Archive for March, 2007

Men change diapers too

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 21, 2007 in Bainbridge Island, Politics and Gender. 1 Comment

Men change diapers too

OK, this article in the Christian Science Monitor makes me very happy. :-) Vienna gives a gender change to its signs and I think it’s a wonderful idea that other communities - including Bainbridge island - should follow. I can totally relate to a young father interviewed for the article:

Mendel, however, thinks the campaign is progressive. If he needed to change a baby’s diaper and saw the new sign, he says, “I would feel 100 percent integrated.” Overwhelmingly, diaper-changing facilities are found in women’s restrooms.

There are plenty of places for me to change diapers around here - though I have done my share of sitting on the toilet seat with a messy diaper in my lap. What I like about changing the signs is that it makes me - like Mendel - feel more normal in that role when I’m out and about with my munchkins.

The message I particular appreciated is the notion that it’s a matter of taking the issue of Gender Mainstreaming to the people, described on Wikipedia thus:

Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.

In Vienna they are seeking to confront expectations about gender roles and shock people - I like it!

What it reminds me of also is that we don’t always have to wait for the politicians to create change for us - here are a couple very visible signs of gender backwardness in my own neighborhood that I have been watching and am hoping to see change:

  • Daycare provider forms have “mother” and “father” fields to fill out
  • Nursery school parents organize “Mom’s night out”
  • Local grocery store has a reserved parking space for pregnant women and young mothers, but not for young fathers
  • The most popular parents e-mail list on the island is called bainbridgeislandmoms

Gentle nudging has already fixed the Mom’s night out. :-) Let’s see how we do on the others.

Thanks K2 for the powerful new WordPress template!

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 16, 2007 in WordPress, Blogging and Free/Libre Open Source Software. 1 Comment

If you’ve been here before, you might have noticed that I’ve updated the saidia.org site design. I’ve moved to the K2 Template for its powerful new functionality. I was initially looking for a simple means for adding rotating images to the header like Grandiose Parlor but then found the K2 template which does this and so much more.

K2 Loves you like a kitten..
This picture has nothing to do with K2, but seeing their tag line “K2 loves you like a kitten” made me think of the old viral picture that went around many years ago. I just found it again here - Every time you vote Republican, God kills a kitten. Think of the kittens!

Continue reading ‘Thanks K2 for the powerful new WordPress template!’

OSISA statement on Zimbabwe Rights Abuses - March 12,2007

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 15, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, Politics, Create Peace, Zimbabwe and Democracy. 0 Comments

I received this alert from the Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa via the AU-Monitor mailing list this morning. It seems that momentum against the Mugabe government is picking up, also with reports on the radio this morning that even the South African government is critical of the violence.

Dear Colleagues, Friends and Partners

With the escalation of repression in Zimbabwe, OSISA has released the following statement:

Please may we request you to disseminate as widely as possible to your networks, media and country contacts. We are presently in the process of drafting a statement which will appear in the regional press. This statement will be forwarded to you shortly and we would like you to sign up to either as an individual or as an organization demanding that the Zimbabwe government stop its atrocities against civil society.

We would also like to request that you lobby your government, the Zimbabwe Consulate/Embassy in country, other embassies, donors etc to make a statement on the situation in Zimbabwe. This can be done by holding public meetings etc.

We are also developing a strategy on engaging with SADC and will forward details in due course.

The situation is dire and needs urgent attention.

Yours in the struggle for democracy and human rights

The OSISA Team.

Continue reading ‘OSISA statement on Zimbabwe Rights Abuses - March 12,2007′

Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 15, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, muti, Media, Politics, Create Peace, Nigeria and Global Voices. 15 Comments

Nigeria’s election in April promises to be full of surprises - and I am worried for the people in Nigeria and the region that it may not go well and descend the country into chaos. A Nigerian friend who should know has already said the country has only a 50/50 chance of getting through this unscathed. I don’t think he’s exaggerating, considering the rather shocking reports coming out of the country, such as this recent Amnesty International Urgent Action alert about another old friend, Anyakwee Nsirimovu. The organization Anyakwee started in Port Harcourt, Institute for Humanitarian and International Law, is one of the first 10 members of Kabissa. Here’s a quote from the AI alert:

Anyakwee Nsirimovu, Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL) in Rivers State, in the Niger delta, was attacked on 4 March, a week after an apparent threat to kill his family if he did not stop his human rights activities. Amnesty International believes that his life may be in danger.

There will no doubt be more reports of incidents like this as we get closer to the elections, which is discouraging to contemplate. However, I am heartened by the strong solidarity shown by members of the African Democracy Forum in response to a posting on their e-network of the AI alert about Anyakwee. People around Nigeria, Africa and indeed the world unequivocally stated their support and readiness.

One way to perhaps help to prevent widescale abuses might be to make this solidarity more readily visible on the Internet through a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog. I did an Internet search and while there are some bloggers (like this and this and this) discussing the election and Global Voices and Pambazuka News have been covering the elections, I did not see any clear effort to use blogging specifically to prevent violence during the election.

Perhaps I am being naive and there are good reasons for this - I’d love to hear them. But I’m very enthusiastic about the blogosphere and am always wondering how it might be applied to the important work of civil society organizations in Africa. I have jotted down some ideas below that perhaps others might pick up on or that might spur a collaboration. And if not in Nigeria, maybe it will be useful for someone trying to do the same in another “emerging democracy”. Read on, and let me know what you think.

Even if such a coordinated effort does not take off, I’d like to encourage everyone that knows anything at all about what is going on in Nigeria these days to blog actively about it and to tag blog postings at Technorati, Del.icio.us and other social networking sites. The election must be carried out as much as possible in public view, and Nigeria must know the world is watching. If you are concerned for your own safety, you can always blog under a pseudonym at WordPress.com or one of the many other free blogging sites out there.

