[UbuntuWomen] About The Penguin Trail project

[Armi Korhonen]

Hi all!

I briefly introduced our project in the #ubuntu-women IRC channel (as
Ihmepupu), but I just noticed that this might be a better way of reaching
people!

A quick introduction to the project: ‘The Penguin Trail – Cape to Cairo’
is a project by two women, Veera Uusoksa and Armi Korhonen, who are
traveling from Cape Town to Cairo, starting January 2011, while raising
awareness for free and open source software (FLOSS).

The aim of the project is to:

    * Learn what different organizations in African countries are doing
around Open Source for Development and find out what still needs to be
done
    * Inform the general public in and outside of Africa about the
possibilities of FLOSS
    * Inform the open source community about the needs for software
projects in Africa

So basically we are going to work as kind of a communication hub in
between the people of Africa (whether it be the general public or
different organizations or ICT4D projects), the FLOSS and COSS communities
and companies and also the general public in other countries, people who
are interested to follow our trip, but in the same time will be informed
about the benefits of FLOSS. The project has already attracted attention,
not only from FLOSS and ICT4D people, but also the mainstream media. We
are also in the talks of producing our trip into a TV-series. We intend to
use all the publicity for the benefit of the open source cause. Please
note that our project is not Ubuntu specific, but as we are both Ubuntu
users, it'll be undoubtedly a big part of our project.

In addition to the points stated above, we are also interested in
gathering female only groups along our journey to see if they have
specific needs and interests and conduct training around the subjects of
interest.

I haven't had a chance to look into it yet, if there are any African
Ubuntu Women LoCo teams out there. If there are, then we would certainly
be interested in meeting you. If there's not, then perhaps we would be
able to spread the word along our way and something might spawn from that.

If you have any questions or comments, or ideas how we could help the
Ubuntu Women, then please don't hesitate to contact us! The easiest way
would be to send e-mail to info at thepenguinrail.org or to me directly to
armi at thepenguintrail.org (I'm reading both of those e-mails, so it's just
a matter of taste, which one to use).

Cheers,
Armi