26th
Idlelo 3
Well, I am back from the Idlelo 3 conference held at Université Cheikh Anta Diop, Dakar. Part of a truly pan African campus with over 10 000 students coming from the rest of Africa ( If I understood the translators). I must say that I am glad that I had the opportunity to attend the conference as it gave me an opportunity to meet with government officials, FOSS developers and advocates from across the continent. Unfortunately, I was not able to blog from the venue.
Day 1 started late but got off to a great start with the Minister’s speech being extremely well received. I had lot of people come over to me and voice their often enthusiastic approval of what the Minister had said, many requesting copies of the speech. I presented our FOSS policy and that too was very well received. On Day 2 I participated on a panel discussion on open standards and I did a brief introduction of the MIOS and presented our definition of an open standard. The discussion quickly turned into a debate around ooxml. The end result was that FOSSFA issued a statement around DIS29500. The conference closed on a high note with an address by the Minister of Education of Senegal
