act

Today I have a few Mambo Presentations.
How to manage a Website?
How to install Mambo?
How to change templates?
How to integrate and offer RSS Feeds?

A small but interested group

Half an hour later, we are 9 people and we can hear good presentations!

Using Wi-Fi for trunking
Asif Kassam, Operations Director, Skyband, Malawi
A good presentation about wireless technology. The advantages und problems. Malawi is one of the poorest country in the world and WiFi makes it possible to build hotspots with very limited funding.
One special advantage is:
WiFi can not be stolen! In africa, sometimes they steal your fibre (and your internet access too).
He mentioned a special protocol from a company in Lithuania
http://www.mikrotik.com/
The next step he said is WIMAX
english
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wimax

Zelda and Caro from AITEC (and many others I do not know) organizes all the things behind the scenes and they have f.e. a lot of work with picking up the conference participants at the airport. They come from the whole world (f.e. Hongkong, Australia, USA, Uganda, Congo, etc) and is not easy to be every 20 minutes at the airport. They have to collect all the presentations and they have to organize the exhibition and all the hotel stuff ... a hard job!

I have bought a one day internet access ticket via the hotel hotspot (cheap! ... 110 Rand for 24 h, < 100 MB Traffic) and I have updated the MRDAL Website so that the project can be organized online. I was surprised, because I have done this work in the train and the plane and it works immediately! As a normal guest at that website you see nothing special, but behing the scenes, as a registered user, it is now possible, to post the questionaires, which Christine & the project team develops in York, UK last week. Every partner is now able to edit his own partner page. I hope that they will do it in the next days.

I found Sean Morony sitting together with James Foster from Cisco trying to use the wireless hotspot in the hotel. Eric Osiakwan comes also to us. He is an ICT Consultant and Journalist from Accra.
I have to change my hotel, because I checked in in the wrong one. So now I am sitting in my new room, preparing my presentation for tomorrow.

Saturday I drive with the train to munich. The train was again in the wrong order (see ice). It was very crowded because in munich was a soccer match in that new Allianz Arena. Even in the S-Bahn were a lot of soccer fans.
I reached on time the airplane to dubai. Christine was also in munich to fly to poland and we hoped that we could meet at the airport. But the time was to short to meet . The airline was Emirates and the stewardesses wear an interesting hat. The airplane has all that technical *boys toys* stuff on board. It is unbelievable, it is possible to access the internet via wifi in the plane in 11.000 m! Unfortunately the seats are so small that working on my

Sean is trying to access the internet

PRESS RELEASE AITEC � 23 September 2005

One of Cisco's pioneering engineers, Jim Forster, will be kicking off the African Internet Forum at the seventh annual African Computing & Telecommunications Summit (ACT 2005), to be held in Johannesburg next week at the Crown Plaza Hotel, Sandton over 4-7 October.

Since earning his B.S. degree in computer engineering from Rutgers University in 1976, Jim Forster has spent
29 years in the computer industry, specializing in communication, networks and operating systems. After working for two Silicon Valley startups that failed he joined a "completely different" fledging company with about two dozen employees, Cisco Systems, in 1988. Forster

I have looked for literature and informations about Johannesburg and South Africa. But it seems that it is not so easy to get real experiences from real people who live & work there.

Before I read all the touristical guides like "how to find animals in South Africa" or "My heart is lost in South Africa".
I have now bought a book from Nelson Mandela.
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3596138043/
and from Neville Alexander
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3406482546/

If you have more ideas getting good informations abouts South Africa, please post a comment!

Last year, when I visited Vitalis in Tanzania, I was invited to an eGovernment Forum in Dar Es Salaam.

In Africa, things are a bit slowly but over the year, we have a few contacts and small projects like the presentation of Vitalis in Europe.
http://www.machm-it.org/article.php?sid=1040

We have made progress in our approach to translate machm-it.org into swahili language.
http://www.machm-it.org/index.php?newlang=swahili

In march we have sent a laptop to Mgesi Juma
http://www.bloghouse.org/node/10281
and now, he is our first tanzanian blogger.
http://mgesi.take-part.org

A lot of these *small* things happens since last November and now, Sean Moroney, from aitecafrica.com noticed the mambo, blogging and community hype and my english mambo book and invites me to come to South Africa to do a workshop related to these things and talk about machm-it.org and community building and e-learning.