Thanks, Oscar, for a great summary!
I’ve got nothing to add to that.
Tusonge mbele!
Oliver (aka BT)
From: wikimediake-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimediake-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Limoke Oscar
Sent: 14 September 2010 18:36
To:
wikimediake-request@lists.wikimedia.org; The
discussion list for the upcoming Wikimedia Kenya chapter.
Subject: [Wikimedia Kenya] KU
Meeting and HealthSpeaks Report
Hey guys,
It has been quite some time since we communicated as a community. Oliver and I
had a very successful meeting with Dr.Njoroge –The Director of the Confucius
Institute of Kenyatta University and a member of The Multilingual Education
Network of East Africa on 9th Sept. 2010.Dennis from Google was set to attend
but some official matter cropped up at the last minute and He could not make
it. We also were involved in the preparations of the Google Health Speaks and
took the participants through the Wikipedia tutorial. The details of each of
the above events are below:
KU Meeting
- Oliver had mentioned of our possible
collaboration with the Confucius Institute of Kenyatta University. In
pursuance to that, we had a meeting with Dr.Njoroge.We discussed various
areas in which we could collaborate as a Local Chapter with KU (as an
institution) and with The Multilingual Education Network of East Africa.
Among the key issues are:
- A possible increase of local content online
both in local languages and other languages
- A possible collaboration with the Multilingual
Education Network of EA to enhance mother tongue curricular and content in
schools
- Dr.Njoroge also brought us in the loop of some
grand African Development Bank project that seeks to train translators to
make as much African content on culture and local languages
online.(financed by the ADB)
- We also thought of identifying some pilot project
of Local relevance say like try to bring Agricultural information online
in local languages as possible. This idea however was left to the Local
Chapter Members to deliberate on it and then get back to Dr.Njoroge with
our thought over the same as soon as possible.
- Dr,Njoroge also assured us of the support of KU
in terms of physical address when we need legal registration.
- We however agreed to try out the one off projects
in collaboration with The Multilingual Education Network of EA as we work
out the registration details.(upon the Local Chapter Members to determine
a pilot)
- Lastly we agreed to have another meeting as soon
as possible to deliberate over the above issues after we(The Local
Chapters have discussed the same)
- We also thought to involve Salome(The Kiswahili
Expert from Google during the next meeting)
Health Speaks
Health Speaks is an initiative of Google to try to make Health related content
available online as much as possible. Currently they are running a pilot to
make English Wikipedia articles available in Swahili, Hindi and Arabic .It is
on voluntary basis but they are offering upto $50,000(US) in donation
to a local NGO. (more at www.google.org/healthspeaks).
Oliver, Abbas and I were involved in the training of the participants on
Wikipedia related issues. Oliver delivered a fantastic Wikipedia start up
tutorial during the Nairobi
training. I was also involved in the distribution of the posters for the same
in my campus (JKUAT) other than being a participant in the same. If anyone
would like to participate, log onto the website above.
--
Limoke Oscar
Undergraduate Student -JKUAT
Bsc.Geomatic Eng.
and GIS
+254 717 845 316