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I spent the last two days meeting with a great group of people from the University of the Western Cape in South Africa. They will be at OSCON in Portland next week and were able to extend their trip a bit in order to come down to the Oregon State University Open Source Lab for a visit.

The visitors from UWC included: Derek Keats, Madiny Darries, Anver Natha, Ernie Smart, Paul Scott, and David Wafula. Although they have quite limited resources, they have been working on a number of open source projects which benefit many people in Africa. Their main initiative is a collaboration between about 13 different higher-ed institutions in Africa which develops, supports, and promotes open source software. In fact, Derek Keats will be speaking about the initiative (AVOIR) at OSCON - http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2320

The main project to come out of AVOIR is a framework called Chisimba. Chisimba is used at the core of most of their other projects, and appears to be a very solid PHP framework. You can also tie into the framework using modules written in other languages. I'm pretty excited about the framework, and we're going to look into ways of using it here at the OSUOSL as well.

All in all, it was a great visit, and I look forward to working with them in the future. The entire group from UWC will be at OSCON, so if you have a chance, I'd recommend seeing Derek's talk, or meeting them at their booth in the expo hall.