Skunkworks in the news

So ... Ken Kasina's cyber-cafe application got featured in the news.
(his group is working on migrating cyber-cafes to open-source solutions)

Business Daily

ZDNet

Linux Magazine (Google English Translation)

BarCamp ... WOW

This was incredible ... my head is reeling from all the energy/passion.
I think we've got the hang of how to organize these :)

Thanks a ton to Brian Muita for putting it all together at Strath, Kiania (His MC-ness), speakers, and all participants.
Thanks to KDN for lunch sponsorship !

Will mostly put links up as coverage comes ... Daudi has some podcast feeds we'll also link to soon.

Wilfred has a real-time blog of the session
http://wmworia.wordpress.com/2007/11/24/barcampkenya-live/

Erik just put up a summary as well
http://whiteafrican.com/?p=806

UPDATE: Photos posted by Daudi, mostly taken by Wesley
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mentalacrobatics/sets/72157603287527256/

BarCamp Kenya 2.0 - Conversations

Over the last few months, we've had discussions with various techies, entrepreneurs,
and just kawa guys about why Kenya is still lagging in terms of ICT innovation and
entrepreneurship.

This BarCamp, we'd just like to have a CONVERSATION with all of you.

Moderated by Dr Kamau Gachigi, we would like you all to come and help us brainstorm
through issues, and hopefully find the causes & solution to start fostering ICT innovation.

Some of the questions we have been asking ourselves:
- why don't we have a culture of innovation
- what is wrong with the education system
- why don't we have enough ICT entrepreneurs eg software & web-app companies (our own facebook ?)
- why are we lagging behind in e-commerce ... why don't we have a payment gateway yet

Date: 24 November 2007
Venue: Strathmore University, Room 34
Time: 9.30am to 2.00pm
Moderator: Dr Kamau Gachigi

More information (& Sign Up) is on the wiki
http://wiki.my.co.ke/index.php/BarCamp

Also - In the spirit of BarCamp and innovation - also check out Hash's new graphic collage of Africa web 2.0 startups
http://whiteafrican.com/?p=805

Introduction to Web Development using Catalyst

From Jason:

We talked about Catalyst[1], an MVC framework primarily used for web
development.

We demonstrated that catalyst uses helper scripts to generate stubs
like Ruby On Rails. We showed that it was simple to populate generated
skeleton files with code even with little Perl experience. Like Ruby
on Rails it is easy to get an app running and see the results
instantly thanks to the development server Catalyst ships with.

We also saw how Catalyst makes use of CPAN[2] to avoid reinventing the
wheel. This means that you also have the power to switch your models
and views as you wish using existing CPAN modules. This demonstrates
the flexibility of the framework.

At the end of the session, it was hoped that Catalyst would give
developers one more reason to use Perl.

Resources:
www.catalystframework.org
http://search.cpan.org/dist/Catalyst-Manual/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Tutorial.pod
www.perl.com

[1] - www.catalystframework.org
[2] - www.cpan.org (Central repository for Perl Modules)

--
Next Session is next week