ICTworks by Inveneo

You know the amazing photograph of the earth at night showing all the lights of population centers around the world. And you've seen the Facebook friendship map that shows where the concentrations of Facebook users are around the globe.

Ian Wojtowicz mashed those two images together to get The UnFacebook World. The dark lines are Facebook usage and the bight yellow dots are where there are population centers that have bright lights at night but no Facebook friends.

Do you notice anything odd about Africa? How about that São Tomé and Príncipe have electricity but no Facebook and the millions in Rwanda, Burundi, and DRC have neither Facebook nor electrical lights at night.

This is a stark visual reminder that not everyone one is on FB, regardless of the hype around Facebook usage doubling in a month across Africa in 2011.

DEANZ (Distance Education Association of New Zealand) 2012 - Shift Happens - Resilience, Relevance and Reform, 11 to 13 April, 2012, Wellington, New Zealand.

Premier conference in New Zealand for leaders and practitioners of open, flexible & distance learning. The conference is relevant to tertiary and secondary educators, and company trainers seeking professional development.

Conference Themes:
• Resilience: dealing with uncertainty and coping with changes you can and cannot influence.
• Relevance: providing educational services that are relevant to the context and culture of the learner.
• Reform: moving to better futures for all, addressing the political, social, economic and personal drivers.

http://www.deanz.org.nz/home/index.php/deanz-conference-2012 or http://tinyurl.com/deanz2012

Email: deanz2012@deanz.org.nz

About VC4A Questions:

VC4Africa seeks to connect entrepreneurs with the network, capital and knowledge they need to build promising businesses on the continent. We have members from 156 countries that network via our online platforms and offline via our VC4Africa Meetups. Our matchmaking site VC4Africa.biz is a tool for entrepreneurs to publish their venture and connect with possible business partners and investors. Our matchmaking program further supports entrepreneurs in their business planning and support entrepreneurs seeking venture finance. So how do we support the community with knowledge?

Building a business is hard and having access to the right knowledge and information is critical. Unfortunately, in the African space information is too often lacking. What do the changes in local tax code mean for the tech sector? What are the import duties for heavy machinery? What are the key points investors look for when reviewing a cash flow prognosis? What are the legal issues I need to consider when expanding across borders? VC4A Questions is a collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by the VC4A community. Together we are building a community generated database of knowledge. A few points that make VC4Africa Questions & Answers unique:

A Growing Knowledge Base

People use VC4A questions to document their African business adventures. Over time, the database of knowledge should grow and grow until almost everything that anyone wants to know about doing business in Africa is available in the system. The information is organized, the history of the questions is archived and the information is freely accessible for anyone with the same question today or tomorrow.

Community Managed

Each question makes use of tags that make them easier to find across multiple search queries. This also helps members link new questions with existing discussions and further centralizes the conversation. Members can find similar questions they can borrow from when outlining additional context. Each question and answer is also rated and sorted by the users. This ensures that only the most pertinent questions rise to the top of the landing page and search results. It helps push prominent issues into the forefront and crowds out any unwanted messages or noise.

Follow Discussions

Members can follow topics they are interested in. Any updates are automatically forwarded per e-mail and this helps maintain an active dialogue. Members, the VC4Africa team and officers can also ‘recommend experts’ with certain questions and encourage them to share their expertise and input. This further serves to mobilize an active network and adds to the growing knowledge base.

VC4A Reputations

VC4A Questions is linked directly to member profiles. The system tracks who posted a question, who responded, how many responses were recorded and whether or not the questions and answers were valued by the VC4A community. This feedback is part of a reputation the user builds via the system. This helps other users appreciate the quality and level of a user’s contributions and serves to recognize the members who contribute the most and are otherwise experts on certain subjects or specific fields of interest.

Moving forward,

Please visit the new section of the website http://vc4africa.biz/questions/. We encourage you to take a look and play around with this new tool. Please add your own questions or share feedback with the community. We look forward to building this resource together and for the benefit of the entrepreneurs and investors working to build promising businesses on the continent.

Regards and happy networking!
The VC4A Team

by ICTWorks' Wayan Vota (Repost from Technology Salon)

Software as a Service, Cloud Computing, Open Source, Open Standard, M-Everything - what do these different approaches to software mean for international development? Can these software solutions help organizations reach programmatic goals quicker, cheaper, and more effectively? And if so, how would you include the killer app in a proposal so it would win funding?

To help you understand if an shelf package or service exists, or if you need consultant to build something custom, prepare yourself with a bit of software knowledge. Come to the next Technology Salon to discuss options, approaches, and solutions to scoping and costing software budgets for RFP responses and grant proposals with these experts:

Jeff Wishnie, Director of Social Impact at ThoughtWorks, a global software consultancy, will provide a survey of interesting trends in software-for-development.

Spice Up Your Next Proposal with Software!
May Technology Salon
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
UN Foundation Conference Room
1800 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036 (map)

We'll have hot coffee and Krispe Kreme donuts for a morning rush, but seating is limited and the UN Foundation is in a secure building. So RSVP ASAP to be confirmed for attendance or you are on the waitlist.

Coders4Africa is a Not-For-Profit Organization with the goal of providing professional training and certification on a variety of platforms, including Java developer frameworks and tools, to one thousand African software and application developers by the year 2016. It provides African programmers and developers a gateway to free high quality training and certification in the main technologies and platforms that currently dominate the software development industry.

This year's conference: Coders4Africa 2011 is taking place in Ghana between June 18-19.

Why Coders4Africa ?

We are looking to contribute practically and effectively to the development of human capital in Africa through the means of technology. Human capital betterment is indispensable in reducing poverty and developing any type of economy. We believe that it is the center of every nation's wealth.

"Our short term goal is developing a community of African developers all across Africa under one structured roof - Coders4Africa," Amadou Daffé (one of the creators of the NGO amongst his 4 other partners also IT professionals: Ali Kone (Mali), Kwame Andah (Ghana), Ibrahim Cisse (Mali/Senegal), and AlMoustapha Cisse (Niger).)

Amadou said. "We want to create a pool of highly skilled African citizens in the software development industry to enlarge the labor income share thus contributing in a more equitable distribution of income," he explained.

We are bound to create a pool of Highly skilled African citizens in the software development industry to enlarge the labor income share thus contributing in a more equitable distribution of income. One of our end goals is to create a community of African programmers that share and transfer knowledge among themselves and to future generation of programmers.