So what do you think of our new look?

We have redesigned the site to reflect Kabissa’s role as a niche network connecting people and organizations working for positive change in Africa. We hope you like it!

We can’t wait for you to explore the site and give us your feedback. Here are some highlights:

• The Kabissa Front Page draws in new members by highlighting our unique offerings for African civil society, showcasing members through a new “member stories” section and featuring news and blogs posted on Kabissa by members.
   
• The Kabissa Community Blog is a space available for members to blog about their activities in Africa and to share opportunities, insights and tech tips relevant to the continent. Posts to the blog are featured on the Kabissa frontpage, monthly member newsletter and distributed via Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks.
   
• Kabissa Groups are now reoriented around private, members-only discussion, information sharing and networking via email (like Yahoo! Groups or a listserv) to enable quicker interaction and mutual support between members - directly in our email. Each group has a private online space containing member list, full record of email discussions and wiki pages.
   
• Log in to take a look at the new Member Dashboard pull-down menu which brings together in one place everything you might need to do to manage your group memberships, newsletter subscriptions, user profile page, organizations and more.

If you encounter a problem or bug with the new site, or have any feedback at all, please report it as soon as possible via our feedback form at http://kabissa.org/beta so we can fix it - thank you!

Up Next

There is still plenty of work to do. Now that we have completed this upgrade, the next step is to upgrade our member directory. Our goals for the next step, which we hope to complete before the end of 2011, include the following:

• Improved integration of Website Features so that it will be easier to browse members and organizations, and see how members are connected to organizations, groups and their own content.
   
• More useful and attractive Organization Profile Pages, including the addition of news feeds from organization ‘official’ websites and blogs, and social networking buttons and widgets.
   
• Ability to add blog content directly to Organization Profile Pages, which then appear as a feed on the page as well as in the community blog and Kabissa front page.

On the Roadmap for 2012

Beyond the improvements outlined above, we have identified the following projects as “low hanging fruit” that we would like to work on in 2012. If you are interested in helping to make it happen, you can either volunteer your expertise or donate money. We’d love to hear from you.

• Improve website performance so web pages load faster, and create a Kabissa distribution of our website code to make security updates and sharing of code easier.
• Add new Open Data interfaces to the Kabissa organization directory to enable programmers to use our data on their websites.
• Begin producing an annual Kabissa Yearbook containing a snapshot of the organizations in the Kabissa network and their content.
• Add support for Multiple Languages to be more welcoming to African organizations working in non-Anglophone countries.
• Create user-friendly Country and Theme Dashboards that make it really easy to find and make use of the Kabissa organizations and content you need. 
• Create Mobile Apps to provide access to Kabissa organizations and content from mobile devices.

Credits

First and foremost I’d like to thank all the Kabissa volunteers around the world for their hard work. All volunteers contributed, but the following people were especially helpful in making this upgrade happen: Thomas Brevik (lead designer), Sami Ghazi (marketing/copywriting), Mark Root-Wiley (designer) and Ryan Barolet-Fogarty (web development).

I’d also like to thank Kyle Mathews, the web developer who implemented the new theme and upgraded the site according to the mockups provided by Thomas.

A shout out also goes out to the 100+ generous individuals who donated to Kabissa’s core costs fund which paid for this round of core site upgrades. If you’d like to join in and help sustain Kabissa into 2012 please see http://www.kabissa.org/donate - thanks! :)