As some of you know, I’ve been involved in a little non-profit called GlobalEyes for a little while now. Today I started a little fundraising initiative based on the Pledgie fundraising platform, which looks pretty cool. I tried ChipIn earlier, but I didn’t like the whole Flash thing.Eventually, we’re trying to start a sort of “open source” non-profit, where we’ll put most of the emails that we get from the Kenyan NGO that we work with, Tropical Focus, the emails we send them, the spreadsheets and documents we write up, podcast our board meetings, etc. The exciting thing for me is that we’re working on sending them a better camera so we can get regular photos and videos from them of the things they’re able to do with the funds we raise and possibly get Tobias or Caren to write a blog post from time to time. More to come on that as I actually get the software to support it done.
The rest of this post is what I put in the Pledgie Fundraising page. I’ve also added the badge to my site here so you can see how it’s doing.
GlobalEyes is looking to raise funds to supply our friends at the Childrens Rescue Mission, Kenya with a new water tank, which will help provide them with a water source through the year.
From an email from Tobias:
“The heavy rains have started already - since 15th this month and may continue to about 10th June. The tank we proposed for CRM is 6000 litres costing about Kshs. 35,000 together with the accessories. However if funds shall be limiting we can go for 3000 litres which costs Kshs. 21,700 together with accessories, but the storage will still not last long.”
35,000 Kshs is about $512 USD.
Here is a picture of the water tank that we funded at that facility a year ago. It’s capacity is not large enough to last the whole year, so we’d like to add another one.
If you donate, we’ll be happy to send you pictures of the new tank when it is installed.
So I was reading this article on how to create high quality YouTube videos and I wanted to try it out. I also had wanted to upload a more compact video about our visiting with the Gorillas in Rwanda, so I re-edited the video to make it less than half as long and tried to follow all those steps to get really nice quality video uploaded.
I ended up with a slightly better quality video, I think, though I’m not sure it’s as good as you can possibly get with YouTube. Here are the screencaps as close to the same frame as I could get them (the top is the new video, the bottom is the older one):
So, I can see a little more detail in the top one, so I think it improved a bit, but it’s not that much more impressive (especially for the amount of work that it took). Let me know if any of you have any good tips for this, I’m interested in how to get really sharp videos onto YouTube.At any rate, here is the new video - only about 2:40 now.
As a result of two separate partnerships that we’ve signed today with the Rwandan Ministry of Infrastructure and the Kenya Education Network, nearly 20,000 students from the National University of Rwanda, the Kigali Institute for Education and the Kigali Institute for Science and Technology, plus 50,000 more from Kenya’s University of Nairobi, are joining their colleagues at Northwestern, ASU and around the world with access to Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, and Google Docs & Spreadsheets under their university’s domain for free.
This is interesting to me because Jessica and I happened to visit a number of those places when we went to Rwanda. Here is the vice rector of KIST showing us some of the projects the students there were working on. We were lucky enough to get a personal tour of the entire facility and got to talk to many of the students there.
Later we also visited the University of Rwanda at Butare, where we were also shown around, then we got to see a dancing competition they were holding on campus and then went to have a beer with the vice rector there.
I’m glad that Rwanda and Kenya are adopting this - I think it is a great sign of things to come and the progress that is being made there. I hope that someday soon Rwanda will be able to compete effectively in the global technology market - providing computer skills to bring in money and jobs and to be able to enhance their own technology infrastructure. I think they are focused and determined to do just that and I’m glad to see them making strategic partnerships to get their students and ministers using cutting edge web apps.
While we were at Butare, I got to chat for a few minutes with a couple of the Linux system admins on campus - there is no doubt that there are some really smart people there that could easily match many of the people that I’ve worked with in Silicon Valley. They are only now starting to graduate people with advanced degrees in computer science from the Univ. of Butare - the genocide having been about 12 years ago, when their educated class was nearly wiped out. I think and hope that in a few more years we’ll see some major outsourcing shops open up there in web development, graphic design, CG work, possibly call center work - and we’ll be able to see their economies benefit on the global market from the educational and infrastructure investments they’ve made in the past few years.
Wow, we’ve been gone for three weeks in Africa with Margee, and it was a heck of a trip. Jessica and I went to Kenya and Rwanda, which was our first time in Africa.
We visited the offices, schools and projects of GlobalEyes, did a couple of safaris (including one on bike), stayed in the Hotel des Mille Collines (of ‘Hotel Rwanda fame), saw some incredible and moving Genocide memorials, saw the gorillas (of Gorillas in the Mist fame), visited Rwandan ministers (of State), schools and universities, witnessed a Gacaca trial, and got some Congolese art. It was a truly incredible trip.
We took over 1800 photos (more than 6 gigs), and about 10 hours of video footage that I’m currently going through. I’ll be posting some mini documentaries on YouTube and hopefully CurrentTV soon, but for now, here are some of the Flickrized photos from our trip!
