Going to CMS Africa
Strathmore University, is a leading University in Nairobi, Kenya, whose mission is to provide all-round quality education in an atmosphere of freedom and responsibility; excellence in teaching, research and scholarship; ethical and social development; and service to society. On Friday March 7 and 8 the university partners with CMS Africa to organise the CMS Africa Summit.
The event is organised to create awareness on various Open Source CMS's. Africa businesses have concerns on how Open Source CMS's are implemented and maintained. Delivery of websites is not adequate enough and installations are left with gaping security holes. Those vulnerablities are also a threat to e-commerce in the region. Without proper education in this field Open Source CMS's will not gain the necessary acceptance.
Oduor Jagero, the Lead at CMS Africa says,
It's an opportunity for people involved in Open Source to meet experts and founders of these CMSs. It's also an opportunity to exchange contacts, learn from each other, and take your business to the next level.
As community manager I have been travelling to a number of European countries and to the US, but this looks like a whole different ballgame to me. It is very hard to make an estimation on how to work in that area.
I see two different challenges. One how to promote, educate and to gain acceptance for TYPO3 that I represent. Of course the same values apply as we always use as TYPO3 being an Enterprise Content Management and the many high level features that make it stand out from the competition.
Another one is the challenge of spreading Open Source and the collaborative nature of how we work as communities. To maintain the conversation seems extremely important in the light of the issues mentioned earlier. Through the past years communities have become increasingly important throughout the world, partly also due to the world wide recession. I see this on a local level in the Netherlands, but our communication tools also enable us to create communities that interact on global scale.
I hope to find out how we can create this link to the African continent for our OS CMS's and to provide our tools as a medium to communicate and interact also on an economic level enabling easy access to create virtual market places for everyone.