Originally posted by: TonyPearson

Last month, fellow co-worker Liz Goodman reached out to me. She was part of a ten-person team that went to Tanzania as part of IBM's[Corporate Service Corps]. Other teams went to Brazil, China, Ghana, Romania, South Africa, The Philippines, Turkey and Vietnam.(I've been to half these other countries, but the closest I have ever been toTanzania was a safari I took in Kenya that included the Masai Mara national park which runsalong the border with Tanzania's Serengheti national park).

Liz was one of the lucky[200 candidates chosen among over 5000 applications] IBM reviews each year for this program. IBM does business in over170 countries, so learning to work in or with emerging growth markets requires a bit of "cultural intelligence".Liz and three others worked with the University of Dudoma [UDOM] to lead some students in adopting a [Moodle] infrastructure based on Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL [LAMP] platform. She noticed that I had experience with both Moodle and LAMP from [my work with OLPC], and reached out to me for help.I was able to provide some insight, things to watch out for, and how to tackle not just the technical challenges, but a few that many don't consider:

• Educational content. Digitizing materials already available in hardcopy, or obtaining digital rights to existing content.

• Business Process. Getting the teachers and students to adopt new process and procedures enabled by these new capabilities.

• Project Management. Fortunately, Liz is already [PMP-certified], and knows well the importance of managing even a small 4-person, 4-week project like this.

How well did her team do? Liz blogged before, during and after her trip. Read all about iton her blog [Liz Goes To Tanzania]!

technorati tags: IBM, Liz Goodman, Corporate Service Corps, Tanzania, Moodle, LAMP, OLPC, PMP