On being a Netsquared Featured Project

There has been plenty of buzz in the blogosphere around Netsquared and its mission of remixing the web for social change. We were actively engaged in the voting process and are honored that our Kabissa 2.0: Strengthening the Social Web in Africa is a Netsquared Featured Project. Thank you for voting for us! Being a Netsquared Featured Project certainly comes with some very exciting perks, both anticipated and unanticipated, which I'd like to share. We are very much looking forward to seeing what else emerges for Kabissa and our project, which we are very proud of already and do hope will gain traction. If it does, then it will be a tremendous boost for African civil society seeking to harness the power of the Internet for social change.

• As co-executive directors of Kabissa, Kim and I have been invited to participate in the exclusive and much anticipated Netsquared conference next week, May 28-30, where we will have an opportunity to mix with our fellow featured projects and compete for the Netsquared Innovation Award.
• Kabissa and our Netsquared proposal are getting some very meaningful scrutiny from many directions, which is a new and very welcome experience for our team! From the start, bloggers have been very enthusiastic. Our own advisory group and board have truly stepped up to the plate and have been sharing very useful feedback. Through Netsquared, we have been assigned a project champion, Nicholas Hodges from Schwab Charitable, who has been giving us his insights and will guide us through the Netsquared competition.
• Innovatorz, a fellow featured project, has organized a podcast site for Netsquared Featured Projects to tell our "founding story". You can listen to me telling the Kabissa founding story here. This is a good example in fact for technology that I would like to see gain currency in Africa - something I have been calling audioblogging by phone. I dialled into a number, followed voice prompts and recorded my message - which then appeared later on the Innovatorz blog.
• Peter Deitz, a philanthropy consultant and web-designer based in Montreal, who will be at the conference, has of his own initiative organized a grassroots fundraising campaign to try to help raise some extra cash for Netsquared Featured Projects. He proposes that individuals donate $21 (that's $1 per project) as a way of saying "we like what you are doing" - and in that way hopes to raise $500 per project. I did it. Can you?
• Throughout the Netsquared selection process we have joined many likeminded nonprofit technologists in a grand experiment to actually use the newest web technologies to promote web tech innovation for social change. This has been very beneficial, but also has been a tremendous learning experience for us all. This is well captured in the concluding paragraph of Allen Gunn in his very heartfelt Talkin N2Y2 Blues blog post:

Again, thank you Net2: you've challenged me to be better, you've grown my audience, and you've forced me to analyze in rich detail why I do what I do. I salute your efforts to innovate in the funding of promising social change technologies and I know that your intentions are nothing but righteous.

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