Kabissa 2.0

One of the things that makes me happy about our new online platform for Kabissa is that it is built using Drupal, an open source content management system with many wonderful developers contributing their code to a larger "ecosystem" that we can all contribute to and benefit from at no cost to us. Today, while looking on the Drupal site for something else, I found the Drupal Twitter module. It's production code and provides powerful functionality, so I installed it on the Kabissa site today.

After years of planning and a big push this spring, we are pleased at last to announce that we have completed our shiny new site. This development accompanies a strategic evolution for Kabissa which we have been talking about since February. We are streamlining our Internet services and focussing our energies on providing a powerful platform to enable people and organisations around the world to connect for Africa.

In a first step in improvements announced last week, we have moved the Kabissa participatory website to a Media Temple Dedicated Virtual account. The site now has plenty of resources devoted to it so we expect that everyone will have an easier (and faster!) time using the site from now on. Many thanks go to longtime Kabissa volunteer Greg Schnippel for his help in ironing out the final bugs in migrating the site!

Please help us by pointing out any new problems you come across since the move today or if you have any feedback. In connection with the website development we are working on right now, we will be in touch with everyone shortly to request input on where you would like this site - and this community - to go in the future. You can submit site feedback at http://www.kabissa.org/beta - thanks!

As a member of the Kabissa Meetups group, you no doubt know that we have been developing this scheme since March to encourage Kabissa members to meetup with one another on the local level. This is explained in some detail in the Meetups page in the Guide to Kabissa Membership. If you have not read that lately I'd encourage you to review it now. If you have any questions about the overall plan for organising meetups, please post a comment to that page or contact me.

Below is an excerpt from an email I sent to the FOSSFA discussion list in January 2006, which I encountered today during a Google search for something else altogether. The message contains some insights that I think we should return to now that we have launched the Kabissa Online Community Website - key words being TRAINING, USABILITY and EMAIL.

Many people ask us all the time about Drupal, the platform used to develop Kabissa 2.0.

Our friends at Lullabot have announced The Lullabot Learning Series available on DVD. I have not yet seen the DVD but the short trailer video on their website is very useful in explaining quickly some of the most important benefits of Drupal.

I have once again been asked to nominate projects for the Ars Electronica PRIX in the Digital Communities category, which is described on the Ars Electronica site as follows:

The "Digital Communities" category will honor important achievements by digital communities well as innovative artistic approaches towards web-based communities.