FLOSSWorld Africa regional workshop agenda

Abstract

The FLOSSWorld Regional Workshop for Africa, will be held in conjunction with Idlelo 2, the foremost conference on FLOSS in Africa which will bring together people from across the continent (and the world) to assess current status and plot a way forward for FLOSS in Africa. FLOSSWorld is a world-wide impact study of free/libre and open source software. At Idlelo 2 collaborators will be sought to extend its reach across the continent. There are three research tracks: (1) Human capacity building: investigating FLOSS communities as informal skills development environments, with economic value for employment generation, (2) Software development: what are the regional and international differences – technical, organisational, business – between FLOSS projects across countries? and (3) e-Government policy: what policies and behaviour do governments around the world adopt towards FLOSS, open standards and interoperability? A fourth track involves workshops and work group activities to build an international research and policy development constituency, initially through collaboration on FLOSSWorld, and later by building long term relationships for research collaboration. The Africa Regional FLOSSWorld workshop is blended into Idlelo 2 as indicated below. Idlelo 2 participants may volunteer to assist FLOSSWorld in meeting certain objectives, by attending FLOSSWorld specific sessions, sharing insights, and starting to build a network of researchers for future collaboration