Hi Ben

You and Tobias have overlapping interests. Given your interest in Africa and gender issues I thought of you when I saw this edition of his newsletter.

Pamela

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Afrika Kabissa - Absolutely Africa <community@kabissa.org>
Date: 8 March 2011 19:10
Subject: Kabissa Gong Gong: March 2011 - International Women's Day / Survey Results / Intro to WordPress
To: Pamela McLean <pamela.mclean@dadamac.net>


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Kabissa Gong Gong: Monthly Member Newsletter

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Kabissa - Connect for Africa

Contact Kabissa

9874 NE Yaquina Ave
Bainbridge Island, WA 98110
United States

community@kabissa.org
+1-206-965-9345

March 8, 2011

This Month in Gong Gong

Today, March 8th, is International Women's Day. What did you do today to celebrate? Let the world know - and join the global celebration by tagging your posts and tweets with the #iwd hashtag. Click here to add a post to Kabissa Connect or send your message by email to connect@groups.kabissa.org.

Kabissa collaborated with WiserEarth on a survey of West African civil society organizations and the role of social media in their work. Today we are pleased to release the results of the survey (download PDF: English / French), as well as spreadsheets containing data we used to do our analysis. We welcome researchers to download and use the data and let us know what they gleaned from it, and give us feedback on questions we may want to ask in future surveys.

Mark Root-Wiley, the star Kabissa volunteer who designed this newsletter, posted a thorough Introduction to WordPress for Civil Society Organizations which he is convinced is the best software anywhere for creating and maintaining nonprofit websites.

Volunteering at Kabissa is shaping up nicely, with teams forming to work on different categories of tasks to nurture and grow Kabissa as a network, improve our online platform and sustain Kabissa the organization. We will be announcing opportunities soon, but you can contact us anytime if you are interested in joining our volunteer team or contributing to projects. Click here to express interest in volunteering for Kabissa or contact our volunteering coordinator at volunteering@kabissa.org.  

Now on to this month's Gong Gong, packed with great updates and content from the Kabissa community. As always, please do not hesitate to contact us with feedback, reactions, and questions!

With thanks,

Kabissa Team

Organization Directory Updates

Farmers Supportive Service and Community Utilities (FASCU) - Wenchi, Ghana

Empowers poor rural communities through facilitation, training, education, advocacy, credit and to increase and sustain their livelihood options, natural resources and access support from relevant service providers.

Panos Eastern Africa - Kampala, Uganda

Our mission is to address the information needs of the poor and marginalised, create media visibility of their concerns and inform policy through building the capacities of the media and civil society, researching, documenting, communicating and disseminating quality development information.

Blogs, News and Opportunities

Women in civil society in Africa continue to face major hurdles

Women in civil society in Africa are particularly prone to intimidation and harassment says a new report released today (PDF) by CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. CIVICUS calls on African governments, regional bodies, the international community and civil society to do much more to protect women human rights defenders on the continent.

Released to coincide with International Women's Day, the report outlines the major challenges faced by women in civil society in Africa. These include deeply entrenched patriarchal norms and an increased risk of sexual harassment and violence due to the nature of their work.

Posted on 08 Mar 2011 by CIVICUS World Assembly

Tell Mugabe to stop harrasing WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise!) activists

Amnesty International USA just reported that  four WOZA (Women of Zimbabwe Arise!) activists were arrested today (28-02-2011) at the home of a WOZA member. The charges or reason for the arrests is unknown. This seems to a continuation of harassment and intimidation against human rights defenders in Zimbabwe.

Please add your voice to put an end to this continued political persecution by the Mugabe government.

Sign our online petition at:

http://www.change.org/petitions/tell-mugabe-to-stop-harrasing-woza-women-of-zimbabwe-arise-activists

Posted on 01 Mar 2011 by IBRAHIM OYEKANMI

FOSS for Sustainable Development Survey

You are cordially invited to participate in Free and Open Source Software for Sustainable Development in Africa or FOSSDeva survey. The FOSSDeva survey is part of the FOSSINA project which employs a number of methodologies and tools to investigate the potential impact of FOSS technologies and services in public and private sectors in developing countries in general and Sub-Sahara Africa, in particular.

