Dear Henry,

I applaud the efforts of you and your friends. One of the funding sources you should investigate is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They are deeply involved in education and library issues.

Peace, love, and continued success! Stephen

Great idea Stephen. Also Henry, see Room to Read, they've built thousands of libraries in developing countries around the world, and really focus in on rural areas, and local book writing and translations.

Hi Kasinja,

You can now "Publish" things for free online. Check out

http://www.scribd.com

If you have a computer, printer, ink and paper you could get publishers to allow you to scan or insert material online and print out books and daily material from online. Overtime you could have an entire library of material available to you to freely printout.

Hi Kasinja, Looks like the discussion is in this thread. It's best to keep it all in one thread because it's so much easier to follow the discussion.

Wow, my head is just swimming with questions and ideas about this project. I'm afraid that I have a tendency to want to "push the river" but of course that's a silly mistake, things take time to develop and it's important to take the time.

Something that interested me right away is that you envision this project as a "charity" project. I think there are many good reasons that this project might be best as a charity project, but it also could be viewed as a for-profit business. Either way, a business plan is really important to develop.

Ned is very cool because there is a nice set of tools here. Along with this discussion thread, and the Private Messaging features, there are also workpages. The workpages are wiki pages, that is they can be edited by members.

LOL what I'm getting at is I hope you might ask Wangi Godfrey, Nalubega Teddy, Ayaa Filda, Matovu David, Lukyamuzi Mohammed and Kagwa Shaphan to also join Ned.

If the group of you joins and begins to develop a business plan I'm sure many others here will be interested to help. The great thing about Ned is people have very diverse skills--they know about lots of different things. So sometimes the really useful information, the little bit of information or contact you really need comes from an unexpected source.

Publishing is something that's really changing nowadays with all the new information and communications technologies. So there are many ideas to look into as what is the best way to structure a publishing company or charity. There are many issue including legal protections and copyright among many other complicated issues. But something there's widespread agreement on is the need to develop more and better curriculum materials.

You have identified the need for certain things like computers, and also the need to rent a place. So money is something on your mind right from the start. LOL everyone here at Ned is smart, but from what I can tell most of us here don't have much money. But many people here understand money. There's an old song with the line: "money, it's a drag" and money issues can be really frustrating, so most people throw up their hands and don't even try to learn about it. So when I say there are people here who "understand money" what I mean is they are people who didn't just throw up their hands, but figured out accounting and business accountability.

This business proposal is for a very important need. You've got a solid team already, so the outlook for success looks good. But to be successful a good business plan is very important. Ned is probably a good place to discuss this.

I want to be helpful but I'm not sure where to begin. Joel Robinson points to Scribd. A whole thread could be spent just brainstorming about different ways of publishing materials. It is a very good idea to think about as many ways of publishing the materials as possible, because how you decide to publish will have real bearing on your business plan.

In addition to your publishing you also go to schools introducing science lessons.

What you are doing is really wonderful and I'm sure there are ways of developing financial support for your efforts. Remember I talked about understanding money? Well one thing about money is it takes hard work and a plan to get.

I like to garden. When I start to make a new garden many of my plants are very small, they will take years to be pretty. So when I garden I have to think about what to do in the meantime. I want flowers to grow and bloom while the plants that require more time mature. A business is sort of like that too. You have an idea of where you want to be in the future and in the present you plant some seeds and seedlings to make that future. But you still want to have immediate impact. So like a garden a business has both long and short goals.

In discussions it's not always easy to know when we're talking long and when we're talking short :-) This business is fairly complicated, so I think it will pay to break the discussion into more narrowly focused topics in the future. But in the meantime it's great ot just get some general discussion going.

I would love it if the other members of the team join Ned and introduce themselves. Making a business plan is an important thing to do. Once a good plan is hammered out the approach to raising funds and initiating partnerships and grant funding can be mapped out. I believe you will find help and encouragement in that if you participate here.

It would be really good to check out the global text project

Hi Stephen, you deserve a credit for your wonderfull project. It sounds good.

Here in Uganda we have two centers that is kampala and Gulu. We have weekend programmes and it would be good if at all we also have Books library so that the kids can read.

What is the conditions or requirements for geting into the project? May i know if we want to have the books at we center Gulu and Kireka what should we do?

Otherwise big thanks.

Thanks alot , Does it need some thing like a resource center? Like in Gulu -Northern Uganda there is nothing like a good recource center for sciences. Science Equipments for all students i the north (Gulu) in particular are always bought from Kamapala and Kenya.

Now i do surggest that for students to benefit well from this scheme, There should be some thing like a resoource center where by all the schools borrow or read books from there .

Example the resource center can be manage by say Lia Gulu and Lia kireka for Kamapala but will benefit a couple of schools and tudents as well.

How do you think about it?