foko

What would we do at Foko if we were invited by Goticom to host their Youth Day at Malagasy biggest ICT event ?

1- Plan a BIG party to celebrate our 1st year . The Palais des Sports et de la Culture is 5000 seats and thousands of sq ft

2- Ask all Open Source community to join us in the Barcamp spirit.

3- Make 15000 kids happy and more aware about Citizen Media, Open Source Softwares and (why not!) Web 2.0

If you chose all three answers you just won a Foko t-shirt!

During Barcamp_MDG in Antananarivo, Foko team was very busy doing their best « Citizen journalists on duty » but we didn’t miss Gil Razafintsalama and Njaka Andriamampita interventions. They were 2 weeks from organizing E-bit 12, a 12 year-old yearly meeting for all business and organisms involved in ICT and Technology in Madagascar. Taking place at Mahamasina’s Palais des Sports et de la Culture, this event has become an institution and their try to get more Open Source communities involved in the event was a new turn for E-bit creators’, Goticom, a group of businesses, bankers, telecommunication companies and governement agencies.

Gil Razafintsalama and Njaka Andriamampita from Goticom during Barcamp_MDG sessions.

At the end of Barcamp Madagascar, around a well-deserved THB, all actors discussed about the opportunities and challenges of joigning E-bit. It was at this time that we stated that the future of ICT and Malagasy Education system was, in some ways, in our hands. A Microsoft sponsored event could, of course, bring ambiguities and maybe joigning a commercial event could cause damages to our credibility as a branded Free Community. By choosing to only participate in E-bit Youth Day on October 17th when thousands of students from all Antananarivo schools will be visiting, we took our chances to put the final Barcamp words into action (in very short terms) : Very quickly, we founded the Quartier Libre Union with the powerful and activists C3LF from Fianarantsoa.

Ndaohialy Manda-vy Ravonimanantsoa sharing Free and Open activism to bloggers and developers after Barcamp_MDG, Quartier Libre was created.

C3LF president, Ndaohialy Manda-vy Ravonimanantsoa, has convinced us on the necessity to work together when dealing with actors of this scale. WIth their experiences and advices, Foko team also invited all associations involved in these 5 different themes : Citizen Media, Web 2.0, e-Education, Open Source Softwares and Multimedia. We knew right away that joining our forces, manpower and energy could help us reach our goals of raising awareness to the situation of Education and ICT. Every steps and every seconds of the two weeks they have given us to organize this big event should be described as the most tiring and frustrating of all Foko entire year of existence but we never lost faith in our capacities to put in place a more professionnal and youth oriented event any Malagasy PR and Marketing company could ever imagine to build with practically no budget. Radio shows, promotion in all forms of media and of course INTENSE networking were our best tools to work fastly and efficiently. Our priorities were to get all Foko in Antananarivo and 25 bloggers from Antsirabe, Majunga and Tamatave answered positively to our call.

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