  for just 1 day, how many days lodging do you think is reasonable to
  motivate volunteers to consider helping us in this way?
- What language is the conference held in?  Should this affect who goes?
- Are there any concerns about getting visas?
- Does the event need to be focused on Fedora?  If The GNOME Foundation
  were sending people, could we get "GNOME" or "Free Software" in the
  event title?
- What visibility do you expect The GNOME Foundation will get from this?
- Could you provide more details about the budget?
- Could the GNOME training sessions be held on other days than the
  conference, so that the volunteer would need to be there for more
  than 1 day?  Or does it make sense to discuss with the event
  organizers making it a 2-day event or something?

We'd have to see a more detailed budget and plan to make a decision,
but it sounds very reasonable.  It is important to the GNOME Foundation
to reach out to the developing world.

Are there other conferences in Africa that you think we should be
planning to send people?

I do think that there should be an announcement on the developing-world
list.  I think we could be better about posting updates to that list,
and notification about possibly interesting events like this.

Brian


> 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
> _______________________________________________
> foundation-list mailing list
> foundation-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list