With gratitude to bytesforall, I learned today about this very meaningful appeal to keep the One Laptop Per Child project on course as a force for freedom in the world, by Richard Stallman, described on Wikipedia as "an American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer." I've been following this issue personally, and while I'm not quite as activist a promoter of open source software as RMS, I was crushed when I learned a few weeks ago about Negroponte's plans for Windows on the device.

Donald Lobo from CiviCRM directed me today to a new version of the very handy Prodder Directory of Southern African NGOs, which SANGONeT launched yesterday at http://beta.prodder.org.za.

This is exciting news for me since we at Kabissa also are using Drupal and CiviCRM as the backbone of our own online community website for African civil society. I like the look and feel of the new Prodder site and am pleased that CiviCRM is finding broader use in Africa.

Browsing the site, I was also intrigued to see that a print version of the Prodder Directory is available. What a terrific resource! I have floated tihs idea in the past for Kabissa: wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to offer a print edition of the Kabissa Member Directory, on an annual basis and also in custom print runs for specific purposes - eg in support of national, regional or sectoral networks, or to distribute at conferences.

SANGONeT official press release follows.

The conference took place in Dakar between the 16th and 20th March and was organised by IDLELO.

Some of the main events were:

The Digital Doorway project made use of FOSS and Open Content

We are beginning to see a trickle of press releases, photos and outcomes from the IDLELO 3 conference taking place this week in Dakar (program in ODT format). I was encouraged by this big training program on open source software announced by the German InWent capacity building organization. I've been seeing alot of interesting InWent activities in Africa recently including with the One Laptop Per Child program.

Many people ask us all the time about Drupal, the platform used to develop Kabissa 2.0.

Our friends at Lullabot have announced The Lullabot Learning Series available on DVD. I have not yet seen the DVD but the short trailer video on their website is very useful in explaining quickly some of the most important benefits of Drupal.

Free Software and Open Source tools you can download or use online to help with information graphics.

 

OpenOffice is an office productivity suite. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and drawing program. OpenOffice also works with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office and open formats such as .odt. OpenOffice runs on Linux and Windows and on Mac OS X under X11.

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Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities. You can download and use it on any computer you have handy (including webhosts), yet it can scale from a single-teacher site to a University with 200,000 students.

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