There are hints that Sam might not want to be programmer or a rugby player, but he may still change his mind.
The experience of crowdsourcing the logo on 99Designs was interesting, fun and ultimately quite exhausting. For the record, we are happy with the logo that we have and, as we’re moving forward with the project, are finally starting to show it to people.
He was born at Constantiaberg Medi-Clinic and our experience was great (all things considered). The NICU staff were incredibly helpful, supportive and, although I cannot judge their expertise, they inspired confidence that he was being properly taken care of and he improved steadily. When making judgements about such things it is probably more important to know how things are handled when they go wrong rather than when everything is going according to plan. In our case, any sort of plan went out the window pretty quickly and things were handled quickly and efficiently, yet with empathy.
--> 4 Comments » Some photos of Sam for everyone to see, detailed commentary to follow:
Album of his progress in the Neonatal unit, hopefully he’ll be home soon.
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Highlights: removal of CPAP
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Highlights: removal of drip.
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Highlights: removal of heater, first ever bath.
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Highlights: two attempts to feed properly, soiling 3 nappies in one go, awake for more than 1 hour.
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Highlights: second bath (first by a parent), 3/4 grandparents visit.
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Highlights: feeding properly all day, ripping out his feeding tube by himself (that's my boy :).
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Highlights: mom slept over in the ICU, got moved to a private room (in ICU), fed properly all day.
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Despite always being a proud South African, I’ll be forever jealous that SA has spent years suppressing our telecoms industry and hasn’t adopted a comprehensive broadband strategy like Rwanda. The silver lining is that at least we’ll have a shining example in a year or two of what is actually possible. Lets just hope Rwanda manage to pull it off.
I am now a complete convert to crowdsourcing. Given my experiences with the Siyavula logo and web-design processes I think that a site like 99 Designs, that has a critical mass of designers, really provides a light-weight, cost-effective and rapid solution for most of my design needs. I will launch a contest, in the near future, to start improving the look of this site I just need to bolster the content so the purpose and scope are clearer 
Good web-design is going to be key to the success or failure of some of my upcoming projects and so spending some time immersing myself in trying to apply some of the ideas to my own site allows me to kill two birds with one stone, build my own theme and really engage with some web-design principles so that they sink in.
I am currently a project manager at the Shuttleworth Foundation, in charge of the Siyavula project, where I co-ordinate the development of a comprehensive set of Open Educational Resources (OER) supporting the South African National Curriculum. This relies on the development of communities to create and support the OERs as well as the provision of [...]