To participate in the FOSSDeva survey, please follow the url:

http://servnet.ias.unu.edu/limesurvey/index.php?sid=86668&newtest=Y =en

Please pass on the survey to friends, colleagues, researchers and research institutions interested in FOSS, ICT in Africa.

More information about the FOSSINA project is available at:

1. http://www.ias.unu.edu/sub_page.aspx?catID=854&ddlID=1508

2. http://unu.edu/africa/activities/science.html#fossina

Looking forward to your participation.

Posted on 28 Feb 2011 by Sulayman K. Sowe

More from Kabissa Connect

ICT Peer Learning

There are a million ways to make a website, but my personal favorite - and arguably the most popular - is WordPress. Because of its ease of use, price ($0.00!), and community, WordPress has been my Content Management System (CMS) of choice for every client - including nonprofits, small business, and university departments - I have worked with as a freelance web designer.

Posted on 08 Mar 2011 by Mark Root-Wiley

post 28th Feb...

So for 28th Feb, we have had amazing feedback.  It started off with people asking why on earth they needed to stand up and sing the national anthem.  We still have people who don't understand what it was all about.  But there is a good number of people who stood up and sang and wrote to us from within and without Kenya.  We are getting all sorts of stories about how people started thinking differently - simply sparked by singing the anthem and thinking about the words they were singing.  It's incredible to see how the words mean different things to different people and to see how they own the words and make them relevant in their own context.  We will slowly be putting up all these stories - photos and videos are already going up on the site www.28feb.co.ke

Posted on 07 Mar 2011 by crystal simeoni

Calling all development bloggers - do you want to be researched?

Calling all development bloggers - do you want to be researched? If so, please contact me and I will send you a short questionnaire by email to complete (international NGO blogs especially).

I am a research student in international development at the University of Bath, UK. As part of my studies I am looking at blogs in development (specifically the blogs of international NGOs). You are invited to share your experience of blogging and participate in this study which will take place during March 2011. All information, including your identity, will be anonymous, and I will of course send you my research report if you would like a copy. Please send an email and I will send you a short questionnaire by email to complete.

Thank you for your interest and I look forward to hearing from you.

Posted on 04 Mar 2011 by Jane Sparrow - 1 Comments

More from ICT Peer Learning

Kabissa Updates

For civil society organizations across Africa, the expanded use of Information & Communications Technology (ICT) has launched a new era marked by easier, more frequent, and more widespread communication directed to a variety of key audiences. The advent of social networks has resulted in greater awareness for many important causes and collaboration among different groups on crucial social initiatives, and as civil society organizations continue to maximize the potential of social platforms, their influence will continue to grow over time.

Today, Kabissa and WiserEarth released a study that sheds light on the habits, concerns, and needs of activists in West African civil society with respect to social networks and ICT at large (Download PDF: English / French). Polling an indicative sample of civil society representatives across 15 different West African countries in October and November 2010, the survey provides a preliminary glimpse into the nature of daily interaction with social networks and communication technologies in the region.

Posted on 08 Mar 2011 by Tobias Eigen
Subscribe to the Absolutely Africa Weekly

Kabissa is actively represented on the Twitter microblogging platform, which you know if you follow @kabissa. We regularly tweet content from the Kabissa community and retweet what we receive from a carefully curated list of ~300 Twitter contacts that are particularly interesting, well phrased and important. Reading and sharing Twitter messages of 140 characters or less isn't for everybody, but there is a great deal of important content about Africa, civil society, activism and technology being shared via Twitter that does not make it into Kabissa Gong Gong or Kabissa Groups.

Now you can benefit from our tweets, even without using Twitter, by subscribing to the new Absolutely Africa Weekly and receive a weekly summary of @kabissa tweets in newspaper format directly to your email inbox.

How does it work? The Absolutely Africa Weekly is generated automatically every week on Thursday by paper.li, a service that organizes links shared on Twitter into an easy to ready newspaper-style format. If you use Twitter or Facebook, you can create your own paper on paper.li too.

And why Absolutely Africa? This is one possible translation of our Afrika Kabissa name derived from the kiswahili language. Click here to subscribe: http://paper.li/kabissa/1297948535

Posted on 17 Feb 2011 by Tobias Eigen

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