Kabissa Gong Gong: May 2008 - Spotlight on Women of Uganda Network

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A monthly newsletter for members of the Kabissa African civil society network

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The Deadline for all submissions to Gong Gong is the 25th of the month. Click here for more details about how the newsletter is produced.

Submit content regularly to the Kabissa Community Website, and it will be considered for inclusion in the newsletter. You can also send us your community news by email to community@kabissa.org.

You are encouraged to forward Gong Gong to others and to reproduce it in your own publications. Gong Gong is produced under the "Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike" Creative Commons License.

1. Dear Mimi: Internet Advice Column

It's great that Kabissa has provided all the members with a space to blog but I am not really sure why I should use the blog and how to use the feature?

There are many ways in which a blog can help your organisation. Apart from generally promoting your organisation, a blog also enables you to write regular updates on activities, organise online campaigns, publish events, connect with other members and readers of Kabissa and much more. To get you started, we have published an online guide Blogging for your organisation which explains in detail how blogging can help you and how to use the Kabissa blog.

Have a question for Mimi? Write to her at mimi@kabissa.org

2. Under the Baobab Tree: Announcements from Kabissa Members

3. Kabissa Matters

Kabissa launches new Social Networking site for African Organizations
We have been dropping hints about "Kabissa 2.0" for a year now, and in February we finally were able to share the fruits of our labors at http://www.kabissa.org . We hope you like what you see!

Feel free to explore the new site, which is still very much undergoing testing. It is designed to empower African organizations and their allies to SHOWCASE, CONNECT and LEARN. This is all about creating horizontal linkages among organizations that might otherwise have been impossible, on the local, city, national and regional levels. It is about knowing how best to use the Internet and related communications tools in pursuit of an organizational mission.
Getting started with Kabissa 2.0
Organizations that have been a part of Kabissa since before February 2008 are advised to carefully follow the instructions on the Getting Started guide to verify that their organization details - which were transferred from our old system to this new one - are correct and up to date.

Kabissa 2.0 is a community effort
Please help us to get issues with the site resolved as soon as possible by reporting problems and giving us your candid feedback. If you are interested in being more closely involved in the development of the new site as a volunteer or advisor, you are invited to join the Kabissa Beta Group.

4. Technology News and Resources

African technology developments are moving at an incredible pace with new websites, applications and mobile phone technologies being launched every month.

In this edition Gong Gong newsletter we publish some of the most useful and interesting developments over the past 12 months.

FrontlineSMS: FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system which enables users to integrate SMS messaging with a computer. It is provided free to charities and other non-profit organisations. For some examples of how FrontlineSMS has been used see [Kubatana.net - Zimbabwe]

NGO in a Box Toolkikt: Tactical Tech's NGO-in-a-box project is a series of innovative toolkits designed to meet the specialised technology needs of non-profit organisations such as NGOs, activists, independent journalists and community groups. As the name suggests, each toolkit is a box containing: * CDs containing specifically selected Free and Open Source Software * easy-to-use tutorials * hands-on guides * informative case studies.

NGO-in-a-Box lançado em Português : O Audio/Video NGO-in-a-Box é um kit de softwares, guias e tutoriais que simplifica o trabalho de ONGs e ativistas de mídia que querem utilizar ferramentas de áudio e vídeo para mudança social.

Handbook on Information Design: An Introductory guide to Information Design aimed at helping NGOs and advocates strengthen their campaigns and projects through communicating vital information with greater impact. The project intends to raise awareness, introduce concepts, and promote good practice in information design which can be a powerful tool for advocacy, outreach, research, organization and education.

Open Office: A suite of software for office and general use similar to Microsoft Office but completely FREE. It includes a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager and drawing program. OpenOffice also works with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office and open formats such as .odt. OpenOffice runs on Linux and Windows and on Mac OS X under X11.

Site of the Month: Digiactive has a very simple mission - to teach grassroots activists how to use the internet and mobile phones more effectively for campaigning, advocacy and enhancing their profile.

digital activism: the methods by which citizens use digital tools to effect social and political change.

Digiactive achieves this by sharing stories, reviewing activist guides and online resources and encouraging the building of online communities to work together for a common good. Each post is supplemented by a list of the tools used,an explanation of the tools and a description of the campaign.

5. Opportunities Pot

Job Opportunity in Accra: FREE THE SLAVES seeks West Africa Regional Coordinator

6. Member Spotlight: Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)

This month, Sokari Ekine interviews Dorothy Okello, the founder and director of WOUGNET. WOUGNET (Kabissa profile, website hosted on Kabissa) has been a Kabissa member since 2001.

Sokari: Can you give members a brief overview of WOUGNET - when and why it started and what it does?

Dorothy: Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET) is a non-governmental organization initiated in May 2000 by several women's organisations in Uganda to develop the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among women as tools to share information and address issues collectively. WOUGNET's vision is a society in which women are empowered through the use of ICTs for sustainable development. Our mission is to promote and support the use of ICTs by women and women organisations in Uganda, so that they can take advantage of the opportunities presented by ICTs in order to effectively address national and local problems of Sustainable National Development. Presently, WOUGNET has over 90 women organisations as members, the majority are in urban areas and/or district towns where there is some Internet access and a few in rural areas.

