Hey guys,<br>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:<br>
<u>KU Meeting</u><br><ul><li>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:</li>
</ul><ul><li>A  possible increase of local content online both in local languages and other languages</li></ul><ul><li>A possible collaboration with the Multilingual Education Network of EA to enhance mother tongue curricular and content in schools</li>
</ul><ul><li>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) </li>
</ul><ul><li>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.</li>
</ul><ul><li>Dr,Njoroge also assured us of the support of KU in terms of physical address when we need legal registration.</li></ul><ul><li>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)</li>
</ul><ul><li>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)</li></ul><ul><li>We also thought to involve Salome(The Kiswahili Expert from Google during the next meeting)</li>
</ul><u>Health Speaks</u><br>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 <a href="http://www.google.org/healthspeaks">www.google.org/healthspeaks</a>).  <br>
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.<br clear="all">
<br>-- <br>Limoke Oscar<br>Undergraduate Student -JKUAT<br>Bsc.Geomatic Eng. and GIS<br>+254 717 845 316<br>