About the Project
‘The Penguin Trail – Cape to Cairo’ is a project by two women, Veera Uusoksa and Armi Korhonen, who are travelling from Cape Town to Cairo, starting January 2011, while raising awareness for free and open source software (FLOSS).
The aim of the project is to:
- Learn what different organizations in African countries are doing around Open Source for Development and find out what still needs to be done
- Inform the general public in and outside of Africa about the possibilities of FLOSS
- Inform the open source community about the needs for software projects in Africa
We believe that by throwing ourselves into this adventure, we are able to draw attention to a cause which we see as an important part of today’s information societies.
The whole trip will be documented through pictures, videos, blog posts and Tweets. Whilst the project itself is going to be hard work, we intend to balance it out by having as much fun as possible throughout the trip and hopefully be able to share those experiences with the people who are following our trip.
Namib Desert, Namibia, 2008
The project’s communication is handled via this website as well as a fansite in Facebook and a Twitter account. We will be giving updates throughout the journey via blog posts, news flashes via Tweets, uploading videos to YouTube and pictures to Flickr. All produced content will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license, unless stated otherwise.
As a personal side project, we will be filming the trip with a DSLR as well as have video diaries using laptop webcams. The purpose is to produce a documentary about the trip. Whilst the documentary will most probably be categorised as a travel documentary, there will also be the aspect of how technology helps us in our daily lives and how it can help in the development of societies.
