Proposal talk:Office in Africa

If we are to be serious about Africa, we should be looking for schemes that will help us reach the tipping point where projects take off autonomously. It is possible to do things but there are literally thousands of languages cultures ... So we have to be selective.

As it is we have a few projects that are alive.. We could make them functional and get them to the tipping points. The key is that it would change the nature of our efforts and we have to consider the effects carefully. One of the things we can do is find an external sponsor who organises the full localisation of our Afrocam language projects and maintain them at that level for at least two years. GerardM 18:23, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

Where will the funding come from?

Great idea to open offices in African cities. Could you specify what I should imagine as 'offices in Africa' on a volunteer basis? (My distorted Western view sees expensive office building with expensive officers doing office things which I can't reconcile with on a volunteer basis.) Dedalus 19:42, 20 August 2009 (UTC)

No offices

I am against opening offices anywhere. This is a online project. Try to find ways how we can include more african users. --90.146.217.210 20:18, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Impact?

Some proposals will have massive impact on end-users, including non-editors. Some will have minimal impact. What will be the impact of this proposal on our end-users? -- Philippe 00:14, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Office -> Employees

I think it would be great to have volunteer stimulating employees in Africa, and I do not believe we need an "office" for that! We could hire someone for a few hours per month, to organize meetups and other community stimulating events, pay for some costs, and stimulate the community in that way. I think this would be far more effective, because you can spread the power of one full time employee over many many countries at the same cost. Lodewijk 17:50, 5 September 2009 (UTC)

speed up access

Africa is the second biggest continent, an office in Khartoum, Lagos or Capetown would be of no relevance to the vast majority of Africans as it would be too distant. But local sets of cache servers could greatly improve access speeds and thereby tempt more people to edit and use the Wiki WereSpielChequers 15:24, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

I've now seen on the news that a high speed internet cable has been run from India to Kenya and South Africa. But that still leaves lots of Africa very remote from the net and subject to slow speeds. What could make a very big difference to local language pedias such as Wolof and Swhahili is if there were local copies of at least those wikis in relevant locations in Africa. Perhaps this is something where the foundation could partner with say African Universities. WereSpielChequers 16:36, 17 September 2009 (UTC)