More networking of African IT specialists with Europe and joint building of advanced training materials – this is what a new partnership of FOSSFA's and GIZ’s ict@innovation programme with the Europe-wide ‘Free Technology Academy’ (FTA) is all about. The Free Technology Academy (FTA), financially supported by the Life Long Learning programme (LLP) of the European Commission, is a collaboration between the Netherlands-based Free Knowledge Institute and three European universities.

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, Partners and Friends,

here is our latest ict@innovation Newsletter, covering the third quarter of 2010 from August till the end of October 2010.

More and more success stories of people making a business with FOSS in Africa are emerging. We have put together a little video of the FOSS stories captured by ict@innovation at this years Fourth African Conference on FOSS and the Digital Commons, Idelo 4.

To publicise the launch of the new ict@innovation Training Handbook "Free your IT-Business in Africa!" we have written this press release and are currently spreadind the news that the materials can be downloaded for free here on the website on different mailinglists and relevant repositories. We want to make sure everyone interested in the materials knows about them so please feel free to help us spread the word and pass on this press release and most importantly the link to the materials!

Location

The first Middle East and Africa Open Source Conference will be held in Cairo, Egypt.

I have been involved in FOSS advocacy in Kenya for the last 7 years. My love affair with FOSS started when I was looking for a content management system (CMS) for a sports portal I was proposing to develop back in 2003. I looked around and what I saw was not impressive. The figures that were being quoted for applications like octigon were basically far out of reach for me as i was just starting out in my consulting business (BTW, just google that name and see what happened to them).