31 August 2009, Kampala, Uganda

The first East African Regional Workshop on Advanced FOSS Business Models got under way on Monday the 31 of August in Kampala.

The workshop is being co-hosted by East African Centre for Open Source (EACOSS) in partnership with InWEnt. It is the second in a series of training-of-trainer (ToT) events in Southern and East Africa. The course is organized by the pan-African Open Source federation FOSSFA as well as the German non-for-profit, "InWEnt – Capacity Building International, Germany“. Main training and facilitator partners are Advanced Information Technology Institute of the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT (AITI-KACE), the United Nations University, UNU-MERIT of The Netherlands and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA).

Mr James Wire, the executive secretary of the Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa officially opened the workshop.
“The workshop is a dream come true considering how far FOSS has come in Uganda and East Africa. The business linkage have always been the missing component” said Mr J. Wire during this occasion.

The ICT@innovation together with the co-host, EACOSS received the twenty participant s coming from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. The participants were later assisted to register for the event, received their workshop packs and made all logistically requirements. The atmosphere right from the beginning reassembled a true “open source” culture with the participants freely engaging in conversation and discussion.

Programme

8-9.00 am:        Registration

9-10.00 am:       Introduction of InWEnt,George Nyambuya

                  Introduction of ICT@innovation, George Nyambuya

                  Official Address by FOSSFA Executive Secretary, James Wire

10.00am -17:00pm: Introduction to Advanced FOSS Models Course, Mr F Yeboah

6-10.00pm:        Special Group dinner hosted by ICT@innovation at Mosa Courts Garden