When we thought about organizing a Barcamp in Madagascar, we expected to get the best participants in town, in the country and in the world. It took us 3 months to convince….our own people to join. Securing the Ivotel and Moov, the first Malagasy Internet provider was easier than getting famous but anonymous hackers or successful startups to join. One of our biggest surprise and achievement was to FINALLY meet the two greatest Open Source Communities in Madagascar : C3FL and AMUL.
maybe you don't sense it but we were on crisis : "this room wouldn't never fit the participants!"
4 letters to name the most activist of them all coming from Fianarantsoa region :
c3fl. c3fl. c3fl. c3fl*.They hosted this saturday September 20th the first FreeSoftwareDay in Madagascar at AUF campus in Tsimbazaza and were having hard times satisfying their……650 attendees! Install parties, linuzeries, free Softwares workshops, no time to help everyone, lots of enthousiasm from students and businesses.After this huge success, they are currently working on planning another bigger event with the same intentions to share more on Free Softwares use all over Madagascar with their HQ in Fianarantsoa.
c3fl* stands for ?? (bisoux be izay manfatatra)
4 letters to name the greatest most established community in Madagascar :
AMUL. AMUL. AMUL. AMUL**. are the guardians of .mg domain name and firmly protecting it from well from anyone.Their community which was created in 2001, met difficulties around 2005 and came back very strongly in 2008 with their participation to first Malagasy Seminar on web 2.0 (foko was present!) is always the first on any vulgarizing Open Source programs around businesses, schools and institutions. They actually do more than sharing, they were the pioneers in creating a Malagasy window to the world for example with Firefox in Malagasy and their support to many workshops around the island.
AMUL** stands for ?? (purple bisoux be izay manfatatra)
On this cool September afternoon in Ambohidahy, Antananarivo, we were waiting anguishly for volunteers to organize this Barcamp. We left the room as part of a powerful network of cyber-activists (ever built in less than an hour and 3 speeches) ! Bloggers meeting forumists, Free software geeks in total admiration for Citizen Media activists, Malagasy translators meeting Malagasy software developers and projecting to work together on a Malagasy dictionary in technology terms.
Fanagasiana – Solontsaina – ….
Randy was there again. Log out, jogany!
AMUL = Asssociation Malgache des Utilisateurs de Logiciels Libres
C3fl* = fluoro-carbonate de … (non, je déc…)
ah!
bon ben 1/2 de biz’oroka made in serasera pr barijaona!
tu as 5 minutes a nous donner ce samedi? il paraît qu’il va falloir venir armé
That would be AMULL ?
oh.c’est vrai.faudrait poser la question en profondeur zany. Oublie pas ton sandwouiche ce samedi DotMG, enfin bon tu as lu le super rapport de jogany qui a tout oublié
[...] http://www.purplecorner.com/2008/09/26/barcamp-madagascar-with-malagasy-best/ [...]
[...] writes about the challenges FOKO faced in organizing the event: When we thought about organizing a [...]
Just wanted to point out that actually, .MG is managed by , but since AMUL’s president happens to be the technical side of NIC.MG, sometimes this incestual relationships may lead to some confusion … But most of the associations here in Mada nurture this kind of relationships finally …
free DotMG! not the spelling bee…
[...] At the end of Barcamp Madagascar, around a well-deserved THB, all actors discussed about the opportunities and challenges of joigning E-bit. It was at this time that we stated that the future of ICT and Malagasy Education system was, in some ways, in our hands. A Microsoft sponsored event could, of course, bring ambiguities and maybe joigning a commercial event could cause damages to our credibility as a branded Free Community. By choosing to only participate in E-bit Youth Day on October 17th when thousands of students from all Antananarivo schools will be visiting, we took our chances to put the final Barcamp words into action (in very short terms) : Very quickly, we founded the Quartier Libre Union with the powerful and activists C3LF from Fianarantsoa. [...]