Liz Trautman and Tobias Eigen just spent a fascinating week participating in the World Movement for Democracy Fourth Assembly. We were pleased with the opportunity to rub shoulders with many Kabissa members, with colleagues from the African Democracy Forum that we had been e-mailing with over the years but had not yet met in person, and with passionate democracy advocates both inside and outside African governments. Read on for more details, useful links and resources relating to the workshops we led, and photos!

World Movement for Democracy

According to the WMD Web site, the purpose of World Movement assemblies is to "bring together a richly diverse group of participants representing every region of the world in the spirit of shared democratic values. They will teach and learn from each other, build collaborative relationships, and thereby strengthen the World Movement as a network committed to mutual support, exchange, and cooperation."

Taking place as it did at the threshold of Europe and Asia, the emphasis of plenaries and award ceremonies was very much on Asia, and prominence was given to Turkey's own aspirations for joining the European Union. Nevertheless, we were glad to find that Africa was represented in force, with over 100 participants coming from Africa.

The Kabissa team sat in on the ADF Business meeting, at which we presented the newly launched ADF Online Community Web site, the culmination of two years of collaboration between Kabissa and ADF. Liz co-facilitated a powerful workshop on the use of technology to empower women's participation, and we led two technical training workshops that were a big hit among assembly participants. We were pleased to confirm that effective use of information and communications technologies is a high priority for democracy advocates.

Barriers and Breakthroughs: Using Technology to Empower Women's Participation

Access to technology entails far more than just having technological equipment or tools; rather, real access depends on a variety of factors to ensure people are truly able to use technology effectively to improve their lives. Any technology strategy or initiative must address questions of cost, availability of local and relevant content, capacity to use technology, and cultural factors, among others. Women face additional challenges in gaining real access to technology. They have less disposable income and therefore less able to afford the relatively high cost of technology tools. The majority of Internet content is not created by or for women, and often content is not available in local languages. Around the world women generally have limited access to formal education including formal computer education and training. Many technology training workshops do not consider the needs of women who are single heads of households or who cannot take time off work to attend them. These are just a few of the barriers women face in accessing technology, but women?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s organizations around the world are finding creative solutions to improve access and empower women.

During the workshop, which Kabissa co-organized with Women's Learning Partnership, we heard from a number of women who are using older and newer technologies to empower women's participation. Activists described the challenges and successes of creating a Web site with resources for women in Arabic. We learned of technology training centers in Afghanistan which are helping women gain skills they can use to communicate with family around the world as well as find higher paying jobs. Both the panelists and the participants shared stories of women organizing around technology--through forming women's groups to listen to cassette tapes, to Middle Eastern women exchanging information in distance learning courses, to mothers and teachers bringing nearly 400 computers to their region.

After hearing the inspiring stories of these women, we broke into groups and developed two technology strategies for campaigns to elect women to government positions. Again, participants drew on a rich understanding of older and newer technologies. For example, in areas where the majority of the electorate is illiterate, the teams combined radio interviews with simple paper flyers illustrating the strengths of the candidates.

Training on Using New Technologies (ICTs): "Speed Geeking": a Review of New Technologies Available for Activism

Inspired by the great experiences the Kabissa team has had with "speed geeking" at Penguin Day events over the years, we felt it was important to expose the international democracy advocates community to the practice.

According to Wikipedia, "A geek (pronunciation /gi:k/ ) is a person who is fascinated, perhaps obsessively, by obscure or very specific areas of knowledge and imagination." And, according to the Penguin Day Website, "A tongue-in-cheek rip off of the speed dating concept, SpeedGeeking offers a fully immersive, invigorating and hilarious approach to meeting people ... and learning about the cool projects, software tools and crazy ideas that they have been working on. At a SpeedGeek, one group of participants sets up at stations around a room to give 5 minute presentations while the rest of the group migrates in a circle around the room to hear these high-speed raps. The result is an obscene amount of fun, all tied up with a good dose of learning about how technology is being used for social change."

While we're not sure about the obscene amount of fun, we did have a good time and concluded that this decidedly American way of delivering information was surprisingly effective for quickly exposing a diverse group of democracy advocates to a range of new technology tools. We added a new wrinkle that was also very effective: an exercise in smaller groups to come up with an advocacy campaign strategy to promote the rights of chocolate lovers everywhere. The groups had to at least consider the pros and cons of each tool they just learned about in the speed geeking and decide if and how they were going to include it in their campaign strategy.

There are many tools of course that we might have chosen to include, but we decided to focus on the followig six: Internet Telephony, E-mail Networks, Gmail, CiviCRM, Encrypted e-mail, and SMS campaigns. Below are some notes about each of these tools along with resources for further reading and research.

1. Internet Telephony
   Proprietary, user-friendly tool: Skype - http://www.skype.com
   Asterisk - Open Source PBX - http://www.asterisk.org
   Kabissa Dear Mimi Article about internet telephony:
   http://www.kabissa.org/mimi/free_phone_calls.html
   
2. E-mail Networks
   http://www.npogroups.org
   http://www.yahoogroups.com
   http://www.kabissa.org
   http://www.googlegroups.com
   Techsoup article: Introduction to E-mail Listservs and Internet Mailing Lists
   http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articles/internet/page2955.cfm
   
3. Gmail - an alternative to Yahoo provided by Google - http://www.gmail.com
   If you don't have a gmail account but want one, you need to be invited by a current gmail user - write to us if you want it and we will invite you.
   
4. CiviCRM - an open source constituency relationship management tool for social change organizations - http://www.openngo.org
   
5. Encrypted email
   Hushmail - a Yahoo-like webmail service providing encrypted email - http://www.hushmail.com
   Kabissa Dear Mimi Article on e-mail privacy:
   http://www.kabissa.org/mimi/e-mail_privacy.html
   NGO in a Box - http://www.tacticaltech.org/ngoinabox
   
6. SMS Campaigns
   Mobile Active - http://www.mobileactive.org
   Justin Oberman's Personal Democracy article on Fahamu SMS campaign
   http://www.personaldemocracy.com/node/738
   New Tactics Workbook
   http://www.newtactics.org/main.php/ToolsforAction/TheNewTacticsWorkbook
   Voter Mobilization using SMS - http://www.mobilevoter.org

Training on Using New Technologies (ICTs): Effective use of E-mail

During this three-hour hands-on workshop, we covered three major topics discussed in the past in Kabissa's monthly Dear Mimi Internet advice column:

1. Characteristics of professional e-mail
   http://www.kabissa.org/mimi/professional_e-mails.html
   
2. Five key skills for effective mailbox management
   http://www.kabissa.org/mimi/mailbox_management.html
   
3. E-mail encryption
   http://www.kabissa.org/mimi/e-mail_privacy.html

We thank Eric Johnson of Internews for his presentation on e-mail encryption.