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eRiders visits in Bulgaria and UK
Submited by Teresa Crawford
I was privileged to take part in an Open Source and eRiding training in Bulgaria put on by the eRiders at Interspace for the eRiders of the RIP project. Was a great opportunity to test out some of the theory and practice of open source on eRiders with a more advocacy and communications bent rather then a hard core tech focus. By the end the RIP eRiders knew all about PHP/MySQL and could comfortably install a CMS and web log system on a server. We all worked on open source workstations during the week and loaded open source software onto our windows machines for later use.
Happy to share the agenda with folks asit might be something you want to train your eRIders in. As usual we ate and drank together every night and had a great visit to a large Roma community in Plovdiv - the second largest city in Bulgaria.
Now I am in London with LASA who is helping to pioneer the circuit rider movement in the UK. Colin arranged for me to give a talk on Monday about the history of circuit riding and the international movement. Was well attended by over 30 folks. The UK government has shown great interest in the circuit riding model and hopefully good things on the funding side will be coming down for the UK riders in the next 6 months.
LASA is also working on training materials for training new circuit riders. Shared with them all the work being down by others and they are looking forward to working with others on the development of materials. They loved all the work Ungana Afrika has done so far.
LASA is also working with NTEN and a few others (me included) to arrange a circuit rider conference in London on September 14th and 15th. While mostly UK focused Colin and I are dicussing making about 25 slots available for eRiders from outside the UK to come to the conference out of about 150 attendees total. We would hope to do 2 eRider days before the UK conference and then participate in their sessions where appropriate. I am actively fundraising for this and so is Colin with the UK foreign office.
If folks have any access to funders, conferences funds or government funds to come to the UK please let us know and we can help. Looks like costs would be around 1000 USD total for the 4-5 days (flight, hotel, food, visa).
Last few bits we discussed about sharing the LASA evaluation model they have used to actively evaluate their eRider project and they are going to approach CISCO about some of the things we discussed in Philadelphia about using CISCO networking academies to give eRiders some training. More on that to come.
Hope everyone is well. Share what you are up to these days!:)
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