A monthly newsletter for members of the Kabissa African civil society network

Contents

1. Dear Mimi: Internet Advice Column
2. Under the Baobab Tree: Announcements from Kabissa Members
3. Kabissa Matters
4. Technology News and Resources
5. Opportunities Pot
6. Member Spotlight: Women of Uganda Network

Kabissa members hosting a domain name on the Kabissa server will want to take note of a configuration change that may affect you. We have moved the online community website at http://www.kabissa.org to a new server. During the move today, the site was unavailable for a few hours, but that did not affect your own website, mailing list or email hosted on Kabissa.

The new home for www.kabissa.org means that the address we have promoted in the past for accessing the Plesk domain control panel no longer works. Please use the address below instead:

https://kabissa.org:8443

As announced yesterday in a Kabissa Server Alert email, we upgraded our server memory this morning. So far the upgrade appears to have helped and we have not had any server issues today. We will continue to monitor the situation.

The Kabissa server was offline for two hours today. We know how important server reliability is to you and apologize for the inconvenience caused.

We are now investigating the cause of the high server load which caused this downtime and also has been causing short downtimes for the past week.

You may have noticed that today and yesterday we all experienced some unexpected downtime on the Kabissa server. The server went down Wednesday morning for 30 minutes, and again several times on Thursday morning for similar time periods. I would like to apologize for the inconvenience caused.

Social Networking for African Organizations

We have been dropping hints about "Kabissa 2.0" for a year now, and now finally we are able to share the fruits of our labors. We hope you like what you see!

With the generous support of the Hurford Foundation, Kabissa is carrying out a pilot project this year to explore ways to extend the benefits of our Time To Get Online training program with more Kabissa members through E-Learning. E-learning, courses conducted mainly over the Internet and/or on a computer, can give a tremendous boost to African organizations seeking to make more effective use of ICT.

The two e-learning courses we developed and are piloting, in response to a poll of our members, are:

• Running an Online Course
• Emerging technologies

The first course was run via two Google Groups itself and has been completed successfully by two sets of participants, one in East Africa and the other in Nigeria. The second will be provided as a self-paced online course via our new online community site.

A full report on the outcomes of the pilot project will be published in January. In the meantime, the executive summary of our proposal to the Hurford Foundation is published below.

Kim Lowery has decided to step down as Co-Executive Director of Kabissa to pursue new adventures. She will continue to contribute to Kabissa's success by joining the Board of Directors this January.

The Kabissa Board would like to thank Kim for a job well done. She worked very hard over the last five years and without her, Kabissa would be a shadow of the organization it is today. We are very sorry to see her step down as Co-Executive Director. We are thrilled, however, that sh ehas accepted a Board position, so that Kabissa can continue benefiting from her vision and commitment.

Kabissa welcomes new team member Chioma Oruh as our Member Relations/Project Assistant.

When I first heard of Kabissa and the unique approach towards assisting positive social change to occur in Africa through the promotion of using internet computer technologies (ICT), I had to pinch myself at the actuality of this ingenious and seldom explored avenue of advancement. Internet usage is a seasoned technology that western nations have had extensive opportunities to develop and cultivate to a point that it is not only income generating, but a unique source of information sharing that has been used to educate, promote and organize like-minded individuals and groups for common goals - no matter where they live. It is high time that Africa, and other regions in the global south, also reap the benefits of this global force for change and development.