Pre-Kabissa 2.0 Musings on African Civil Society, Open Source and Yahoo Groups

Below is an excerpt from an email I sent to the FOSSFA discussion list in January 2006, which I encountered today during a Google search for something else altogether. The message contains some insights that I think we should return to now that we have launched the Kabissa Online Community Website - key words being TRAINING, USABILITY and EMAIL.

I agree that African CSOs are not as far along with adopting open source as much as they could be. However, the African Democracy Forum site is actually a stellar example of the opposite - we are working very closely with them to develop an online community for their network of democracy activists using open source tools. It is a delicate process to move a network from one platform to another, and limited as the Yahoo group is it is in fact a great tool for democracy activists already as it is now. We have begun the process of migrating by piloting an online forum which has unfortunately not been adopted with enthusiasm by ADF members - as opposed to the yahoo group which flourishes.

In my view the main barrier has been that there is no easily implemented open source tool available that properly links online discussion forum tools with traditional e-mail lists (such as this one hosted on mailman or yahoo groups). The way people (especially in Africa) interact online is primarily via their e-mail - and Yahoo responds to this very well. Even compared to Yahoo, traditional e-mail list servers like mailman are sadly lacking in functionality, in particular in the web interface and message archiving. Forums, on the ther hand, are impressive on the web side but do not interface with email very well. There are cultural reasons for this - the open source forums are being developed by geeks who are more concerned about security than usability. We are making some progress on integrating them and it will happen but it's been a process convincing developers that it is needed or beneficial, and we don't want to create something new or a fork of an existing widely used tool.

Ultimately we migrated the ADF Yahoo group to a Mailman mailing list hosted on Kabissa, which is now flourishing more than ever. Meanwhile the online forum has been all but abandoned.

This brings me to the next barrier: organizations don't tend to be as committed to the nifty open source tools as we techies are. They are pragmatic and use the tools that are most readily available. Often, even organizations that are provided with very powerful and feature-rich content management systems don't update their websites frequently enough, don't take relatively easy steps to make sure their websites are actually navigable, and otherwise don't use them effectively to support their day to day work. This can often be explained simply by the pressures organizations and the people in them are facing, and slow or hard to access internet connections. But sometimes the problem is also that the people in an organization that, for example, are running conferences are not involved with the website and don't know how powerful the website can be to help them in organizing their event.

There are two sides to this problem.

The first is of course training. CSOs often don't prioritize their website or other innovative technology simply because they don't fully "get it" yet. It is important to give them opportunities to take time out to look at the various tools available and learn how they can be harnessed to implement their agenda and present themselves online. For many functions, open source tools are inexpensive and quick to implement, and can quickly revolutionize how an organization operates - but only if the people that work there are empowered to actually do it and are compelled to move it up on their priority list. It's not utomatic. This is in large part what Kabissa's Time To Get Online training program is all about, though ultimately it is a question of the ability (and commitment) of organizations to integrate new technologies into their activities and programs.

The second is the Yahoo factor. Everyone understands Yahoo (and increasingly Google) because its services are user-friendly and packaged in a slick, integrated interface that people are motivated to use. It and other US-market focussed tools are really easy to start using, although they do in the end limit your options (i.e. exporting Yahoo archives is tricky or next to impossible). Open source tools on the other hand offer more freedom, but the interfaces tend to be less user friendly, confusing and require lots of different passwords and interfaces. We geeks put up with this but African CSO executive directors will not, or shouldn't be asked to. In response to this we are developing Kabissa's Online Platform, which will take advantage of an impressive array of existing open source tools and integrate them to the greatest extent possible into a single platform using a single signon and interface.

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