March 12th, 2006 by George Appiah
I recently attended Africa Source II, an eight day hands-on workshop aimed at building the technical capacity of folks working with and within NGOs on the African continent.
The workshop took place in one of the most beautiful parts of the Kalangala Island on Victoria Lake in Uganda from the Jan 08-Jan 15, 2006 …. and saw over a hundred participants from all over the continent and beyond.
There were three main thematic tracks, viz …
- NGO Migration
- Education Migration, and
- Information Handling and Advocacy
In addition to these main tracks, there were a plethora of skill-share events, with most of the topics chosen on-the-fly as people demanded them and people with the skills to share were found.
With four delegates from SchoolNet, we thought it wise to split up and get a little bit of a feel from each main track, instead of all four of us being in the Education Migration track.
I followed the Information Handling and Advocacy track. I thought I didn’t know much about advocacy and was going to be a mere observer. OMG … how wrong I was! I ended up being a leading contributor in most of the discussions, especially on ICT tools for advocacy.
That’s a big lesson I’ve learned. From hindsight, I know I could have done a much better job facilitating most of the tracks and skill-shares that I participated in. But I didn’t find myself ‘fit’ to do that when I was applying for the workshop.
Posted in Workshops and Events | Comments Off
March 7th, 2006 by George Appiah
In my recent post, I mentioned I had earlier posts elsewhere, which I was going to move here. But with so many posts (including lots of photos), and being on an uber-slow Internet connection, I decided not to use WordPress’ in-built importer … but rather make the switch via database.
So I went ahead to make a backup of my WordPress database. And having once been bitten, I did not want to take any chances at all this time. So I kept a copy of the database on my USB stick, a copy on my local machine, another copy on the webserver, and yet another copy in my Gmail account.
With these backups-of-backups, I reckoned I was safe enough, and went ahead to clean-up GeorgeAppiah.com, preparing the way for it’s pending assignment.
And today when I finally made time to upload my database to this new blog … grrrrrrrrrrrr. None of the 4 copies of the database I had on different media would work. Try, try, try … nada, nada, nada.
So the lesson here? Yes … make regular backups: databases, files, whatever. And yes, backup your backups too. But most importantly, test your backups before storing them.
Posted in Site Announcements | Comments Off
March 2nd, 2006 by George Appiah
[photopress:uganda_beach.jpg,full,pp_empty]
So here I go … finally managed to steal some little time to get this blog running. The subject matter of this blog is actually not new. It started life at my personal blog where I used to write about many topics … from coding to cooking (oh yes … that’s true!), with life in Uganda getting it’s due attention.
So why the move? Is it just because I wanted to walk my talk? Well, that and more. I sure wanted to walk my talk about a central place to keep WEC volunteers’ journals. But also, I’ve kindda’ got other plans for the domain GeorgeAppiah.com, and I thought it wise best to separate WEC related content from the pending project I’m going to use that domain for.
So in a day or two, I’m going to move all the old posts here … plus lots and lots of photos.
So how does that pass for a supposedly first post in a blog?
Posted in Where is George? | 1 Comment »