The Free and Open Source Software Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), has advanced plans to institute an industry-based media prize for practitioners on the continent.
FOSSFA was established in 2002, as a channel in pursuance of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policy based on the civil society drive to see deployment and usage of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) applications in Africa.
Basically, ‘Free’ in this circumstance means ‘freedom’ as in free speech; which entails that FOSS pays less attention to prices of application, unlike the paid or proprietary applications produced by the likes of Microsoft, Adobe and Oracle to name a few.
Top council member of FOSSFA and chartered accountant, Mr. Dapo Ladimeji, disclosed this in a chat with Champion Infotel, following the conclusion of week-long workshop on FOSS-Media held at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in Information and Communication Technology, Accra.
This plan, Mr. Lademeji said would give the foundation the needed boost in taking its relevance to several African countries and localising same for the communities.
He also said that the media prize which details will be outlined at this year’s Highway Africa (HA) conference, holding at Rhodes University, Grahamstown campus, is being worked out with a United Kingdom-based company, just as the foundation said it would increase the coverage and dissemination of information as well as understanding of what FOSS is all about.
Confirming this development, Director, Highway Africa, Mr. Chris Kabwato, said that plans are also up for the structuring of the 2007 conference billed for September, to accommodate a newsroom that would be powered by FOSS applications for the media.
He also said that expectation at the gathering of African journalists of the 21st century in advancement of their contributions to the society, will entail that the FOSS newsroom for instance, would have handy some Desk Top Publishing (DTP) applications, such as Scribus, Inkscape, OpenOffice.org and Mozila Firefox to name a few.
Champion Infotel, also gathered that the prize would be streamlined to encourage media understanding of what FOSS is, the usage of any of its aspects, and documentation especially as it concerns the continent and media in particular.
Top prize for the proposed FOSS award is being touted to be a laptop loaded with FOSS applications and other digital cadgets such as camera, mobile phone that has impact.
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