Hi all The Highway Africa conference [1] has invited us to take part in a panel discussion on "Open Source as a techonological alternative for Africa", and to present a workshop about using Open Source software for online publishing. With this mail, I'm trolling for advice and input from all you moguls experienced at wowing the crowds ;) I've put together a page with more details and links here: http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/highwayafrica.html There's also a QuickTopic discussion space here: http://www.quicktopic.com/15/H/Vx6UCXCpB6qK The panel will include representatives of the South African government and from AllAfrica.com, so our contribution should emphasize the role of Open Source in a third-world national and regional context. For the Workshop, which will be taking place in a media lab with workstations for participants, we're considering walking the participants through a Plone [2] portal. Plone is an implementation of the Zope Content Management Framework [3] with a lot of emphasis on an attractive UI and on usability out of the box. The default installation provides a portal with similarity to sites like Kuro5hin, though with a wider application than news publishing: - site visitors can browse, search and comment on content, - members can contribute content (news items, documents, etc), - content participates in a publishing workflow, so that site editors can vet members' content before publishing. Content is also automatically syndicated as RSS, so a Plone portal is open to integration with other news sites. As Highway Africa 2002 is focussed on the media and journalism, rather than on IT professionals, this looks like a reasonable starting point. So what do you think? -- Jean Jordaan Upfront Systems http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za [1] Highway Africa 2002: Wiring Journalism for development. Johannesburg, August 21st to August 23rd, 2002 http://www.highwayafrica.org.za/ [2] http://plone.org [3] http://cmf.zope.org