The second Swaziland Computer Society meeting was a success! I am excited to see our group is moving in a positive direction. Our first meeting in December was a great way to break the ice for SCS members to meet in person. After our initial meeting we decided we weren’t done hanging out and we went to Nando’s for an hour or so to drink coffee and talk shop.
This time for our January meeting we built on the same idea and decided to meet at the Apple Cafe in Manzini. Getting into Manzini is much easier for everyone as it is centrally located in the country. Unfortunately the urgently-needed rain did work against us, as anyone who has lived in southern Africa knows, rain generally means your event is canceled. I held out hope though and I was thrilled when two of the biggest contributors to SCS came over.
My main goal of the meeting was to talk about how Swaziland Computer Society has now been added to the NetSquared community of like-minded organizations. This pairing really helps bring reputation points to what SCS is trying to do. Additionally it gives TechSoupGlobal and NetSquared some insight and contacts for this pocket of the world. There is a lot of room to grow this connection and we are really excited to see where it goes.
You can check out the NetSquared page for SCS here:
http://www.netsquared.org/local/africa/swaziland-computer-society
Additional topics covered were the push forward with the website. PD has gone a long way towards the design of the site, including the forum, an advertising section for people to sell gear, and tools for vendors to advertise. It’s great stuff and we’re really excited to get that launched. To help out with the launch of the site, another member suggested we hold a logo-creation contest and get some talent from within SCS to come up with the logo for our new site. This will be a great way for an aspiring and upcoming Swazi graphic artist to get their work out.
Other topics had a focus on programming and fixing a few problems people are having. For programming there was some discussion about a Coursera offering for functional programming. This course teaches how to use functional programming with ML, Racket, and Ruby. The course has just started and the two people enrolled were able to talk a bit about it. A great tip was offered about http://developers.facebook.com as a site dedicated to using APIs and programming centered around Facebook.
Some of the problems addressed included an unresolved issue with using Tor under Fedora. This is still being looked at, but it’s really exciting to know people are using Tor. There was discussion on how to get an ICT intern for projects, and that process should be identified and posted online once the forum launches. We also talked about the upcoming SCS resource disc and how valuable that will be to instructors without great Internet access.
The next meeting is already in the works, with its planned date sometime after the end of the logo contest. Having these meetings is great as it really shows how much the members do appreciate what SCS is trying to do. From the admin team we are looking forward to exciting times ahead!