Hi all,

Here is the first part of the write-up of the Africa trip that I promised.

We spent four days in Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone. Here we met
Isaac Massaquoi, journalist and head of Cornet, a network of 13
community radios in Sierra Leone. He told us that elections are to
going to be held in July 2007, and he is very interested in finding a
way to distribute national election programming to the Cornet stations.
We met the Sierra eRiders Farrel King, Sahr Gborie and Mohamed Kamara
(Mohamed only for 10 minutes right before we left, because he was
traveling in the countryside installing radio station equipment). If
you don't know what an eRider is, see http://www.eriders.net.

We installed the newest Campcaster version on the computers in the
eRiders office, realized the packages were broken, fixed the packages,
re-installed Campcaster, and answered some Linux/Ubuntu questions. For
some reason which is not very clear to me in retrospect, this took us 3
of the 4 days, so we only got to an actual radio station on the morning
of the last day.

It was a college radio station of Fourah Bay College, called Radio Mount
Aureol. I didn't get to see them much in action (they broadcast from 6
to 10 AM and 2 to 6 PM, and we got there at 9:50), but they basically
use Windows Media Player to play songs ripped from CDs to wma files,
interspersed with live talk and paid greeting messages. Farrel and Sahr
installed Ubuntu on a second hard disk, and we converted a couple files
from wma to mp3. The quality was quite bad, but they did not mind. What
they were really excited about was the possibility of rebroadcasting
WADR programming.

WADR (West Africa Democracy Radio) is a regional radio station which
broadcasts from Dakar. Both Cornet and WADR are financed by OSIWA
(http://www.osiwa.org, aka George Soros), but for some strange
(personal?) reason, there is not much cooperation between them. Later
we learned in Dakar that OSIWA is trying to fix this. There is also
another regional network called Talking Drum, which is financed mainly
by USAID (http://www.usaid.gov); there doesn't even seem to be any hope
of cooperation with them.

In the Cornet office, they have a slow Ethernet connection from a local
ISP (http://www.iptelsl.net) for $200 a month, plus $20 for a fixed IP
address. We set up a dyndns account for them, so you can access their
computer at http://cornethub.homelinux.org when their generator is
running, mostly weekday afternoons (UTC+0). This is the main problem in
Freetown: the electric grid does not work, so computers run only when
there is somebody there to put gas in the the generator, and start it.
One of the symptoms of the lack of cooperation mentioned above is that
WADR has an office in Freetown with a VSAT (ie, fast) internet
connection, and a grant for running their generators 24 hours a day, but
nobody is using it. We only learned about this later, in Dakar.

As we left, two eRiders from Bulgaria arrived, Kaladan and Stoycho. They
tried to set up a wifi link between the Cornet office and the Mount
Aureol studio. It did not quite work, because the antennas they brought
were not strong enough, and they had to go shopping to get some
satellite dishes. They said that just before they left, they finally
had all the necessary equipment and the local eRiders will be able to
finish the job.

And now the reward for having read so far, Kaladan's pictures:
http://www.kldn.net/?p=149
http://www.kldn.net/?p=150
http://www.kldn.net/?p=151
(Don't be intimidated by Bulgarian, it's easy: Дакар is Dakar, Сиера
Леоне is Sierra Leone, and сървъри is servers.)

And my pictures:
http://flickr.com/photos/11502981@N00/

OK, that's enough for now; to be continued...

Ferenc