Highlights from the first G-Tanzania (Google Developer event)

It all started with an email sent in November 2011 from one of the Googlers wanting to meet up with the Dar GTUG leads to start preparing for a potential G event in Tanzania. The GTUG team was excited because this event was on our wish list as we were also lobbying behind the scenes for this event to take place in Tanzania.This was the very first ever Google developer day event in form of a conference dubbed g|Tanzania. Being the first G event in Tanzania this was an opportunity for Google to engage with a community of local developers, business leaders, and entrepreneurs who are passionate about technology.This engagement started a day before in the form of a pre -event hangout session between Googlers , members of Dar es Salaam GTUG and tech enthusiasts in the country at the Innovation space within the Commission for Science and Technology (COSTECH) . This was a combination of one on one sessions between attendees and Googlers and a Google Plus Hangout with other Googlers from all over the world about the tech scene in Tanzania.This was a nice way to kick things off and get people even more excited for the official opening of G-tanzania a day after I.e 2^nd and 3^rd of Feb, 2012 at the Mlimani City conference Center.

The conference was split into two days , Day 1 had more hands on sessions for developers to understand Google Platforms such as Google App Engine , Android and Google web toolkit. they were introduced to these tools so that they could develop applications and sites that are locally meaningful in the Tanzanian context. Day 2 was more geared towards businesses and entrepreneurs with a quest to learn how to use advanced Google products such as Google Analytics, Adwords and Adsense to enable and grow their businesses in the web and mobile arena.

Attendees had the chance to explore Google’s open source technologies through a combination of tech talks, breakout sessions and codelabs run by engineers and business teams from across Google offices around the Globe such as Nairobi, Accra and Zurich. The event featured a lineup of high caliber Google speakers who offered key insights in understanding the important role innovation plays in business.Some of the highlights from this event were various efforts that were shown by Google such as trying to make the internet relevant and useful to local people by various Swahili localization and content creation efforts as explained by a Googler from the localization team , Salome Nduku, some of these efforts included localization of Gmail into Swahili , Swahili Wikipedia challenge and Google books partnerships.

The last event was the mapping party that took place at COSTECH on Saturday 4^th Feb, this was another opportunity to put Tanzania on the map , through crowdsourcing of knowledge of various individuals and putting it to good use through mapping of various places in Tanzania.

Overall G-tanzania and all pre and after events was a wonderful platform to bring together Tanzanian tech enthusiasts together ,to network and get to know others in the community hopefully for major collaborations in the future. In Tanzania, there are very few events of this nature and this one from the feedback that has been given out by attendees seems to have had a major impact in how the tech community interacts moving forward from now onwards.