The Kabissa online community platform was built using Drupal and CiviCRM, two very powerful freely available open source web applications. It would be great to get more folks in Seattle who are working in Africa to pick up on the benefits of CiviCRM for nonprofit/charitable work and consider using it. A terrific opportunity to find out more is coming up - a new CiviCRM Users Group will meet for the first time on May 27th. Details at http://bit.ly/b1vUY1

Thanks to everyone in the Kabissa and Connect Pacific Northwest Community for your interest and support of Lumana Credit! The Microfinance and Microbrews event, hosted by Seattle Microfinance last Thursday, was a great success. We had a large turn-out of about 100-150 folks who came to learn about Lumana's goals and recent initiatives for 2010. Lumana spoke about their over-arching mission of using microfinance as an enabler for rural villagers in Ghana, as well as their recent tech partnerships with Literacy Bridge and Open Data Kit.

I got an interesting email just now from Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project. I've pasted it below - if you have any extra XO laptops lying around and no longer need them, you may want to donate them to be used in child education projects in Haiti.

Personally, I am a little ambivalent about the offer - in it he seems to reinforce the idea that the laptops are not as useful as we all had hoped but that they are still useful for use by children in poor countries.

I found out about this through Twitter via @care - seems an ideal opportunity to get people together locally to reflect and work on the issues we care about.

Best,

Tobias

Dear Friend,

Very interesting - an organization in the Pacific Northwest that I have been following for years has announced today that it has changed its focus and its name.

"To bring about the scale of change needed for this kind of impact, we need to connect a lot of people – both to each other and to the planet. We’ve tried to capture the essence of this in our new 'You Are Connected' tagline."

Global Washington http://globalwa.org is a very interesting organization that supports the global development sector in the state of Washington. It is comprised of non-profits, foundations, businesses and governmenatal agencies who work together to build a more equitable and prosperous world.  Its diverse members work collectively to generate new opportunities for growth, strengthen member organizations and increase impact.

Global Washington is hosting what sounds to be an exciting event on October 21st in Seattle.  I think anyone in the Seattle area who is interested in Africa and non-profits should attend, and Kabissa will definitely be represented!

I got an email from idealist.org with a great list of nonprofit career and grad school fairs in Portand and Seattle coming up in October - see below. Kabissa once participated in a grad school fair at George Washington University in Washington DC, and it was really fruitful for us as an organisation.

Zack Tucker, the Seattle film maker was just in Morocco and posted a blog post from Morocco - visiting Tanmia, ATED and ASUEEJ.   Tanmia has been a long time partner of Kabissa and was instrumental in helping Kabissa with our previous work "Time to Get Online".  Zack had the opportunity to meet with Tanmia and two other non-profits to learn from them how technology is being used in Africa to further the work of non-profits.

Hey PNWesters -

Below is an announcement about Seattle Net Tuesday, which I think would be a great event for Kabissa folks in Seattle to consider attending from time to time. Net Tuesdays are meetups affiliated with Netsquared.org, which Kabissa has been involved with since 2007. Our "Web 2.0 Ambassadors" idea was a Netsquared finalist. 

Direct link: http://seattlenettuesday.ning.com