[Foundation-l] Opinions/suggestions for "outside" members of the board?

[Gerard Meijssen]

Anthere wrote:
> Hello
>
> How having servers in Africa would help the goal ?
>
> Ant
>   
Hoi,
African ISP's pay for traffic coming from America or Europe. 
Consequently the speed of American and European websites is really poor. 
Within Africa, African websites perform as we would expect them to. By 
having servers in Africa the speed in which we serve our pages would be 
dramatically better. I would argue that we should have our projects in 
African languages completely in Africa and do caching for English and 
French as well.

Hosting in Africa is not as cheap as in either America or Europe. 
Bandwidth is much more expensive. It would be good to find a partner who 
would pay the hosting of our content. There are plenty of universities 
and NGO's who could provide part of such a service. Universities can 
provide expertise and NGO's the funding.

The signal value of us having servers in Africa is very important. It 
would help us not only in getting more readers, it would help our 
localisation effort. It would help the adoption of MediaWiki as a 
platform to provide information. The marketing value for our projects is 
really big. It would also help make the use of African languages 
acceptable by providing content.

Thanks,
    GerardM

PS these are the latest *localisation *statistics and the problematic 
messages:
http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/Localisation_statistics
http://nike.users.idler.fi/dev/problems.txt