$5000 mentored open source summer internship with Twisted and the GNOME Outreach Program for Women‏

I saw this on a list I belong to. It sounds like an excellent opportunity and note that it's open to women anywhere in the world. Just read through and apply:

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Get paid to contribute to an open source project this summer, with mentorship from women leaders in the open source community!

What: USD $5000 full-time summer internship with the Twisted Python open source project

Who: This internship is open to all women, including students and non-students

When: May - August 2012, *applications close April 13th*

Apply at: http://twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/WomenOutreach2012

Questions? Say hello at

The Twisted project has partnered with the GNOME Outreach Program for Women and the Software Freedom Conservancy to fund an internship for one woman to spend the summer participating in and contributing to Twisted while being mentored.

Twisted is an event-driven networking engine written in Python. If you love the Internet, Twisted is the project for you! This is a great opportunity to learn more about what goes on under the hood when you browse the web, send an e-mail, or use an instant messaging service, as Twisted supports all of these networking protocols. Twisted applies software development best practices like in-depth code reviews and complete unit test coverage, so it's a great way to improve your technical skills, whether you're a beginner or an expert programmer.

Twisted is used by companies like Google, Apple and Lucasfilm and by many open source projects, in everything from an airline reservation system to providing dynamic monitoring of a rural electrification project in sub-Saharan Africa. You can learn about some of Twisted's users at twistedmatrix.com/trac/wiki/SuccessStories.

This is a *full-time* internship open to all women, including students and non-students from anywhere on the globe. The summer stipend is USD $5000.

Please review the application process and get started on it early, as a small initial contribution to Twisted is a part of applying (if this sounds intimidating, don't worry! We'll help you pick a task to complete and you'll have lots of support as you work through submitting your first patch.)

This internship is appropriate for *any level of open source experience*. If you have worked on an open source project before, great! If not, we'll help you learn the development and communication tools we use as part of the internship. Some Python experience is a prerequisite.

Please check out the full project description and apply today.

New 'Policy and Internet' Journal

The Policy Studies Organization (PSO), the Oxford Internet Institute (OII), and Berkeley Electronic Press are proud to announce Policy and Internet, the first major peer-reviewed journal investigating the implications of the Internet and associated technologies for public policy. The journal's first articles will be available in summer 2009.

Read more about P&I and about submitting your work.

Ushahidi - Tech in the hands of the people

As we continue to explore the role of ICT - and the Internet, in particular - in fighting against violence against women, it's interesting to read about a woman who is using these tools to report violence.

Ory Okolloh, one of the co-founders of Ushahidi, a mash-up used by Kenyans to report the post-election violence and which has since been used in the DRC, is featured in this Forbes article.

Internet Woes

My internet access has been so patchy this past week that reading and responding to emails has been virtually impossible. Seeing as it would take on average 7 minutes to open an email (IF I was lucky), I only selected those emails that appeared to be absolutely important. Btw, this is the Visafone that I just got hooked up with. My Starcomms connection at work has been just as bad (and it's usually the worse one). Then, my Dad's 21st Century was also not working, so I assumed it was a general problem. Until a friend mentioned that MTN's 3G service is working just fine. Hmmmm......

Anyway, FINALLY after only 1 week of being virtually offline, I find my service seemingly working okay (at 1.25am, thank you very much)! I called Visafone's customer service to harass them anyway for good measure. The lady I spoke with said they are "experiencing some downtime." Whatever that means. However she was sure that "it would be working soon." Again, whatever. I asked her if their customers would be compensated for a week of service paid for, with no service received. She said that she was sure that "they would do their best."

I hope this week is a better one, internet-wise.

Visafone Trial

Moved to Visafone last week, or was it the week before? It has been pretty good, I have to say. The service was supposed to be activated a few hours after paying at the Visafone shop, but that didn't happen causing me to wonder whether I had made a horrible mistake dumping my beloved Netcom.

I took my laptop back to the shop the next day and after a few calls, it was up and running. And since then, it's been really good. Much faster than the Netcom, it appears (I have the Gold account) and portable. The portability is actually the nicest thing about Visafone, as Netcom came with a bulky modem that had to be almost constantly plugged into the a socket. Although it should have been able to retain its charge for up to 3 hours, I had never found this to be the case and so was always tied to one spot.

How's Visaphone?

My sporadic blogging has been in part due to my lack of Internet access. I am thinking of trying out Visaphone and I'd love to hear some feedback from people who are currently using or have used Visaphone.

Faster Internet Soon?

According to an article in the Punch newspaper, Glo's telecom cable being laid from London to Africa will be completed next year. Hope this heralds lightening-fast internet.

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Glo's 9,500km submarine cable project ready next year – Jameel

By Jonah Iboma
Published: Wednesday, 23 Jul 2008

The 9,500-kilometre submarine telecommunications cable being laid by Globacom to connect Africa with Europe and the United States is nearing completion.

A statement on Tuesday by the company said the Group Chief Operating Officer of Globacom, Mr. Mohammed Jameel, made this disclosure in Accra, Ghana at a press conference where the GSM licence won by the company was formally presented by the country's National Communications Authority.

The submarine cable project, which is costing about $250m, will run from London to 14 West African countries, with a dedicated link to the United States. It is expected to reach Ghana by May 2009, and shortly after, Nigeria .

The completion of the project, according to Jameel, will revolutionise telecoms services on the continent, and make them truly affordable to individuals and corporate bodies.

It will also enable more services and products to be introduced by Globacom.

Jameel promised that Glo would not disappoint the people of Ghana as it would replicate its success story in Nigeria and Benin Republic by giving the people value for money.

He said Glo would start operations in Ghana by the end of the year, and hoped to hit a subscriber base of two million in two years.

According to him, in Ghana, Glo has already gone to work to make this dream a reality. This, he said, would enable many Ghanaian businesses and individuals derive maximum satisfaction from Glo's services.

He added that Glo had applied to the NCA for a 3G licence, which he was optimistic it would get soon to improve its services together with the cable connection to make bandwidth available for businesses that required it.

These, he noted, would help Glo to provide high-speed Internet connectivity, data and voice transmission.

He commended NCA for making the licence bidding process "extremely transparent" as the authority kept to the timeline for issuing the licence as advertised.

Nairobi's Rising Profile as a Technology Hotbed

Interesting article from the New York Times on Nairobi's emerging coding community. Google set-up a development office there last September, which is intended to be a testing bed for new products and ideas for the African continent.

Being in Nairobi last week, I saw many of the same access issues that plague us here in Nigeria, with many of the young ladies who I worked with, who lived outside Nairobi, not having access to computers or the Internet or the means to pay for access. However, the costs seemed much lower than in Nigeria. It was also fairly easy to go to a provider like Safaricom and buy a modem, which would provide fairly fast wireless connectivity. This could be on a pre-paid or post-paid basis.

The Internet Today

This Internet connection is so patchy and so slow. It's the same old story whenever it rains, nevermind the fact that traffic in the afternoon already slows down to a baby's crawl compared to the other times of the day (wait, many babies actually move quite quickly compared to what we have here ...). I click on a link and maybe I'll get to the page I want, or maybe I won't. Overall though, this is much better than the service provider we used before.

At home, I use My Netcom Africa and after initial problems of long down-times, their service has very rapidly improved. The times when I used to call their customer service line to complain and report problems are now a thing of a past.