What we learned from organizing a Barcamp

Foko bloggers were the real authors of the first Barcamp in Madagascar's success. The coordinators wanted the tech communities to notice the existence of Foko network and mostly the members interests in other fields related to Citizen Media. In fact, very few associations, journalists and professionals knew about Foko-Madagascar and our outreach project the Foko Blog Club before this October 4th. Of course the event was wide open to anyone to participate and we only took the reporting task as an honour but not as a duty at all. Each blogger had the opportunity to interview, take videos and liveblog thanks to Moov, Malagasy first internet provider, free connexion. It is also a great opportunity to get more sponsors, volunteers or help from organisms. Foko bloggers presentations from Diana and Patricia were very applauded because of their spontaneity and of course hard work. Rondro and Lomelle from Majunga joined by Theo and Patrick from Tamatave were the proud representants of Foko network in the provinces. They proved to be more than interested to Open Source projects when asking very professional questions during the presentations.

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Lomelle liveblogging and twitting with excellence on FBC's new laptop the very useful Asus eepc

Creating partnerships was also one of our goals during this event and when associations from the provinces of Madagascar knew about Foko's intentions to expand, they graciously offered their technical support. In exchange, ICE, the english-speaking group in Antananarivo, will see more Open Source developers at their weekly meetings to improve their English! Finally it was a surprise for us to see the creators of the biggest tech event in Madagascar participating at the discussions and inviting all the attendees to help them for Youth Day were 15000 students from all schools will be visiting on October 17th. Of course carefully we are going to be using the acronym : Open and Free Communities when refering to the associations involved this project in order to keep the “Barcamp” spirit.

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Nambina (C3LF- Open Source developers community) helping Diana on her presentation with OpenOffice

So on October 17th, all Foko from Antsirabe to Tamatave will be again in Antananarivo sharing their Citizen Media experiences and giving blogging tips ! But for us at Foko, it will be another memorable day when we don't have to intensively text each other …

By Friday, we hope you will enjoy posting comments at Vakinankaratra region new groups (Antsirabe+Ambatolampy) and ICE :

FBC 12 from ICE