Interested in meeting some colleagues in West Africa? SeneJUG is the West African Java User Group. Members come from Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Morocco and many other countries in Africa. France, too! Many of our group already live in Dakar, Senegal's beautiful capital, because of the stellar Polytechnic University of Dakar. Our advisor, Alex Corenthin, is the chairman of the Comp Sci dep't and the registrar of the .sn domain.

There's a Senejug Group at Codetown, if you'd like to reach out to one of our colleagues in Africa.
I visited Dakar for the SeneJUG kickoff. It fascinating to become involved with a group of students at the university whose lab runs nearly entirely on open source software. The grad students majored in topics like IPV6. There are a bunch of startups in Dakar. The Chamber of Commerce is busy with people meeting others excitedly describing successes in the marketplace. Although PHP is the most popular language used in Dakar on the web, Java is very common.

Since most of the SeneJUG members speak French (and Wolof), it may be useful for you to use Babelfish, the brilliant translation service written by Henry Story, to go from French to your native language.

I visited Kaolack, south of Dakar and worked with a group there called 10,000 Girls Their mission is to give girls a well rounded education when these young ladies might otherwise be constrained to working at home. They learn math, language skills and sewing among other subjects. I coached them on entrepreneurship and the Web2.0 phenomenon. Click on any of these photos I took to see the set.

I am so happy to say that now the 10,000 Girls organization has an online store!
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Check it out: http://10000girls.org/dolls/index.html