Sub-Saharan Africa Conferences How To

This page aims to provide useful information for running a GNOME booth or giving a training session in Sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the information presented here may be applicable to other regions with limited internet connectivity.

Things to Bring

• A laptop to give demos.
• A GSM modem or mobile phone you can tether to your laptop (see Applications to Demo below). Ensure that the GSM modem and / or mobile phone are supported by your distribution before you leave.
• Bring as many CDs / DVDs with the latest version of Linux and / or Unix running GNOME. We had about 200 at the GNOME Booth at Idlelo 4 in Ghana and ran out on the second day. You could easily hand out 500 discs at a conference the size of Idlelo. If you have extras, I'm sure a local Linux Users Group will take them off your hands. The GNOME Foundation can put you in touch with the right people to request media from.

• A large GNOME name and logo banner. We now have some nice posters in the North American Event Box but I think we need more brand recognition at events like these. A good example is the Fedora banner as pictured in the blog post. You should request funding to make a rugged banner from the GNOME Foundation.

• A flyer directed at new GNOME users or users who don't know what GNOME is. The Fedora Project has an excellent flyer that could serve as a good example for us. The GNOME Marketing team may be able to help create the shirts and the Foundation may be able to help organize this.

• Sell GNOME t-shirts to conference attendees. This might be a tricky one to organize but many people were interested in buying GNOME t-shirts at Idlelo 4. The Fedora booth were selling their t-shirts at cost and I think this is something we should consider for next year or other conferences in the region. The GNOME Marketing team may be able to help create the shirts and the Foundation may be able to help organize this.

Applications to Demo

NetworkManager: Show how NetworkManager can easily connect to the internet with a GSM modem or mobile phone. You should highlight that the countries and network providers are included in the default set up. If the country is not in the default setup, show people how they can file a bug to get the country and/or network provider added. You could also show developers how to make a patch if their country and/or network provider are not included.

PhoneManager: Show that you can use your computer to send and receive SMS messages with your connected mobile phone. Besides personal use, this might be useful for internet cafes to offer this as a service. PhoneManager could also be useful for organizations to communicate with a group of people as an SMS based notification system for newsletters, emergencies etc.

Ideas for GNOME Developer Training Sessions

Internet access is very slow and expensive in this region. You should have a couple of copies of the complete GNOME git tree on DVD so that trainees can have a large chunk of the GNOME module they want to hack on. This will allow people to copy over the module they're interested in and only have to download a few updates with git.

It might also be useful to setup a mirror on your laptop which can be exported/advertised with mDNS. This would allow trainees to practise using git to clone modules and maybe even practise committing patches. Obviously you shouldn't push the changes back to the main repo they haven't been reviewed by the module maintainers.