Session Ideas

From Wiki

The following are session ideas to drop into the agenda. Note that each concept (especially topics like business models and community process) could blossom into more than one session. Comments, questions, and additions strongly encouraged!

Story and Demo Swap: Each participating project will be invited to share a brief history of their project and demo their basic functionality.

Community Process: A vexing challenge in all open source projects is defining and maintaining an effective community process. Managing distributed developers, handling code submissions, engaging users, responding to bugs and issues, inspiring evangelists, nurturing documentation volunteers, and marketing the project are all

Stacks and Toolsets: Teams will be invited to compare the development and runtime environments of their respective platforms, share tools and tips, and talk serious developer tech.

Collaborative Tools - The Good, The Bad and the Missing: Participants will compare the tools, technologies, and processes they use to communicate and collaborate both synchronously and asynchronously, from tried-and-true IRC to sometimes-useful tools like Skype.

Skillshares: Participants will be invited to share skills, hacks, tips and tricks on any topic they want.

Peer Assists: Participants will share challenges and issues they're experiencing with their projects, and invite other participants to weigh in with suggestions, advice and possible solutions.

Project Management Mind Meld: Participants will compare their processes and tools for managing projects

Business Models and Sustainability for Technology Projects In Africa: participants will compare their experiences and challenges in trying to make their projects sustainable.

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From Derek Keats, some thoughts on how the AVOIR team might contribute:

For AVOIR, I think the biggest challenge is:

• creating an ecosystem and making it sustianable
  • probably a subset of that,
    • creating business opportunities for the nodes based on the activities of organizations such as the IDRC
    • marketing and promoting our capabilities and software
    • strengthening the nodes so that they are able to create business opportunities
    • getting people to believe that world class work can be done in Africa
• Building research capacity
• Finding synergy with other funding organizations