Open Source Initiative

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocacy in Africa receives a big boost from the Open Society Institute for West Africa (OSIWA)

ACCRA, GHANA - February 1, 2009

All through last week, I spent my time in Ghana at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Center for Excellence in ICT ( AITI-KACE ) in Accra. It has been an incredibly refreshing experience for me, personally, and for the hundreds of students, developers, businesses, bankers and educators that are participating in the forum.

The Open Source Convention of 2008 has closed its doors. It might not have been right to count our gains and losses during the conference, but it is time and timely, to do so.

The first of all lessons was the increasing number of attendance from Africa. The word increasing may look absurd, because it does not mean from 20 to 50 or even from 10 to 25, but at least it means from 3 to 8.

On the just concluded Access to Knowledge Conference run by the Yale Law School Information Society Project, Open Source came out clear champion. Distinguished participants on this prestigious conference singles out the use of Free Software and Open Source as a key in Access to Knowledge (A2K)

http://research.yale.edu/isp/eventsa2k2.html

It was an overwhelming surprise to hear the Ghanaian minister of Communications - Mike Oquaye, give the government's full support to Open Source. This was at the opening ceremony of the FOSS media training in Accra. This event also made prime time news;

The speech is here

http://www.fossfa.net/fossfa

Just that