Home › Categories

Tech

Workshop challenges in Bulawayo

Thursday 06/10/2010  14:57  |  by Brenda Burrell

In late May, Amy & I went down to Bulawayo to run a hands-on Freedom Fone training workshop for 11 participants based in Zimbabwe's City of Skies. The workshop was hosted there by a vibrant community radio station called Radio Dialogue. That will sound like a contradiction in terms as Zimbabwe has yet to award a broadcast licence to any community radio station in the country.

CATEGORIES:

Making sense of all the noise – testing Freedom Fone v1.5pre

Friday 02/19/2010  17:59  |  by Brenda Burrell

I've spent time recently testing the pre-release version 1.5 of Freedom Fone in Zimbabwe. Lots of little bugs have presented themselves but for the most part this version has been a revelation. The closest tech support has been Alberto in freezing Stockholm and Giovanni somewhere in Italy. I am sweating it out in Harare, Zimbabwe.

CATEGORIES:

Free Kiswahili synthetic voice for Freedom Fone a possibility

Friday 01/15/2010  11:47  |  by Brenda Burrell

Freedom Fone's ability to fulfill it's promise as a must have tool for bridging the digital divide has yet to be determined. Millions of poor people have access to mobile phones, but with tariffs as high as they are in countries like Zimbabwe, experimentation in this field is still costly. And of course, for our project these are early days.

CATEGORIES:

Molo and Kubatana's partnership helps put information in the hands of Zimbabweans

Thursday 01/14/2010  12:26  |  by Brenda Burrell

Kubatana, a Zimbabwean non-profit organisation committed to democratising access to information, was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in May 2008 for its Freedom Fone software development project. The Freedom Fone project aspires to help civic organisations extend their information in an audio format to mobile phone users.

CATEGORIES:

How does FreeSWITCH compare to Asterisk?

Tuesday 12/29/2009  11:26  |  by Brenda Burrell

Open source telephony platform, Asterisk, has been used for years as an inexpensive alternative to proprietry PBXs, democratising this previously closed service industry. Why then did Freedom Fone choose to use FreeSWITCH as its telephony component instead of Asterisk? Our Project Architect, Alberto Escudero Pascual, will answer that question in the new year, but until then clues lie in this comment from Telecom Monthly:

CATEGORIES: