Having met so many of you at Akademy last year, I am now glad to notify you guys that we have approval from Bayero University Kano Nigeria to host the Free and Open Source Nigeria 2009 conference on 6th to 9th March. We want to invite KDE contributors and users including organisations and companies who want to come and give talks or workshops during the event. We are expecting more than 2000 participants from within and outwith the university. We will be glad to receive guests from all over the world, especially people with vast experiences in open source.


70% of the attendees are going to be students from higher institutions from the northern part of Nigeria,while 2% are government representatives, 10% academicians and 17% are people that will come from outside the academic environment. Everyone will want to know what is free and open source software.

Due to our few resources ,the committee can only take care of our guest's food, accommodation and site visits of all those that will come from outside the country although we are going to look for a donations if we can get any.

We would like to release the programme of events by 19th january 2009.Therefore we will like to know those who would like to speak and give workshops so that we will speed up our arrangements in time.

From our research so far, 90% of the participants are ignorant of free and open source ideas,while the remaining have heard about the idea but do not know its values and importance. This is going to be the first free and open source conference in northern Nigeria, a country with more than 100 million people.

All interested companies who wants to advertise their open source products and services can send their banners, pamphlets, stickers, shirts or anything that can sell the idea to our community free of charge so that it can be distributed or place in all the programme halls.

If you are interested in coming to give a talk, workshop or just meet Nigerians interested in free software please contact me, Mustapha, at mustapha@hutsoftnigeria.com.

Posted on Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:56:53 +0000 at http://dot.kde.org/2009/01/07/invite-kd ... geria-2009