Day 1 was nothing short of spectacular. Despite a two hour downpour that shut down the city and cut the power twice, the attendees ranged from 50 to 75 in number and all contributed to a healthy discussion about technology in Kampala, Uganda and throughout East Africa. The realtime liveblog on Twitter drew an international audience of twenty and several people from around the world had questions for the campers which were answered. Day 2 starts in six hours and it’s been dubbed “nerd day” because the focus is on workshops centered around web and software development. We’ll be having sessions on JQuery, Python, Version Control, Ebox and more…

Jon Gosier of Appfrica.org addresses the crowd.

Simon Vass of eTech.

James Wire is a well known developer in Uganda who had a lot to say to the students about the industry.

Kicking off Campala with the closed Wifi network we created for the camp.

More photos from Day 1 of Campala at Flickr

The liveblog has drawn International Attention at #campala

The wiki is also being updated in realtime.

Big thanks to Michael Niyitegeka and The Faculty of Computing and IT at Makerere University who made this entirely possible. They offered us a room, a projector, a PA system, chairs, tables and everything else we could have possibly needed.

I also want to thank Renier Brattenburg, Simon Vass, John Chamberlain, Dennis M. Senyonjo, Simon Muwanga, and Olweny San James who helped to organize things.

See you all at Day 2!

About the Author: Jonathan Gosier (Founder) is an American-born software developer, writer and social entrepreneur. He currently lives in Kampala, Uganda where he is working on two fronts: to encourage western businesses and investors to engage African entrepreneurs and to encourage the adoption of computers, programming and use of the internet in the developing regions of Africa. He is a huge advocate for promoting the ways in which a semantic web will benefit emerging economies in the world.

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