As a tech enthusiast, one of the things I like about Google mail is the ongoing tweaking and innovating with the service. Sometimes changes are annoying at first (the user interface was "streamlined" a few weeks ago and I didn't like it), sometimes changes don't help that much (Google Buzz certainly did not revolutionize the way I connect and engage with my friends and associates) but sometimes the improvements are hugely beneficial. Since Priority Inbox was announced last week I have been waiting eagerly for it to be activated in my accounts so I can try it out and share my learnings with the Kabissa community. New services tend to be rolled out slowly as Google looks for and irons out bugs, and it took a week this time for Priority Inbox to finallyarrive in my Kabissa mailboxes (though not yet in my gmail.com mailbox). 

At first glance I like Priority Inbox very much - it adds a new label above the Inbox which presents your incoming email in three categories: important and unread, starred, and everything else. It uses the same automatic algorithms it uses for spam filtering to decide what is important ("based on what you read") and lets you train it by indicating whether it was right or not. Time will tell how well it actually works, and part of the idea is that it will in fact get better with time as it "learns" your priorities.

I think Priority Inbox is a great idea and will be very useful, especially for those in Africa who struggle to make maximum use of the limited time they have in front of Internet connected computers to get their work done. On the other hand, as usual this raises questions about Google and privacy, and how much we can afford to allow corporations like Google to know so much about what we are corresponding about and with whom. For African activists and journalists, keeping certain activities and relationships secret can be a matter of life and death. Perhaps they should not be using gmail. I've already talked about the risks of Facebook for activists - now do we also have to worry about our email? What are the alternatives? 

What do you think?

Below is a copy of the email I received in my inbox explaining the new service and linking to an introductory video with quite the peppy sound track. 

Oxfam Deutschland has graciously agreed to host hands-on CiviCRM workshops on October 6-7, targeting nonprofits using (or considering) CiviCRM in their organizations as well as web developers that want to add CiviCRM implementation and customization to their toolchest.

CiviCRM is available as a companion module for Drupal and Joomla content management systems, and like these tools is also open source software and available as a free download.

The CiviCRM team have also agreed to give a quick overview of CiviCRM on October 5 at the Socialbar ("ein Treffen von Weltverbesserern" = a social event for dogooders).

Workshop Registration is open!  

If you are interested in participating in the workshops, see the following links to learn more and to register: 

• Berlin user and administrator training : Oct 06, 2010 9:00 AM
• Berlin developer and implementer training : Oct 07, 2010 9:00 AM

If you have any questions about the event, feel free to contact me as I am helping to coordinate the event. 

As you will see, the trainers have an agile approach and the agenda is still not set in stone. It will be finalized at the event so that the workshop can be tailored to the participants. CiviCRM is fairly feature rich, so before you come be sure to review the CiviCRM manual and take CiviCRM for a test drive. 

If you use Facebook, you are now potentially broadcasting your location to your "Facebook friends" or the world.

I just received my first Twitter Qwitter (@usequitter) notification (see below), and am pleased with how it will help me to keep track of who has "unfollowed" @kabissa on twitter, a feature lamentably missing from @Twitter out of the box. You see, I follow everyone who follows me so that I can get to know them and allow them to send me direct messages. Unfortunately there are alot of twitter spammers out there who follow at random and then unfollow shortly thereafter, which causes unwanted clutter in my twitter stream.

Update 1 September: I uninstalled @wisestamp because they added a cumbersome link on the Google Mail menu that displays popup updates from Wise Stamp. I remain impressed by the app and will miss it, but don't want to have my email experience cluttered with apps. I've have had a good correspondence with their support team, but I don't like the direction they are going - what if all the google mail extensions I use added an item to the menu and popus? No thanks. I will only reinstall if they provide an option to disable the alerts and menu. What are your views? Alternative apps for this purpose? I welcome comments.

I just installed the WiseStamp Chrome browser plugin and am impressed! Read on to see a screenshot of the signature I created for my Kabissa mail on Google Apps and lessons I learned setting it up. Not only do signatures look attractive, but they can include the latest content from Twitter or any RSS Feed which is really quite neat.

The installation is quick and easy, and the personalization is also straightforward and user friendly. WiseStamp supports four webmail services including Gmail and Yahoo mail, and the offline open source Thunderbird email program (which is looking great, by the way). The only sad part for our purposes in Africa where so many people are cybercafe "internet nomads" is that it is computer-specific - no synchronizing of settings between computers and browsers or server-based offering. 

In 2002, Kim Lowery put to paper the story of Kabissa until that point in time to submit to the ICT Stories Competition jointly organized by IICD and InfoDev. This story is important to me and telling it at that point - and getting the acknowledgement through winning the competition - gave Kim and me the encouragement to take the next steps to establish Kabissa as an organization and start our capacity building program. The story picks up from there on the About Kabissa page, which provides lots of great information about Kabissa's background, benefits to Kabissa membership and how we seek to engage with our stakeholders working in Africa and seeking to connect and support one another.  

In the words of Layton Croft from the ICT Stories Competition Jury: "What I liked in Kabissa is the extraordinary collaboration the project got all over Africa. It should be a real lesson for most organizations working in this continent, most of them working in a fragmented way, spoiling resources instead of joining efforts to get better results!"

The IICD website has gone through several iterations and I was unable to find the stories there - but the Wayback Machine helped me to find the text, which I included in full below and attached as a PDF for future reference. We joined three other winners that year including Ecosandals in Kenya, Drishtee in India and Radio Sagarmatha in Nepal at the Internet Society (ISOC) 2002 conference. 

National Endowment for Democracy is hosting an event tomorrow to honor Floribert Bahizire.

From the invitation (see below): "The people of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the worldwide human rights community suffered a terrible loss on June 1 when human rights defender Floribert Chebeya Bahizire was apparently assassinated after being summoned by the police. Floribert was undoubtedly Congo's most prominent, committed, courageous human rights activist."

After about a year of tweeting @kabissa about Kabissa, African civil society and technology issues, the biggest frustration for me has been an inability to go back later to review what I and others were tweeting and sharing about a certain topic at a certain point in time. Sure, it's possible via http://search.twitter.com and other websites and twitter apps, but the sheer volume of tweets makes most of these interfaces unwieldy. Too often I return from a conference and am unable to find a certain tweet shared on a certain day that I wanted to look into. 

I managed to miss this, but it looks like Google launched a new feature in April that addresses just this issue. (Thank you Guardian Technology News Bucket for the reminder). To try it yourself, go to http://www.google.com and select "Updates" on the left side before typing in your search terms. You can then choose the year and month to browse, and then specific time periods on a given day. 

UPDATE: Click here to watch a screencast I made walking you through Google's twitter search. Thanks @bonniekoenig for pointing out that it was needed!  

What do you think of this tip?

Check out http://www.fordfound.org where the Ford Foundation, a Kabissa supporter, has unveiled a brand new website, with specific guidance for grantseekers, interactive graphics, grants database, bios of grantmakers, multimedia spotlights, and a new impact section. I like that regional office web pages provide pictures and bios of grantmakers and grantees in West Africa, Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, and Middle East & North Africa.