Hi all On the 22 August 2002 we (me and Roché Compaan) introduced journalists at the Highway Africa conference (http://www.highwayafrica.org.za) to the Plone CMF during a 3-hour workshop. Highway Africa was (a small) part of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, taking place in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the moment. The workshop was a lot of fun: we nursed the roomful of journalists, some young, some veterans, from all over Africa, through the process of joining the portal, customizing their homepages, visiting each others' homepages, and adding a news item. Then half of them got the "Reviewer" role, and rejected the news item of the person next to them with a comment. The author revised their article, resubmitted, and the reviewers published it. For most of the participants, this was their first encounter with collaborative online publishing, and *almost* too good to be true. They wanted to continue using it. A big barrier is simply knowledge and connectivity --- there are many online publishing forums, but if your only access is via expensive dialup at a semi-legal internet cafe, then you're not in the position to figure out which ones are good and reliable, and how to use them. "Open Source" was a recurring refrain during the conference, but for the majority of people it was a buzzword without substance. In his presentation, Roché told where the movement comes from, and gave some definitions. Many people came to us afterwards, asking for more names, papers and sources of information about Open Source, its acceptance, business models and economic viability studies about it. It was clear that there is a great deal of sober interest among policy makers who are beginning to see Open Source as a valuable resource, both as infrastructure and as community. Among the organisations who expressed interest or support were the Acacia Project (http://www.idrc.ca/ACACIA/), the Association for Progressive Communications (http://www.apc.org/), the European Centre for Development Policy Management (http://www.ecdpm.org/) and the Department of Communications (http://docweb.pwv.gov.za/). In their presentation, the DoC spoke of moving the Department's operations to Open Source, and of advocating Open Source at other government departments. They also want to look for appropriate channels to promote Open Source in the private sector, but were unsure how this might best be approached. According to Bridget McBean of the ECDPM, Torped's Easy Publisher is doing very well in Europe. She isn't familiar with Zope, Open Source, online publishing or whatever, but she does know that many organizations use Easy Publisher. Roché's talk is online at: http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/highwayafrica-opensource-talk.html http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/highwayafrica.html We'd like to try building on the publishing platform that we presented during our workshop. About the workshop: as it was done live on the internet, it's still accessible. Here it is: http://demo.upfrontsystems.co.za/plone Besides the finger exercises, there are a couple of good articles. Look at this one: http://demo.upfrontsystems.co.za/plone/Members/baraka/News_Item.2002-08-22.2... We aim to contact the workshop attendees and invite them to continue using the portal for publishing. It would be great if a real space for collaboration could emerge. Regards, -- Jean Jordaan Upfront Systems http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za