Archive for the 'Web 2.0' Category

Run, don’t walk to vote for Pambazuka News in Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics

Published by
Tobias Eigen
September 20, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Politics, Create Peace, Democracy and Poverty. 0 Comments

Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and PoliticsIf you haven’t done so already, go now to vote for Pambazuka News!

It’s easy to do. No login required, just go to http://tinyurl.com/2yo3vy, look for PAMBAZUKA NEWS on the list and click the “Vote” button.

Vote for Pambazuka News!

For the third year running, Pambazuka News has been selected as one of 25 finalists for the Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics.

Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 300 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women’s organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators.

Winning this award would be a tribute to all the many contributors who have made Pambazuka News essential reading for all concerned with the cause of justice and freedom in Africa.

With your help, we could win this award. Please vote for us at: http://tinyurl.com/2yo3vy

NGOs going mobile… join the nGOmobile.org competition for grassroots groups in the third world

Published by
Tobias Eigen
September 18, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, ICT4D, Loband, web2fordev, SMS and MobileActive. 2 Comments

ngomobile logo

Via the mobileactive mailing list, I learned today about the nGOmobile competition, which is kicking off today! Grassroots groups in the third world seeking the tools and resources to use mobile phones and SMS in pursuit of their missions are invited to participate.

I am particularly excited because I have observed over the last two years, since participating in the first Mobile Active Convergence in Toronto back in 2005, that the opportunities of mobile phones for advocacy in the third world have been out there and available, but not fully exploited. The case studies (what works and what does not work) have not been widely shared and discussed for others around the continent to benefit from. More civil society groups need to see examples of how this technology is empowering others - and can empower them.

This competition will go a long way to remedying that problem - so hats off to kiwanja.net, 160 Characters and the others involved in putting on this competition. Read on to see the announcement, or go straight to ngomobile.org to learn more. Please help spread the word about this terrific initiative. Continue reading ‘NGOs going mobile… join the nGOmobile.org competition for grassroots groups in the third world’

Images FOR Africa - Flickr group promotes Creative Commons and sharing of Images FOR Africa

Published by
Tobias Eigen
September 4, 2007 in Africa, nptech, Web 2.0, WordPress, Blogging, Media, ICT4D, Flickr, web2fordev and Creative Commons. 1 Comment

Flickr Images for Africa group banner

I love Creative Commons. I love pictures. And I love Africa! So I was very pleased to encounter - and promptly join - the Images of Africa - Images FOR Africa group on Flickr. The group gathers images of Africa by people who want to share them with others. The photos shared by the group can be used freely under a generous Creative Commons license, and of course can be browsed, discussed or searched in the usual nifty Flickr ways.

There is even a beautiful Flickr map so you can place your own photos on the map and allow people to browse them by country.

Flickr map of the Images FOR Africa group

I am enthusiastic about the new channels this provides for building networks of shared interest among likeminded and generous people in Africa.

I would gather that Flickr groups like this with such a clear common benefit for group members will provide a wonderfully gentle route into Creative Commons for people that otherwise are skeptical of the hype surrounding Web 2.0.
Continue reading ‘Images FOR Africa - Flickr group promotes Creative Commons and sharing of Images FOR Africa’

Interview with Walter Turner on Kabissa, Web 2.0, African civil society and more…

Published by
Tobias Eigen
September 4, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Democracy and web2fordev. 0 Comments

I was pleased to learn from Nunu Kidane (Priority Africa Network) this morning that an interview Kim Lowery and I did with Walter Turner back in May aired on KPFA in Berkeley yesterday and is available online.

KPFA Africa Today with Walter Turner - September 3rd 2007

The interview came on the heels of the Netsquared conference on “remixing the web for social change”, so Kim and I were very much jazzed up by - and no doubt still processing - the attention our Kabissa 2.0 proposal received at the conference and the many remarkable projects and ideas we were exposed to. We discussed Web 2.0 concepts but Walter Turner also challenged us to go into detail about the history and justification for Kabissa, on what we think civil society is and how we support the important work of organizations in Africa.

Gathering stories about Web 2.0 in African civil society

Published by
Tobias Eigen
August 17, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, ICT4D and web2fordev. 2 Comments

web2fordev bannerHey folks - I’m going to web2fordev in September and in the lead up to that am finalizing various outputs, including..

  • A paper I have been working on for the University of Washington’s Evans School about Web 2.0 in African Civil Society and which will be published on the Kabissa Wiki
  • An article about Kabissa and Web 2.0 for ICT Update
  • A presentation to give at the web2fordev conference about Kabissa and Web 2.0

As part of this, I wanted to get an update from Kabissa members and others in African civil society about their use of blogging and other social networking tools - remarkably, there are not that many case studies available despite the clearly active use of these nifty new tools and the massive potential dangling out there.

