Dadamac Day 2010 marked our sixth anniversary celebration and took as its theme the issue of global involvement in local initiatives.

It was an exciting event for us, held “virtually” at Dadamac’s physical home in Nigeria, the Knowledge Resource Centre. The seventeen participants included guests from the wider Dadamac community. Local attendees ranged from Programme Directors to trainers and students from Fantsuam (who were inside the KRC, sharing computers). Other contributors came from Ireland, the UK, Benin and Lagos. A webcam linkup between Nigeria and the UK proved an enjoyable way to mark the end of our celebrations.  

Every Dadamac Day is different.

Way back in 2005 we were simply celebrating the fact that we could get online in real time! That year’s event marked the year following Pam’s visit to Nigeria, when she presented the first Teacher Talking course. It was fantastic on the subsequent Dadamac Days to connect with some of the same teachers who were by then in various locations. Some returned to FF in order to get online. It was appropriate that the first course Pam taught in the newly-built KRC was for “Self-Directed Learners” in 2008 since this year’s Dadamac Day saw the KRC celebrating its potential future as a truly glocal information centre.

Last year the UK held a live Skype conference at Barcamp Africa, where a audio link-up allowed us to hear a local Nigerian choir sing. No one knows yet how we will mark next year’s anniversary . . . but I can tell you one thing. I am confident it will be suitably celebrated!

Organising the 6th Dadamac Day anniversary celebrations took up the majority of the allotted hour for this week’s UK-nigeria meeting.
The theme agreed upon was “ Dadamac goes Glocal” and was to be focused around the Knowledge Resource Centre at Fantsuam Foundation.

Dadamac Day 2009 was a new and exciting extension of our annual online celebration. Usually it is pretty much "a family affair" - reuniting people who already know each other. This time we widened our reach, both in the UK and in rural Nigeria, so there were extra guests at the celebration.

Audio and video

There were exciting audio and video connections too. During the year we are limited by bandwidth, and the core groups communicate by typing. But for Dadamac Day - when we all get together - special arrangements are made and there is usually more bandwidth available. We managed a brief video link (very extravagant on bandwidth) which was a chance for people on both sides to smile and wave and greet each other out loud. This is hugely exciting and important for us as it is such a rare opportunity - and the closest that many of the group ever get to a F2F meeting.

BarCampAfrica

On the UK side, we had moved out of our normal comfort zone of working privately in front of our own screens  and had gone public. Dadamac Day was a fringe event at BarCampAfrica, with one of our laptops linked to a big screen and all comers welcome. This meant that the people in Nigeria, at Fantsuam, got to see new people in the UK, from BarCampAfrica, smiling and greeting them - not just Nikki and I from the UK team.

We have launched our discussion forum. Now it will be easy for people to join in discussions here. Now dadamac.net can gradually become an active online space for the growing Dadamac community.

To join in all you have to do is go to the discussion forum link choose the discussion topic that interests you and add any comments you like. You can reach the discussion forum link from any page; it is under the heading "get involved".

The idea of dadamac.net is that is should be an "online home/office/clubroom/study-space/whatever-we-need" for the growing dadamac community (which welcomes newcomers). We started off by "preparing the reception area" i.e. the home page and such like (this area needs more work - fewer words, more pictures -  but is well under way).

Now we are ready to start graduallly inviting people in - probably people we already know to start with - simply because they already have shared interests and onging shared conversations. As the conversations develop other people, newcomers to dadamac, may decide to join in. At first we'll do this througn the blogs and comments. Later we will start to have more structured discussions as well, and we'll put the word out through our "usual channels" to let people know what the topics will be.  Gradually we will also move our various Special Interest Groups over into the dadamac.net space  - but not yet. For now we will leave them where they are accustomed to meet.

Some of the ogoing conversations that may move here are:

This week we had the first planning and practice meeting for Dadamac Day (DD).  The DD team, Chollom and Alheri (in Nigeria) and Nikki and Pam (in UK), e-met through one of Dadamac's usual typed Skype conferences.

Date, time and place.

The date and time are agreed -Saturday November 7th 10:00 GMT, 11:00 Nigerian time, 13:00 East Africa Time.