Submitted by Tobias Eigen on 22 December, 2010 - 16:24
As 2010 draws to a close, allow me to wish you a happy holiday and all the best for the new year.
I am immensely proud of Kabissa and our achievements in 2010, and am excited about our plans for 2011. Below is a quick roundup.
Kabissa depends on the generosity of people like you.
If you like Kabissa and we have been useful or helpful to you, consider making a contribution. Donate here!
We could not do this work without your support. Thank you!
In solidarity and gratitude,
Tobias Eigen
Kabissa Founder
1. Kabissa the Network
As of this writing, Kabissa has 1,558 approved organizations in the network, 215 of them new in 2011, that have been taking excellent advantage of Kabissa to showcase themselves and connect with each other for peer learning and information sharing.
I am proud of Kabissa members who are doing valuable work throughout Africa on a range of crucial issues including girls education (Maasai Girls Education Fund), empowering children through football (Alive and Kicking), get out the vote campaigning (Enough is Enough Nigeria), building libraries (Lubuto Library Project) and stoking innovation in rural development (Africa Rural Connect).
You can find more great organizations by region or issue area at http://www.kabissa.org/map and keep in touch with them by participating in the Connect and ICT Peer Learning groups on Kabissa. If you prefer to get less mail but want to keep yourself informed of what is happening in the Kabissa network, you can subscribe to the Kabissa Gong Gong monthly member newsletter.
2. Kabissa the Organization
The organization that powers the Kabissa network is now firmly on the path to becoming a stakeholder-driven, volunteer-run online network. Our new physical base is on Bainbridge Island, a community near Seattle in the United States with strong ties to many African countries. We recruited a reliable and dedicated local book keeper, Georgene Scott. A new local CPA firm, Ball & Treger, competently carried out our 2009 independent audit and IRS Form 990 tax return and will handle our audits going forward.
The board of directors agreed to expand from 5 to 9 members in the new year and will take on key operational roles on a pro bono basis. Look for a call for nominations on our website early in the new year. Besides myself, our fledgling volunteer team includes Ghislain Siewe (membership management), Hannah Lee-Jones (volunteer coordinator), Mark Root-Wiley (web design), Greg Schnippel and Ryan Barolet-Fogarty (web programming and server administration). I admire and appreciate the dedication of this wonderful group of people and look forward to welcoming more volunteers on board in the new year.
As a result of this new volunteering approach, Kabissa’s core costs are modest, which we hope to raise in donations from Kabissa members and supporters. Projects to improve Kabissa will be funded separately and carried out in collaboration with partners and contractors.
Keep yourself informed of Kabissa organizational progress by subscribing to Kabissa Progress Updates, which are sent out periodically by email.
3. Kabissa the Online Platform
Kabissa’s online platform offers a stakeholder-driven alternative to commercialized online services like Facebook, and is specifically tailored for people and organizations working in Africa seeking to showcase their work and connect with each other. Since we built our platform using free/libre open source software, we can leverage the work done by others to provide great features as well as contribute back our own improvements to the open source community for the benefit of others.
The two flagship services on the Kabissa platform are the directory and groups, which we intend to continue to develop on an ongoing basis through projects and regular maintenance upgrades. On groups, we have begun working with Kyle Matthews, creator of a powerful new social learning platform called Eduglu. We have already added new functionality to allow group members to participate in discussions by email, just like Yahoo Groups. Early in 2011, we plan to hire Kyle to give our website and groups a major upgrade to streamline the content being shared and to improve the overall user interface and design.
In November we also worked with WebAccess in India to upgrade CiviCRM, the open source constituency relationship management platform that powers our organization directory. Thanks to this new upgrade, we were able to fix many bugs and gain access to powerful new functionality such as proximity search, displaying search results on a map, and personal fundraising pages on the frontend, and improved user interface and reporting tools on the backend. We intend to continue our partnership with WebAccess to maintain and upgrade our directory platform, as well as explore opportunities to take the directory to a whole new level by implementing the Kabissa Connections project which won the Netsquared FACT Social Justice Challenge in November.
Post new comment