Cameroun: Atteindre l'excellence!

The Drupal Cameroon Association was present in a very small booth (9 m²) at the Open Source Software Day in Yaoundé and had a much bigger success than expected, though unfortunately Denis Ngamka and Joseph Samnick could not join us for personal reasons.

Karim Fondi had bought 60 CD at his own expense in order to fill them with following material :

- Acquia Drupal 7.4.4.exe
- Drupal 6 plus 87 zipped modules
- Drupal 7 plus 81 modules and French .po files
- 13 useful web pages
- Drupal 7 installation PDF
- Some PDF Presentations of the last Yaoundé DrupalCamp
- Drupal official logo plus the Drupal Cameroon logo he designed.

and intended to distribute them free of charge for those who do not have an Internet connection. We suggested to rather « sell» them at 100 FCFA (0,15€, price of the support) in order to be able to buy more CD if needed. We finally «sold» 53 CDs and collected 75 addresses of people interested in Drupal.

The praise of Drupal by Professor Ebenezer Njoh-Mouelle, posted in colour A3 format, raised a strong enthusiam and we even saw some students copying it by hand. Here it is:

«I greet the advent of the DRUPAL community and the production of an avant-garde software that may contribute to a reduction of the numeric fracture between North and South, between the poors and the rich.

But I am greeting even more one of the best illustrations of the cult of excellence and wish [Cameroon] to quickly master this inspired («génial») instrument serving knowledge and development.

Ebénézer Njoh-Mouellé
Yaoundé, June 15th, 2011»

Professor Njoh-Mouellé, a philosophy teacher and respected author of «De la médiocrité à l'excellence», whose works are now studied in high schools, is a strong moral authority in Cameroon. It is worth noting that he expressed this enthusiastic judgement just a few days after we held the first Yaoundé DrupalCamp.

We held a conference in 3 parts from 15:00 to 16:30.

• FDA explained how the conjunction of falling hardware costs + Open Source Software represented an opportunity for the Third World in general and Cameroon in particular. He then showed a HD video presenting the rudiments of Drupal in 12 minutes.
• Karim detailed the many ways Drupal could be installed under Windows and Linux, friendly challenged by FDA reminding the benefits of the Acquia Drupal Community Edition.
• Finally Hordie showed in real-time how easy it was to set a site on a PC with Acquia Drupal, activate french translations, personalize name, slogan and (animated!) logo. She then activated the «Poll» module and demonstrated its instant results using two concurrent browsers, raising a thunder of applauses for Drupal because the presidential election results had only been known the preceding day, two weeks after the vote. She insisted that polls cannot be compared yet to a national vote, but are however very useful in a community.

Many questions were asked and answered. Paul concluded reminding the audience that Drupal needs a lot of competences from various horizons: good writers, good designers, good thinkers, good organizers, not only good computer specialists; and that in fact Drupal is designed to be used by NON computer specialists.

We then got back to the booth where people kept asking us questions till 19:00 while we were burning the remainder of our CDs for them on 4 parallel machines (3 Windows, 1 Ubuntu).

The Drupal booth appeared to be one of the 4 most frequented ones, with Ubuntu (18m²), Orange (9m²) and Video Games (18m²).