Today August 5th

Time
It will be at the usual time (!2.00 GMT, 13.00 British Summer Time and Nigerian TIme, 14.00 Central European Summer Time. 15.00 East African Time and East European Summer Time, 17.30 IST, and uncomfortably early in the morning for people in most parts America - our apologies for that.)

Location
The plan is to do it by Skype public chat - Instant Messaging
Join in here - come back here just before the session starts and you will find the link to the chat. This is our first attempt at using Skype's public chat facility so it may not go completely smoothly.

PROBLEM WITH LINK - I had problems setting it up and don't know how to tell you the link- but it is displayed by name if I am on your skype contacts list. Some of my contacts are already joining in there. I guess you need to be one of my skype contacts to see it. So if you do want to join in please ask to become one of my contacts. I'm pamelamclean . Nikki is in the chat already and is adding some of the team in Nigeria.... another rich learning experience ;-)

The people
We are expecting people from the UK-Nigeria Dadamac team and various friends
We are "almost certain " of six people who will be attending the full session, with more who may be able to drop by for part of the time.
Usually we get people who join First Thursday without telling us first - and they are welcome to do so - so I won't know number for sure until afterwards.

Introductions and the conversation

The conversation will roam around shared interests. There is no set agenda - but if it gets too noisy I may suggest we narrow the focus at some points.

Elaine plans to be with us from (Ireland) - she is a techie with Open Source interests. She is our "Dadamac ambassador-to-her-local-Rotary-club-when-she-has-time" a "Dadamac Resource Hunter" and a technical writer. She also belongs to a photography club (relevant to Dadamac's Cameras4Communication work). She is recently back with Dadamac so has a lot of catching up to do. Her interests may well guide the shape of our chat.

Phil (in England) is joining us for the first time. We met at Franz Nahrada's workshop in Vienna earlier this year and have various overlapping interests. Welcome Phil!

Nikki and I (from our home locations in SE London) - are interested and involved in all Dadamac things.

Graham and Marcus (from their home locations in other parts of SE England) hope to join us - they are frequent participants in Dadamac discussions - especially regarding appropriate technology and permaculture.

From Nigeria we have had confirmation that Edi - a key full-time member of the team will attend, and we are hoping Kelechi and John I. will also be there (and any other members of the team who are able to leave their usual work long enough to drop in).

We discussed our plans for First Thursday during the UK-Nigeria team meeting yesterday. Edi has good information to share. Kelechi is the natural person to overlap with Elaine regarding Open Source. He also takes great photos and produced the Fantsuam video - so there is a lot for them to talk about. John I, is looking for more resources for a photography course so it would be good if he can discuss that with Elaine too.  John I was in Abuja yesterday collecting Jim - a new member of the Fantsuam team - who has come mainly to help support the work at Attachab. It would be great if he could join us and discuss various ideas with Marcus and Graham

Andy is usually working at my place on a Thursday afternoon, so he will be around, and may join in if we are talking about photos - or if we get into a practical session improving our shared skills on Twitter (as we did a couple of months ago) - but I'm not really expecting that today. I think we will have too much else to talk about.

I have no idea who else may join us - but I hope these introductory notes will help them/you to make sense of what is going on and join in easily.

It's nearly 12.00 here in the UK. I'm off for a "quick cuppa and a sarnie" and look forward to connecting with you on Skype in about an hour.

Pamela