WOUGNET activities are carried out under three major program areas:

Information sharing and networking: This program aims at providing relevant information to urban and rural women and sharing of experiences for purposes of improving quality of lives.

Technical support: This program aims at supporting women organisations to access, utilise and apply ICTs in addressing their development problems.

Gender and ICT Policy Advocacy: The program aims at building capacity of network members to effectively influence the formulation and implementation of gender sensitive ICT policies and programs. WOUGNET serves as secretariat for the Uganda Women's Caucus on ICT (UWCI) to undertake advocacy activities geared towards addressing gender concerns within the ICT Policies and programs.

Sokari: You recently updated your website from being a very comprehensive but somewhat flat and passive site to one which is more interactive, more organised and less cumbersome. Can you tell me what led to the decision to change and what do you hope to achieve with the new site?

Dorothy: I would say that the new site was motivated by three needs:

To make the site more interactive in order to increase engagement by WOUGNET members as well as site visitors
To make the site more 'useable' as well as easier for one to learn about WOUGNET and our programs, and how to participate
To take advantage of new web technologies, including Web2.0, that make maintenance and administration of the website so much easier

Sokari: What new features do you have on the website?

Dorothy: Among the new features include:

ability for members and visitors to register and contribute articles, blogs, etc., directly to the website
rss feeds to bring in relevant information from other sites, e.g., we have a link on the Citizen Journalism page that brings in our contributions and others at the Citizen Journalism in Africa project in which we are also participating
for the links and resources section we are now pulling in links compiled through Delicious that allows a more network-approach to compiling and sharing knowledge in the various categories of interest. At the moment, we have an agriculture group and a health group

Sokari: Do you plan on adding any other features such as broadcasting using podcasts and video casts?

Dorothy: Yes, we do and we are getting training and support on how to go about this through our participation in the Citizen Journalism in Africa (CJA) project. Just this week, WOUGNET is one of six organisations that have participated in a week long training on citizen journalism including digital photography, digital recordings, and broadcasting.

The CJA is a three-year initiative funded by both Hivos and the EU. Hivos is working with SANGONet (South Africa) on this project. The aim of the project is to increase civil society organisations' use of and interaction with various forms of media. This will help them maximise their communication strategies and reach. It is hoped that this will strengthen the organisations' use of media and increase quality information dissemination capacity using multiple platforms. The project is targeting six countries i.e. South Africa, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania.

Sokari: I note you have chosen to place your gallery on WOUGNET's server rather than use a service such as Flickr or Picassa. Why did you choose this method?

Dorothy: Actually our web development is pretty much of a learning-by-doing process, and as a result will continue to evolve as we develop one area after an another. The short-term solution was to place the gallery on our server, but we are investigating the use of services such as Flickr and Picassa and how we can take advantage of them. This will also involve training our members in the use of the new tools.

Sokari: Why did you choose the open source software Joomla to build the new site and have you had any problems with it?

Dorothy: We chose Joomla because at the time we began Kabissa was using Joomla too. We thought it best to use the same software. So far, we have not had problems - I should add that we have just launched the website this year, but so far so good.

Sokari: What advice would you give to other Kabissa members who were considering launching their own site?

Dorothy: I think the key issues:

What is the purpose of the website and who are the intended users - this will help determine what type of website you should have including the best ways to manage our content
Availability of local support to get you going with your website design project. With our new website, we were fortunate to have a volunteer with us for three months with the kind of skills needed to help us build up our website
Compatibility of proposed software for the website and what is available or supported by Kabissa already

Sokari: Over the years how has WOUGNET changed in its use and approach to ICT tools for advocacy?

Dorothy: I think the main change is a shift from simply training/supporting members to use ICTs, but also using the tools to support our advocacy work on the need to ensure that our ICT policy environment is responsive to the different means, access and usage by men and women in Uganda. For example, the 'Gender and ICT Policy Advocacy' section of our websites has copies of key ICT policy documents as well as our own research and information materials on gender-related issues.

We are also more and more having the integration of the 'old' and the 'new' ICT tools. For example, we have run SMS campaigns which involve sending out sms messages on a daily basis to subscribers for the given campaign. Information on the campaigns is available at our website under the 'News section'. We have also blogged all the messages sent out during the SMS campaigns.

Sokari: Can you give some examples of the ways in which you have integrated internet technologies with other more traditional technologies such as radio and print media with new technologies such as the mobile phone?

Dorothy: I think I have mentioned this above, and perhaps after you have visited the website you can let me know if you would like more information on the SMS campaigns. For radio and print, for the moment, we have used the Internet as a resource to get information which is then repackaged into our weekly radio programs targeted at rural women farmers in Apac. With our new skills in citizen journalisms, we would hope to make some of the audio and video clips we record out in the field also available online.

Thank you very much to Dorothy and her colleagues for providing this insight into WOUGNET. If you would like your organisation to be featured, please contact the Community Coordinator.