Dear Kabissa Bloggers and Beta Testers! The Kabissa website was appearing sluggish this morning,  so I reviewed the technical setup and talked it over with our hosting provider. As a result, I have carried out a few maintenance tasks which may affect the site performance and functionality - so I would appreciate it if you could come test the site and let me know if you see anything unusual. Thanks as always!

Some of the things I did:

• "repaired" the mysql database containing the drupal site data - this increases the efficiency of database calls and I should find a way for this to be taken care of automatically on perhaps a monthly basis
• "emptied" the drupal database "sessions" table, which had several hundred thousand records in it. As a result, all users will have to log in, even if they have an open session with the site stored in their browser
• disabled and physically deleted all the modules we are currently not using - this is a large list, which I will include in a comment shortly for the record. Apparently having many disabled modules still available on the server slows down the site since they must be loaded into memory anyway.

Cheers,

Tobias

Hi Sokari -

Dear Kabissa bloggers and beta testers! We made several security upgrades to the Kabissa website yesterday, and would appreciate your help in reviewing the site and verifying that all functionality is operating as expected. There are some changes/improvements that I have already noticed in the upgrades:

Dear team! beware - Schnippy and I are making security upgrades and improvements to Drupal this week.. mostly you should not notice anything but I have installed a module to display a more userfriendly theme for us admin users when we are in the admin interface for drupal or in civicrm. Hopefully users will still see the kabissa theme, but we need a different theme so that we can access all the functionality that the kabissa theme hides or makes look rather ugly.

This is temporary until Chris, our web designer, fixes the kabissa theme.  

I was very pleased to watch this very powerful and meaningful BBC program featuring John Githongo, a Kabissa board member and longtime family friend. Highly recommended watching! Click here to watch it online at the BBC website.

The G8 leaders of the world's richest countries have promised to
stick to their commitment to double development aid by 2010, with half
destined for Africa.

Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo investigates
whether Tanzania - hailed as a model for good development - is really
benefitting from Western aid.

Hello Kabissa 2.0 beta testers and bloggers! Please help me to test out a new feature improvement to the Kabissa online community website. Log in and edit your my account settings and you will see a new set of features available to help you to stay informed of new content that interests you on the Kabissa site. Please try it and let me know what you think!

Hi Neema and Sokari -

I wanted to show you how the special mailings are taking shape. It
seems to work quite well - the links to the survey below were clicked
over 50 times so far. The same opportunity was also in Gong Gong and
received 15 clicks.

You Just Need To Get Started You probably already know that you want and need to get connected to the Internet, both for your own benefit, and for the purposes of your organization. But the Internet can be intimidating. This section gives you a simple, easy to use guide to getting connected to the Internet, and the basics of how to find your way around the Internet. The most important step is to get started!

By The End Of This Chapter, You Will Be Able To:

The Internet is a global network of people and organizations connected through computers and phone lines. It works through several very clever tools (software programs) that enable you to access valuable information resources and communicate with others around the world.

In today’s networked world, civil society organizations are recognizing the power of the Internet for their advocacy work. While many organizations around the world have already embraced this technology, many organizations in Africa have not yet been able to access the wealth of resources available through the Internet. One of the key barriers has been a lack of necessary Internet skills.

You are reading a set of learning materials created by Kabissa to help African civil society organizations to get online and to integrate the Internet into their organizations.

Preface

Introduction: Why Get Online?

Connecting to the Power of the Internet

Accessing Information & Opportunities

Interacting With Like-Minded Organizations

Establishing Your Web Presence

Advocating For Your Community

Next Steps: Integrating The Internet Into Your Organization

Answers To Section Post Tests

Glossary Of Internet Terms

ICT Resource Center

copy frm 4 - Phase III: Maintaining And Improving Your Web Site

copy from 3 - Phase II: Developing Your Web Site

copy from 2 - Phase I: Planning Your Web Site

Establishing A Web Site Can Seem Like A Daunting Task

Even though you may be under pressure to deliver a Web site as soon as possible, it is essential that you take time to develop your Web site properly. A Web site is a very public view into your organization – you want to make sure that it reflects the high quality of your organization’s work.

Below is a selection of recommended hosting providers. If you have other recommendations, please give us the name, web address and reasons for recommending by adding a comment below or via our contact form.

copy from 4 - Publishing Your Own eNewsletter Or Running Your Own eNetwork

copy fm 3 - Making Submissions To eNewsletters & Participating In eNetworks

copy from 2 - Receiving eNewsletters And "Listening" To eNetwork Discussions

Copy from here and update and change language: Understanding eNewsletters vs. eNetworks

The interactive features of e-mail mailing lists make the Internet a
dynamic and exciting place where you can gain access to opportunities,
inform people about your work, join others to discuss issues and
concerns dear to you, and much more – all directly through your e-mail mailbox.

This guide is derived from Chapter 3 of Kabissa's Time To Get Online Manual on Interacting with Likeminded Organizations.

Feedback? Updates? Please get in touch via our contact form. 

