We’re in the early stages of building the Village Diary project as a free and open source software (FOSS) platform. A large part of the software development will be performed right here in Buea, Cameroon—not far from the communities whom we hope will directly benefit from our efforts. There are, however, several significant (read: fun) engineering challenges that exist in the project. A few of them are listed below:

• Mapping component for plotting villages/localities
• Gears integration to support offline functionality
• FrontlineSMS integration
• Security/encryption components
• PHP template system to support customization
• Administrative functionality
• Plugin support
• Testing on multiple platforms (Linux distros, Windows, MacOS, etc.)

We’re a small development team working under the pressure of a mid-June 2009 release. If you have software skills in any of the areas listed above, feel free to contact us and let us know about your desire to help and availability. We’re using an SVN repository hosted by Unfuddle to manage our source code. You can also head over to the developer’s wiki to look at our project documentation.