Marc Osten of Summit Collaborative made an interesting contribution today, quoted below, to the NTEN Discuss email list. It's very relevant to the ideas Kabissa has been nurturing during the course of the last year for creating opportunities for face to face (F2F = face to face in Marc's jargon below) contact for people in the Kabissa community through local meetups.

Via muti.co.za, I just came across this disheartening news report in InfoWorld about a new direction that the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) programme seems to be heading. The picture (thank you nirak @ flickr) expresses my fears but if you have been following the OLPC story over the last several years you will want to also read this article.

The folks at olpcnews.com have also been reporting on the issue and tend to have more (and more current) information than anyone else. Check out this olpcnews.com article about the speech by OLPC founder Negroponte about OLPC and XP, in which he is quoted as saying:

"Eventually Windows might be the sole operating system, and Sugar would be educational software running on top of it."

I was pleased to get the PingER update from the University of Trieste - it was the first time I had heard from PingER since 2002, when it was presented at the eJDS Open Round Table on "Developing Country Access to On-Line Scientific Publishing: Sustainable Alternatives". I was there talking about (and hoping to breathe life into) the www4mail tool, and am pleased my www4mail presentation (PPT) is still up on their website! www4mail was developed at the University of Trieste and for a time there were a few really good servers running including ours at Kabissa and another at Bellanet in Canada. These servers played a critical role for a time, enabling people with limited access to the web to request web pages to be sent to them by email.

Via the incom-l mailing list I received Marco Zennaro's news of a new video visualizing African Internet connectivity. Over the years, the PingER project has been keeping track of actual server availability in Africa and around the world (300 servers are monitored) using the simple ping computer network tool. Copy of announcement follows. I'd be interested in hearing from experts in the Kabissa community on the topic - is this an accurate representation of the connectivity you have access to?

Via Bill Minter of AfricaFocus.org (member profile), I received the following inquiry from a filmmaker in London looking to do an interesting documentary about slums in Lagos. I sent it on directly to members in Lagos and received quite a few responses. I also thought it might be worthwhile sharing it on the blog so that others can see it. Please get in touch with Cat at Keo Films directly if you have any useful information or insights, or are interested in getting involved in the project.

Donald Lobo from CiviCRM directed me today to a new version of the very handy Prodder Directory of Southern African NGOs, which SANGONeT launched yesterday at http://beta.prodder.org.za.

This is exciting news for me since we at Kabissa also are using Drupal and CiviCRM as the backbone of our own online community website for African civil society. I like the look and feel of the new Prodder site and am pleased that CiviCRM is finding broader use in Africa.

Browsing the site, I was also intrigued to see that a print version of the Prodder Directory is available. What a terrific resource! I have floated tihs idea in the past for Kabissa: wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to offer a print edition of the Kabissa Member Directory, on an annual basis and also in custom print runs for specific purposes - eg in support of national, regional or sectoral networks, or to distribute at conferences.

SANGONeT official press release follows.