So I wrote a post on the Kabissa blog inviting grassroots groups to share their stories and sent out a quick mailing to members to invite them to come check it out. It should be interesting so stay tuned. If you have some good stories and links to share, please do so!

12-24 hours of skype free living - and email signatures: the ultimate social networking interface

Published by
Tobias Eigen
August 16, 2007 in nptech, Web 2.0 and skype. 0 Comments

skype status animated balloon buttonI was reminded today how important Skype is as a work tool for me. It has allowed me to be “joined at the hip” with my colleagues in the Kabissa office in Washington DC, as well as keep in close contact with many friends and colleagues in Africa, in Europe, and of course in North America. All this despite being on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, far too many time zones away from all those lovely people.

Still, I had a call scheduled for this morning, and thanks to the convenience of Skype didn’t even have the phone number handy for the person I needed to talk with. Skype was acting mysterious and I was offline. I then did a quick search of my email and found his various contacts in the signature info at the bottom of his email. Web 2.0 may be all that, but after all these years, email remains the central organizing tool for my work life, and email sigs are still a massively important part of leading a professional online existence.

Jiminy Crickets. Here is the rather humdrum announcement of this huge event on the Skype blog:

UPDATED 14:02 GMT: Some of you may be having problems logging into Skype. Our engineering team has determined that it’s a software issue. We expect this to be resolved within 12 to 24 hours. Meanwhile, you can simply leave your Skype client running and as soon as the issue is resolved, you will be logged in. We apologize for the inconvenience.

And what’s an email sig, you ask? We covered this in a Kabissa Dear Mimi internet advice column last year: I miss my letterhead! How do I give e-mails from my organization a professional look?

Don’t forget to add a meaningful footer! Often referred to as a “signature”, a footer is a snippet of text that you can have automatically added to the bottom of every e-mail you send. Don’t underestimate the power of this snippet: it can contain your organization’s vital coordinates, a link to your Web site, and even an emotive parable, quote or tagline that you change from time to time. It is reassuring for people to know how and where they can reach you.

Note that last sentence in particular - email is still the principle “home on the Internet” for me and perhaps most people. It’s where we turn to for finding answers, getting help - and connecting with our social network. My sig hasn’t been replaced by my LinkedIn and Facebook profile pages - not just yet.

Nicht mit uns! Let’s join the noisy Germans protesting censorship on Flickr

Published by
Tobias Eigen
July 11, 2007 in Civil Society, Web 2.0, Politics, Germany, Free Speech, Flickr and Internationalization. 0 Comments

Nicht mit uns! Think Flickr Think! Against censorship!

I’m on my way to Germany today, so it’s timely that I come across this post on the development seed blog:

This week Flickr greeted its new international audience with a surprise: radical censorship. Originally I planned to write about how wonderful it was that Flickr added multilingual support for seven more languages. I was going to predict that its number of users and photos would quickly explode. That was before Alex clued me into the buzz from the German Flickr community, people who have been blocked from accessing a good chunk of Flickr’s content.

To access all content on Flickr you need to sign in with a Yahoo! ID. And now if you’re Yahoo! ID says you’re from Germany – or Singapore or Hong Kong or Korea – you’re blocked from accessing “moderate” and “restricted” photos. Because of the country you live in.

I am also heartily against censorship, and join the ranks of the noisy Germans in calling for an end to censorship on Flickr. May Yahoo respond quickly and find it in their hearts to reverse this decision!

This incident is a reminder also that we need to keep in mind that Flickr and other powerful Web 2.0 sites are not merely appliances that we can expect to continue using forever as we are using them today. Just yesterday I went looking for a tool to retrieve some of my favorite flickr photosets to copy onto my brand spanking new Sansa e250 mp3 player, and found that it was tricky to do so. Indeed Flickr does not offer a simple way to do it and you have to use a 3rd party tool that takes advantage of Flickr’s API.

Camping out with the Drupallers in Seattle

Published by
Tobias Eigen
June 30, 2007 in nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Web Development, Drupal and Seattle. 5 Comments

Drupal Camp 2007The Seattle Drupal Users Group met for a Drupal Camp yesterday. It was an all day affair, with Drupal developers hiding out in one room learning about such things as theming and jviews with Robin Barre and noobs like me in a larger room with Gregory Heller from CivicActions doing a so-called Barn Raising. Donald Lobo from CiviCRM also happened to be there and we took adantage of the opportunity to sign a contract and review the specs for the CiviCRM component of the Kabissa African Voices project. It feels good to be implementing CiviCRM at long last, after years of planning and false starts with other vendors, and I very much like the way we are doing it.

