Apologies for missing the last couple of weeks due to a fractured left arm which gradually on the mend.   Since the last roundup  on April 10th we have had 14 new members which is great. Kabissa has now passed the 1200 mark and still growing. I am  also pleased to see the steady growth in numbers of members taking advantage of K2's blogging feature.  Please remember there is no limit to the number of people in your organisation who can blog and also note you can post separately to "Events" which will appear on the Kabissa calender.

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

Just as a toothless molar deprives one of the enjoyment of ripe kolanuts (to quote a Yoruba proverb), so is the irregularity of energy denying many organizations (in Nigeria especially) the opportunity to maximize the benefits inherent inthe (new) technology.

I have been involved with Kabissa in various capacities for the past 7 years - as a member, as an adviser and now as the community coordinator, so I would say I am more than qualified to blow the "Kabissa Trumpet".

Four organisations have joined Kabissa this week, two from the Cameroons, two involved in rural conservation and one Arts and human rights group.  Rural-Urban Development and Education Agency  is a youth centered NGO  based in Cameroon that aims to address the educational and employment needs of young people by providing community based teachers and creative teaching methods and urban community projects.  

Twenty six organisations joined the Kabissa online community in March. The activities ranged from HIV/AIDS, agriculture, capacity building, enterprise creation and refugee support.

Conflict Resolution initiative : Based in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. CRI train local leaders in conflict resolution skills to resolve local disputes and also provide training and sustainable community development in the Niger Delta region, Nigeria and the world at large.

Kabissa has set itself a huge challenge in deciding to create the new online community with the aim of bringing together over a thousand civil society organisations across the continent. Whereas previously members were "passive users", K2 requires a signifianct change in the way members think of and use the site as now they are being asked to actively participate in the development of Kabissa. In other words the members and users move from being in a passive user state to being active contributors through creating content and building relationhships with each other on a geographical or thematic basis.

[Image: iMedExchange]

Our job at Kabissa is to facilitate and support members. One way of doing that is to keep everyone up to date with what is happening on the site so we have decided to have a weekly roundup of K2 which includes brief profiles of new members, highlight from the weeks most interesting blog posts and news of any changes to the site and to Kabissa in general.

The good news for Kabissa is that we have 60 new members since January this year which brings our membership to over 1000. Our aim is to try and get at least 5% of these to become actively involved with K2 by the end of the year and build on that and hope there will be some knock on effect and members encourage each other to join in.

I remember once writing a post called Turning on the social networking on my personal blog - that was last year when I was learning about blogging and was very excited to learn about the power of social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, digg.com and their very popular African equivalent muti.co.za. These tools can be extremely useful to learn about important events in Africa and around the world, and to help spread the word about initiatives, campaigns and organizations that you believe in and support.

Now, almost exactly a year later, we are bringing social networking to the Kabissa community! At the bottom of this and every blog post on kabissa.org you will see bookmarking links, enabling you to share blog posts you see here with others. We all have our preferences (I like muti and delicious personally) so if you don't see your favorite social bookmarking site here let us know and we will add it.

I was searching on Google today for web 2.0 in Africa (what else) and came across the FAO Audio Online catalogue which happened to feature a picture of me listening attentively to a panel (!!) along with two interviews with Anriette Esterhuysen, APC Executive Director, and me. The interviews took place at the Web2fordev conference in Rome back in September 2007.

I hadn't come across this page before nor heard these interviews but I think they do capture some of the excitement Anriette and I shared with folks at the conference about Web 2.0. Anriette told a very informative story of Fantsuam in Kaduna, Nigeria and the importance of access (bandwidth!) to get information through the Internet. Fantsuam is part of APC and a longtime Kabissa member. I spend quite a bit of time explaining my motivations and passion for developing the Kabissa Online Community website for African civil society.

Blurbage and mp3 files to download and listen below.