Marc Osten of Summit Collaborative made an interesting contribution today, quoted below, to the NTEN Discuss email list. It's very relevant to the ideas Kabissa has been nurturing during the course of the last year for creating opportunities for face to face (F2F = face to face in Marc's jargon below) contact for people in the Kabissa community through local meetups.

Some of you, like me, keep trying hammer the message home that effective Internet strategy, particularly new used of Web 2.0 tools, often requires that we meld online and F2F efforts.

The Obama campaign is using various networking strategies which is described in the current issue of Rolling Stone magazine. From the article - "Over the past year, the Obama campaign has quietly worked to integrate the online technologies that fueled the rise of Howard Dean —as well as social-networking and video tools that didn't even exist in 2004 — with the kind of neighbor-to-neighbor movement-building that Obama learned as a young organizer on the streets of Chicago."

Check it out at http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/19106326

Our purpose at Kabissa is of course quite different - we are promoting and encouraging IT capacity building in African civil society organizations and not trying to win a presidential campaign.

Nevertheless the example of Barack Obama is very powerful indeed and I have already been curious about the clever use of Web 2.0 technology at http://www.barackobama.com which has enabled the campaign to raise millions of dollars from individuals and is also a powerful organizing tool. All of this is well worth examining for any civil society organization organization seeking to take advantage of the power of the Internet for campaigning around any issue or in response to to a crisis.