Back to the Drupal Camp: I found the Barn Raising to be very helpful - we basically learned all about Drupal, a leading open source content management system, by planning and implementing a Drupal site in a day. I was able to get alot of my questions answered which will help me a great deal in finalizing the migration of the Kabissa site from Joomla to Drupal (keep your eyes peeled on http://www.kabissa.org for a new site appearing shortly!). Roland Taglao from bryght.com came down from Vancouver. Roland took loads of photos which presumably he will upload to his DrupalCamp Seattle 2007 set on flickr and recorded video which is currently available, in rather raw form, at http://ustream.tv/roland. The Seattle DUG is a lively group, and I very much enjoyed and appreciated the open, friendly atmosphere. I hope to make sense of my notes here, but for the moment have just pasted them in below. Read on at your own risk!

Oh, and before you go: yes, I did go watch Candy Mountain on YouTube as strongly recommended by Gregory. :-) What is it, a morality story teaching about the perils of peer pressure?
Continue reading ‘Camping out with the Drupallers in Seattle’

Near a radio? Join talk about Nigeria election in BBC World Have Your Say

Published by
Tobias Eigen
April 23, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Nigeria and Democracy. 4 Comments

I got an email this morning from BBC inviting me to join their talk on today’s Have Your Say program is the Nigerian election. It’s on at 6pm GMT today, Monday April 23. They appear to be interested in hearing about how technology is being used, and my post last month on Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog.

Seems since then alot has happened in that department - but perhaps not enough. I’m still digesting it all, and trying to get my head around the tragedy that is the election results filtering through. The greenlightnigeria.org blog was set up by SDN, and NMEM, a to me unknown group, used the Frontline SMS tool by Ken Banks to do some election monitoring by SMS. I don’t know yet how the SMS experiment worked out, but the greenlightnigeria.org blog has been very inspiring to monitor, with audio and video testimony posted just about daily for the last two weeks.

Are you in Nigeria? Text your election observations to 0808-4032739

Published by
Tobias Eigen
April 20, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Web 2.0, Blogging, Media, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Nigeria and Democracy. 3 Comments

SDN photo: PH LGA INEC collection centre 14th 3

According to this Texts monitor Nigerian elections article on the BBC News website,

Anyone trying to rig or tamper with Saturday’s presidential elections in Nigeria could be caught out by a team of volunteers armed with mobile phones.

The number to text to is 0808-4032739. Note that number and tell everyone you know! According to the Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) website, here is how it works:

The success of our endeavor rest solely on the effectiveness of our volunteers. To participate is simple. First of you have to register as a volunteer, simply text the following information to 0808-403-2739. We will send a reply sms indicating we have signed you up as volunteer.

As a volunteer, you are expected to go out on Election Day and vote. This is the only way you can participate and report correctly on the election.

Volunteers are required to send in two reports on the conduct of the polls in their location.

The first report should be sent in before 12noon and should cover the following aspects of the polls.

  • Poll opening times
  • Voter accreditation
  • Ballot box / materials delivery times

2nd report at the close poll should be sent in before 6pm

  • Vote counting / result
  • Turn out at polling station
  • General conduct of election
  • Exit polls

And some more details from the BBC article:

The Network of Mobile Election Monitors (NMEM) will use SMS to feedback their observations to a central computer hub.

The collected text messages will then be passed on to other monitoring groups and authorities including the EU.

NMEM hopes the system will stop fraud, especially in areas considered too dangerous for other groups to enter.

“We want to set a precedent,” said Emauwa Nelson of the Human Emancipation Lead Project, a Nigerian NGO that helped set up the project.

“We want people to know that if they are trying to rig the election, there could be someone behind them and that person may send a text message saying what happened.”

… and don’t forget about blogging the election!

Then, if you are able to get to a computer with a microphone, please share your voice so the world can hear about what you are seeing and experiencing. Record a voice message to be posted directly on the greenlightnigeria.org election blog website. Or, if you prefer, send in your submissions via the greenlightnigeria.org contact form.

This is terrific news and I am very pleased to see that election monitors are making use of Ken Banks’s Frontline SMS tool to make this possible. These examples of SMS use for defending democracy are extremely important and can be applied everywhere in Africa.

Congratulations, Ken and NMEM, and may you succeed in helping to keep Nigeria from erupting tomorrow. All eyes are on you.

(If you can, please share your observations about your experience using this technology in a comment to this post - I’m very interested to hear about it.)

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