Introducing The Drupal Nigeria Initiative and soliciting support.

Hi Y'All,

Its my humble pleasure to introduce to you The Drupal Nigeria Initiative. This initiative is being pioneered by my company Living Portals & Systems right here in the heart of eastern Nigeria. Just like every project there are some reasons and objectives behind this initiative.

First and foremost I have benefited quite a bit from the Drupal Open-Source CMS and indeed from its supporting community. While I am not myself a programmer or even a web designer per say (actually I'm a IT/Computer Support Engineer), I have been able to make some level of progress with Drupal. I have even been able to take on some little jobs and marvel at how simple Drupal makes web designing to look. Therefore I have thought of a way to give back something to the Drupal community. One of these was I believe is to extend the popularity of the Drupal Open Source, and to encourage its use in website development within my immediate community and country and by so doing inprove th Drupal profile.

In pursuit of this, I have quite some novel ideas and plans running through my "big" head.
The first is to organize FREE training programmes for youth and other interested members of the public in the use of Drupal for the development of website and portals. We have already started making posters and advertising this training. While the training is FREE participants are requested to pay a little registration fee of #650 (650 Naira which is about $5.5 at the moment) to cover basic administrative costs. They are also encouraged to acquire web spaces for the hosting of what we have tagged "Practice Web Space" for the training. Because of my relatively little experience in web programming, I will just be taking them through an Introductory course. I then hope to introduce them to the larger Drupal community, where they can learn much more from the community support.

I also have the plan to run another version of this training programme for University Computer Science Students on campuses in and around my immediate community. While doing this, I hope to launch a kind of coding contest for Computer Science undergraduates on Nigerian Campuses, which will lead to their using Drupal for web designs and submitting such projects as part of a contest. I hope to attach some prize money to the contest in order to add excitement and encourage participation. However, I'm at a real loss as to how much to place the prize money at and how to raise the prize money. I had thought of asking participants to submit the projects with a registration fee, which could be compiled to add up to the prize sum, which will be won by the best submissions. Another idea I have is to meet with corporate bodies who have a committment towards buildin such talents and ask for the sponsorship.

We have already setup a website for this initiative @ www.DrupalNigeria.Com. Kindly register at the site and post your comments. We will be glad to hear from you.

At the same time, we will ne more than glad to hear your comments on this article. Encourage us with your advice, suggestions and support.

It is indeed true that Nigerians have been largely known for a lot of scam, but we have a firm belief that not ALL Nigerians are that way. In every corrupt society, there are a large crop of members who have not yet been stained with corruption. It is our faith that this initiative can become an avenue for showcasing the better side of Nigerians.

Thanks and Have a Great Day.