• The Benefits of Google Apps
• Inform yourself: read up on Google Apps from Google and Reviewers
• How it works and how Kabissa can help
• Request Google Apps for your domain

The Benefits of Google Apps

Hey folks - I am posting this plan to the Kabissa team blog because I want to add to it and make sure that we cover all the bases. There's alot going on here! Please let me know your thoughts via email reply or add comments to this post.

• Clean up blog posts
  • Often, members post to the blog and there are typos or minor issues with the post. Or when they post they provide their own email address in the post and not a link to their profile page (See below).
  • Things worth fixing:
    

• Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tasks
• Kabissa Drupal site
• Rackspace/Plesk (old server, member sites)
• Mosso (new server, Drupal site and wiki)
• Dreamhost

Daily, Weekly, Monthly Tasks

• daily
  • support@kabissa.org
• weekly
  • hosting@kabissa.org
  • log into kabissa plesk server and check disk space and usage

• Monthly
  • check google webmaster tools
  • check google analytics and alexa

CiviEvent is the tool to use for scheduling meetups once you have identified the organizer and have a date and agenda in hand.

Part 1: create event in CiviEvent

Log in and click on CiviCRM, then on CiviEvent. Then you will go through a 4-step wizard as follows:

Kabissa members hosting a domain name on the Kabissa server will want to take note of a configuration change that may affect you. We have moved the online
community website at http://www.kabissa.org to a new server. During the move today, the site was unavailable
for a few hours, but that did not affect your own website, mailing list or email
hosted on Kabissa.

The new home for www.kabissa.org means that the address we have promoted in the past for
accessing the Plesk domain control panel no longer works. Please use the address below
instead:

https://kabissa.org:8443

Hi Neema and Sokari -

Please read this! :-) I have added Neema to the Kabissa Team group, at http://www.kabissa.org/group/team - so you have access to our internal blog pages and the community coordinator (CC) guide at http://www.kabissa.org/group/team/guide/coordinator - this is an internal document with a job description for Sokari's role and lots of useful procedures. 

I signed us up for a mosso account at http://www.mosso.com to see if it might be appropriate for our needs. Mosso is a child company of Rackspace, which hosts our server now. The idea would be to migrate all our domains from the Rackspace server to the Mosso 'cloud'.

Advantages:

One of the great advantages of our new site is that we can do fairly granular searches for people in the Kabissa network and send them email. This is very useful for connecting people that contact us looking for partners in specific countries or sectors etc.

Here's a procedure that seems to be working:

List of organizations signed up in a given period of time

One of the more essential duties of the CC is to write a weekly member roundup blog post, highlighting the best blog posts on the site, new members in the last week and to highlight the "post of the week". The purpose of the roundup is to contribute to turning our site inside out, making the most interesting developments on the site accessible.

The weekly member roundup blog post should include the following:

Creating a new guide

Creating a new guide (eg http://www.kabissa.org/learn/about/kabissa) seems tricky using the "book" feature in drupal - at first it seems really straightforward but there are considerations that might be confusing.

The kabissa calendar at http://www.kabissa.org/calendar is managed through Google Apps.

The calendar is public and should include all key Kabissa dates as well as dates in the African civil society calendar, including:

• FIXME this is inaccurate and contains too much information (TE May 6, 08) 

Kabissa produces two newsletters.

Please check with Tobias before using civicrm to email members. When contacting members by email consider the following criteria:

• Is the inquiry of direct benefit to the segment of the network that you are emailing?
• Is it timely/urgent? If not, perhaps it could be posted to the blog and included in the next member newsletter
• Is it a newsletter or regular mailing that people might want to subscribe to?

OPTION 1: One-Time email to a small number of people (less than 200 people)

Click on “Review Applications (all the way on the left) and review the application data.

Step 1 Things to look for:

General Member Management

New members are signing up and members migrated from old system
are trying to log in. All need support to ensure they are able to get
their applications approved (or rejected/more info request) and that
they are able to log in and update their profiles and begin adding
people to them and adding content to the site.

Daily Tasks

The Kabissa Community Coordinator is responsible for engaging, empowering and growing the Kabissa membership, especially with regard to our new Web site tools.

Responsibilities:

1. Membership Management:

The Community Coordintor book details the role and responsibilities of the CC as well as procedure and production guides. This should be a living document - please update procedures etc as you see fit. Click "printable view" below to see (or print) this whole guide at once.

Many people ask us all the time about Drupal, the platform used to develop Kabissa 2.0.

Our friends at Lullabot have announced The Lullabot Learning Series available on DVD. I have not yet seen the DVD but the short trailer video on their website is very useful in explaining quickly some of the most important benefits of Drupal.

1. What is a blog?
2. Why should my organisation or group have a blog?

What is a Blog?  How does it differ from a website

The best way to answer this is to describe the features of a blog that
are not present in a website.

Welcome to Kabissa! Please signup using the form above.

How Kabissa membership works

There are three steps to the signup process:

DRAFT. NOT PUBLISHED

This guide is due to be published in March. Please contact us with your suggestions on what we should cover.
We are considering including the following resources:

As you become a more experienced Internet user, you may consider
building your own Web site. Your colleagues and friends may have their
own Web sites, and they may encourage you to build one for your own
organization.

There are several good reasons for having a Web site. Having a Web site can: