Kabissa Gong Gong March 2009

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

Read Gong Gong Back Issues
Subscribe to Gong Gong RSS Feed

1. Dear Mimi: Internet Advice Column

Kabissa has begun encouraging members to switch their email to Google Apps, so Mimi has decided to devote this month's Internet Advice column to share Google's own comprehensive explanation of its services. The text is business oriented but the benefits for civil society groups in the Kabissa network are mostly the same if not even greater since many of us operate on a shoestring budget or do not have in-house computing systems and staff to run them. If you can, watch the videos linked below to view Google Apps in action.

When considering Google Apps, keep in mind that Google Apps Standard Edition is free for anyone (expect unobtrusive text-based advertising) and that Google Apps Educational Edition (no advertising, more features including email migration tools) is free for nonprofits registered with 501(c)3 status in the United States. All you need is a domain name, which you can register at Kabissa and which we will gladly help you set up at Google Apps. We will be formally launching our new domain registrar service soon, but in the meantime existing hosting members can switch to Google Apps immediately - please contact support@kabissa.org for more information.

Save time and money with Google-powered email, IM and calendar

Essential messaging apps – Gmail and Google Calendar are included.
Continuous innovation – Put the web's rapid pace of innovation to work for your business. New features
Lower cost – No hardware, software or patches, so you save money. Estimate your savings
Universal access – Access your data from anywhere. Connect with IMAP, POP or from mobile devices.
Enterprise-class service – Google Apps includes a 99.9% uptime SLA.* Phone support is available for critical issues.
Secure infrastructure – Multiple layers of protection keep your business data safe and secure. Learn more

Why businesses use Gmail for professional email accounts

Get control of spam – Advanced filters keep spam from your inbox so you can focus on messages that matter.
Keep all your important email – 25 GB of storage per user lets you keep just about anything you think may be important down the road.
Unified communications – Email, instant message, and make high-quality voice and video communication without launching a separate application.
Voice and video chat from your inbox
IM from your inbox
Find old messages instantly – Google search technology is built in, so you can find emails and instant message conversations quickly.
Find emails fast
Prevent data leaks - Create custom inbound and outbound policies to keep sensitive information safe with Email Security.
Keep a corporate record of all email – Administrators can search and recover corporate email with Email Archiving. 90-day archiving can be extended to fit your regulatory needs.

Watch the Gmail overview video
See other Google Apps videos

"Why move our internal email infrastructure to Gmail? Because I get all the upside of a huge scale upgrade, and I don't need to revise my budget or put extra equipment in my server rooms or add internal support to ensure uptime, or even teach users to use it. It's a natural."

– Mike Campbell, Director of Information Technology, Eli Research, Inc.

See more customer stories

Why businesses manage their time with Google Calendar

Get people together easily – Just pick a time (based on when people are free) and enter meeting details. Google Calendar will send invitations and keep track of RSVPs.
Schedule a meeting
Share project calendars – Share whole calendars company-wide or with specific people. Coworkers can have editing rights and see shared events alongside their own schedules.
Share a calendar
Show event information in context – Embed an internal calendar in Google Sites or publicly on your website, no programming required.
Show a calendar in Google Sites

See other Google Apps videos

"As a small and growing firm, we were looking for an easily scalable and affordable email and calendaring platform with minimal maintenance. Google Apps provides our employees with plenty of storage space, accessibility from different devices without synchronization, spam prevention and shared calendars."

– Drew George, CEO, Drew George & Partners, Inc.

See more customer stories

* The 99.9% uptime SLA for Google Apps is offered to organizations using Google Apps Premier Edition, as described in the Google Apps Premier Edition Terms of Service.

Read all Dear Mimi advice
Subscribe to Dear Mimi RSS Feed

2. Under the Baobab Tree: News and Blogs from Kabissa Members

Uganda: Meet2Connect Kampala: Lots of people and lots of energy

GHANA'S 52 BIRTHDAY TODAY. (INDEPENDENCE DAY. 6TH MARCH 1957)

Pallisa Children's Concern Project in Uganda in need of volunteers to start project in local community

Sojra in Somalia:

"Blogging Positively" Chat Reminder: February 27 and March 6 and Project Update

Zimbabwe: Free Jestina Mukoko!

Ghana: Despite the Storms

International Women's Day: Call for Participation

Africa's Climb to an Internet Revolution

Read the Kabissa Community Blog
Subscribe to Kabissa Community Blog RSS Feed

3. Kabissa Matters

Membership Update

13 organisations joined Kabissa this month, from Kenya, Canada, United States, Uganda, Nigeria, and Cameroon, bringing our membership total as of today to 1372.

The Kabissa site received 5186 unique visits in the month of February, according to ClustrMaps.

Kabissa is changing!

On behalf of the Kabissa board, I am pleased to announce changes to Kabissa's strategy and activities so that we can better serve you and contribute to social change in Africa on a scalable and sustainable basis.

As you know, Kabissa is a technology partner for African civil society, and since our founding in 1999 we have provided website hosting, training, and networking to help African civil society organisations to put technology to work for the benefit of their communities. Over the years we have grown to nearly 1400 member organisations, hosted thousands of mailboxes, more than 500 websites, and dozens of very active discussion lists. We have trained hundreds of people using our own Time To Get Online training curriculum tailored for African civil society. Just over a year ago, we launched our new community website and monthly newsletter where African organisations can showcase their achievements, connect and collaborate with each other, and share knowledge about ICT strategies and tools that can increase the impact of their work. We are proud of these achievements and the relationships we have built up with the hardworking, courageous people in our network over the years.

We have determined that Kabissa is now better positioned than ever to have a profound impact on social change movements in Africa. In the last two years, we scaled back our hosting and training activities and focussed on our online community website so that we could become a leaner, self-sustaining organisation with modest staffing and budget needs. Meanwhile, a new generation of savvy civil society activists and social entrepreneurs are springing up in Africa, many of them "home grown" technologists developing exciting and promising new tools and tactics for getting the work of civil society organisations done in new ways.

Reflecting this dynamic new environment, we have identified two priority areas that we are embarking on immediately that will enable us to leverage our long-standing role as technology partner to African organisations to make a dramatic, wide-scale contribution to improving the lives of people on the continent.

We are dramatically improving the Kabissa community website. The website at www.kabissa.org, launched a year ago, has already revolutionized the Kabissa network with a community blog, profiles for people and organisations in the network, a monthly member newsletter, and special mailings sent out by members to targeted subsets of our membership. We will relaunch the site with empowering social networking functionality designed specifically for African Civil Society, including a powerful and user-friendly member directory and the ability for members to create private and public groups to organise around your activities, issues, and localised concerns. The new site will also feature updated information about Kabissa's mission, services and activities.

This activity is funded by the Ford foundation as the final part of our African Voices project and will be carried out in collaboration with Fuse IQ, a web development firm in Seattle, USA. The target launch date for the new Kabissa site is April 30th. We will be sending out a survey shortly to request your input for improvements you would like to see, and will start work on the new site right away.

We are streamlining our Internet Services. Kabissa is well known for its Internet Services, which we have offered since our founding in 1999 with the vision of providing a "space for change on the Internet" for African civil society organisations. We provided free subdomain hosting and low-cost hosting of dedicated domains for our members, including email, websites and mailing lists. This is now going to change. A remarkable range of options has become available in recent years to African organisations for hosting email and website projects, including home grown website hosting providers based in African countries as well as online service providers available through the Internet. Google Apps Standard Edition for your Domain is one powerful example of a free email and intranet service, paid for through unobtrusive text-based advertising. Another example is WordPress, which offers free full-featured blogs on a wordpress.com subdomain that can be set up in minutes using a user-friendly interface, or at low-cost on a dedicated domain.

This trend, it seems, will only continue, so Kabissa has decided not to attempt to compete anymore in the Domain hosting space. We are instead streamlining our Internet Services to continue as Domain Registrar for organisations in our network. This presents us with the opportunity to help our members to keep their Domain names safe, without requiring regular credit card payments, and pointing to the Hosting Services hosted elsewhere (including Google Apps, WordPress, and others) that best suit their needs.