Continue reading ‘Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog’

Joomla launches powerful new forge

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 13, 2007 in nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Web Development and Joomla. 0 Comments

New Joomla Forge

All in one week, the Joomla Open Source Content Management System has, in in the awe inspiring hype enabled words of its developer team, “pimped its ride“, “shifted Forge’s Gears“, and marked a “defining moment in the Joomlasphere”.

Today marks a defining moment in the Joomlasphere, which sees the launch of our gForge. Yes, the new ‘V8 hot rod’ has arrived — and we believe it will provide the best development environment for a number of reasons but primarily to future-proof and cope with huge load.

All giggling aside, I’m very pleased by these developments. Joomla is not messing around, and I am hopeful that this effort to future proof their forge (where Joomla software and extensions live) means the much anticipated public release of Joomla version 1.5 is nigh. The Kabissa website is built using Joomla 1.0 and we actively promote it to our African civil society members, and 1.5 promises to be even more powerful and userfriendly. I know we are eagerly awaiting 1.5 because it has been more than two years now since we adoped Mambo, which became Joomla, and there has been no major new release in all that time.

Stockholm 009

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 13, 2007 in Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking and ICT4D. 0 Comments

Stockholm 009.jpg

I received this photo today. There must be something wrong with the notion of a “Tobias Grill” but I can’t get my head around it. Better than “Grilled Tobias” I suppose! :-)

The “Stockholm 009″ photo comes from Eric Berg, who runs Learning for International NGOs (LINGOs) right here in Seattle. LINGOs provides international NGOs with (among other services) some very interesting online collaboration tools, e-conferencing, and a learning management system. Eric and I met last week at the “Communications Community of Practice” meeting in Stockholm hosted by the Global Water Partnership for Global Action Network-Net.

My first blog posting by email

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 3, 2007 in WordPress, Blogging and Loband. 0 Comments

segull-frenchfry.jpg

I am sending this picture of a seagull trying to catch a french fry by email. Let’s see what happens! :-)

I would like to think that I *would* share my socks!

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 2, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Politics, Middle East and Create Peace. 1 Comment

I received the email below from Ami Dar of Idealist.org this afternoon - and wanted to share the message far and wide. I am full of admiration for Ami and the work he and his colleagues do at Idealist.org, and look forward to being a part of this movement to create positive change in the world.

Idealist.org Meeting in Northern Uganda, February 10, 2007

Ami’s story from his days as an Israeli soldier watching Syrians watching him watch them reminds me of the 1914 Christmas Truce story (check out this snopes.com story), where German and British soldiers spontaneously stopped fighting and instead came out of their trenches to celebrate Christmas together.

Dear Tobias,

Would you share your socks? Let me explain.

Last month, at http://www.idealist.org/imagine, we invited everyone on Idealist to imagine a better world and to help build it together.

The response was overwhelming. People in 70 countries organized 300 start-up meetings in less than three weeks, and more meetings are planned for the weeks of March 12-18 and April 23-29, at
http://www.idealist.org/meetings

After seeing some photos from these meetings - at http://www.flickr.com/photos/idealist - I thought this might be a good moment to tell you about an experience I had when I was 19. This led me to start Idealist.org, and it’s still the best way I’ve found for expressing this whole idea.

Continue reading ‘I would like to think that I *would* share my socks!’

XO Man: Sugar and Spice, and all things nice?

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 2, 2007 in Africa, Free/Libre Open Source Software, OLPC, ICT4D and Loband. 1 Comment

The One Laptop Per Child “Sugar” operating system

This picture looks to me like an old Atari video game a childhood friend had hooked up to his TV, but in fact it’s the One Laptop Per Child answer to the traditional Mac/Windows Desktop. Continue reading ‘XO Man: Sugar and Spice, and all things nice?’

Reporting Africa, blog by blog - Becky Hogge article on openDemocracy

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 1, 2007 in Africa, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, Media and Global Voices. 2 Comments

Via the DigAfrica Yahoogroup I came across Reporting Africa, blog by blog on openDemocracy. This article by Becky Hogge should be required reading by anyone with an interest in Africa, media and blogging. It covers a new partnership between Reuters and the powerful Global Voices “bridge blogging” service, and explains the history and nature of the Global Voices project very nicely. According to Becky, Reuters launched a new news portal which includes direct feeds to Global Voices blogs on the “News by country” pages.

Reuters “News By Country”I found it interesting that there was no mention of allafrica.com, which also provides a news portal used by many to follow events throughout Africa and hosts the BlogAfrica blog aggregator site which appears to have been the precursor to Global Voices. I’d be interested in hearing more about that history and how allafrica.com, which I have always found to be a most useful and valiantly offered service, fits into all of this.

Becky also gets into the discussion of how difficult it is to report out of Africa, and fears that reporters might have of media outlets seeking to have blogs replace journalism. Time will tell - but in the meantime I’m very pleased to see the contribution Global Voices is making to encouraging Africans to speak out to the world and make their presence known.

She concludes:

Rachel Rawlins, managing editor of the Global Voices project, believes the Reuters move “demonstrates the increasing value placed by news organisations on the ability of authentic voices to provide perspective, background and context to the events they cover.” But she recognises that the value this provides is only nascent. Announcing the Reuters project to her community, Rawlins ended with a hope that “the involvement of bloggers in projects such as this not only gives a platform to those whose voices have long been left unheard, but also encourages others to join the conversation and brings pressure to bear on behalf of those who want to speak but cannot.”

Good stuff. Yes, I’ve now added the Global Voices badge on my fledgling blog. I encourage you to do the same!

 

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