Local Programming Community

Hi All,

Over the past few months I have been digressing new (coding) languages and Google has been my new best friend.
I have stumbed across many international websites offering support and assistance to those who need it - many filled with South Africans. This made me wonder, are there any local programming communities that offer support and are active? Not many.

So, I decided I would create one, for South Africans, to bring together the vast talent in South Africa. It will be locally hosted (for those poor souls on local only bandwidth) and completely non profit. I ran a poll for about 3 weeks and spread it around in some local IRC channels. After 200 votes, the users had clearly decided on a domain name (which I have registered) and also liked the idea of using Drupal as a platform.

The plan is as follows:
-The site will consist of a blog type front page, where people can submit articles, which are then potentially approved by a staff member to appear on the front page.
-There will be forums where users can post polls and threads for assistance or just take part in general chatter/forum stuff.
-There will be a pastebin (http://drupal.org/project/geshifilter looks good)
-There will be a Projects page, very similar to the one found on Drupal.org - where users can register a locally developed, free/opensource project. Once their registration is accepted/complete, they will receive SVN/CVS space and a project page where bug tracking etc can happen. (Project* modules)

Those are some of my ideas and I would appreciate any more you may have.

This project is something I am taking very seriously and I assure you all it will not fail :D
Hopefully we can get some talented graphic designers to make backgrounds which can be distributed into universities and colleges where teachers use projecters. Maybe even sponsored printing to spread flyers.

Now, to be honest I had never heard of Drupal until someone I told my ideas to suggested it as the CMS platform - I checked it out and I like it very much, it is powerful and clean. What I need is someone who would like to contribute to the community and help me set everything up - maybe even become a 'staff member', with no pay that is :D - though I really don't think it would be TOO much work.

The site is disgraceful at the moment (lol) so I'd rather not give out the URL publically, but if you are willing to help, please drop me an e-mail on undefined.za@gmail.com!

Thank you all,

Chris