Members currently hosting their websites, email and mailing lists on the Kabissa server will be hearing from us shortly regarding the implications of this strategic shift. We are committed to facilitating a seamless transition. When we launch our new website we will also launch our new Domain Registrar service to the broader Kabissa network.

We hope you are as excited as we are about the changes coming to Kabissa, and the new opportunities they provide for everyone in our network. Please do not hesitate to get in touch by adding a comment to this announcement on our website or by reply email to community@kabissa.org with any questions, concerns, suggestions or offers of partnership.

In solidarity,

Tobias Eigen
Executive Director

Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa
http://www.kabissa.org

Kabissa is streamlining its Internet Services

As explained above, Kabissa is changing. We are immediately starting work to dramatically improve the website at www.kabissa.org to strengthen the Kabissa network and enable us to be a better partner to African organisations seeking to put technology to work. At the same time, we are streamlining our Internet services to focus on being a trusted Domain Registrar for organisations in our network. This means that in the future, we will register and help manage domain names (e.g. yourorg.org) for our member organisations, but we will no longer offer domain hosting on our server. We are excited about the opportunity this change presents for us to help larger numbers of Kabissa members to have their own domain name on the Internet using powerful tools and services available for free or at low cost.

It took us quite some time to reach this decision, as we have enjoyed the relationships we have built up with our hosting members over the years and know that many organisations rely on us for their important every day work. Nevertheless, we now recognize that the hosting service we have been offering to date could never be scalable and that we should not be competing with the increasingly capable local hosting providers in Africa, online providers like Google and Yahoo, and the reseller services that we would be using to provide hosting services anyway. We are confident that organisations currently hosting with us will agree that the new services they will be able to move to now will greatly increase their capabilities online.

On April 30, 2009, we will shut off the Kabissa server and cease hosting email, website and mailing lists. If you are currently hosting on Kabissa, you will need to take action to move your email, website and/or mailing lists to another hosting provider before April 30th or risk disruption of service. We recommend that, like Kabissa itself and several of our members already, you move your email accounts to a Google Apps account. Google Apps offers free email, calendar, online documents, and more, all on a user-friendly, multilingual web interface. Google Apps also provides a tool for creating simple websites which may be adequate for your website needs. If not, you will need to consider other options for hosting your website using a traditional hosting provider. We can help with the migration of your domains to Google Apps and/or any other hosting provider of your choice and will do our best to provide a seamless transition.

Contact Kabissa Tech Support privately by email to start the planning process with us to migrate (or simply close) your hosting account, and we will walk you through the process personally. Don't hesitate to ask any questions or express concerns. If you like, you can also share your reactions by adding a public comment to this post on our website.

Kabissa has moved its participatory website to Media Temple

In a first step in improvements announced above, we have moved the Kabissa participatory website to a Media Temple Dedicated Virtual account. The site now has plenty of resources devoted to it so we expect that everyone will have an easier (and faster!) time using the site from now on. Many thanks go to longtime Kabissa volunteer Greg Schnippel for his help in ironing out the final bugs in migrating the site!

Please help us by pointing out any new problems you come across since the move today or if you have any feedback. In connection with the website development we are working on right now, we will be in touch with everyone shortly to request input on where you would like this site - and this community - to go in the future. You can submit site feedback at http://www.kabissa.org/beta - thanks!

4. Technology News and Resources

New Release from Tactical Tech: Security in a box!

REPORT OF WOMEN’S ACCESS TO ICT IN AN URBAN AREA OF EDO STATE NIGERIA

Musicians and the Web: A Platform for Change in Africa and beyond

5. Opportunities Pot

Call For Participation - 1st Congress of African Network of Professionals in Ghana - 10th to 13th November,

WNUSP-News: FINAL ANNOUNCEMENT: WNUSP GA- REGISTER NOW!

Best Business Schools in the World to visit Lagos in March 09

6. Member Spotlight

This space is reserved for spotlighting exemplary organizations making particularly innovative use of technology in support of their mission.

Have you just launched a powerful new online initiative? Got a new website you want to share with the community? A technology story to tell about an approach that worked for your organization? Tell us about it!