Social Networking archive at saidia.org

Archive for the 'Social Networking' Category

I, Tobias Eigen, am blogging about Africa at Kabissa.org

Published by

August 20, 2008 in Africa, Civil Society, Kabissa, Bainbridge Island, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, ICT4D, Drupal, web2fordev and freecycle. 0 Comments

Visitors to saidia.org may be wondering what is happening here - not much it seems. I set up this blog some time ago as an experiment, to learn about the ins and outs of blogging and to learn about the free and open source WordPress blogging tool that makes this particular blog possible. My reasons for carrying out the experiment were personal but also related to Kabissa, the organization I started 9 years ago to enable me to be a reliable technology partner for African civil society. The Kabissa team was exploring the participatory web, also known as Web 2.0, and the blogosphere was - and remains - an important part of that, so having some of us blogging was an important part of our research. Outcomes from that along the way have been a research paper available on the Kabissa wiki, a “wikified” version of Kabissa’s Time To Get Online training manual in English, French and Arabic, and of course various articles, interviews and presentations we gave at Netsquared and Web2fordev. These are floating in the blogosphere and hopefully useful to folks seeking to explore the power of Web 2.0 in civil society no matter where in the world.

In February 2008, Kabissa watchers will have noted the launch of our new online community website at http://www.kabissa.org including blogs for staff of all 1200+ member organizations. This includes me! I am now blogging there very regularly, along with Sokari Ekine, Kabissa’s in-house blogger and community coordinator, and a range of very idealistic and courageous people working in African civil society. Check out the blog at http://www.kabissa.org/blog

Thanks to the Drupal open source content management system we are using, the site has some very powerful functionality we are exploring that is relevant and useful for African organizations. This includes a granular notification system allowing registered site users to subscribe to posts by specific bloggers or containing specific tags or a range of other combinable filtering methods. We also are able to do special mailings containing opportunities and timely announcements addressed to a subset of our membership (eg in a specific city or region, or working in a specific thematic area) and then to generate reports on the effectiveness of the mailings. Our monthly member newsletter contains a selection of our best content from the past month along with a member spotlight and “Dear Mimi” Internet advice column. One of the niftiest new tools we are playing with is a blog-by-email gizmo, allowing our members to send email to a specific email address to be posted (by them) on the blog, or to reply to notifications to add comments to blog posts.

So this is the long way for me to tell you quite simply - looking for posts by Tobias Eigen about tech in Africa? Go to http://www.kabissa.org/blog/1 to see them! While you are there, please go ahead and sign up and join the Kabissa community, and if you have something to say please start blogging yourself and participate in blog discussions with others that share your passion about African civil society and the role technology can play.

And as for saidia.org - I like having my own personal blog where I can speak out on my own recognizance without concern for the bylaws of Kabissa or any other organization, and also talk about any topic that spurs me to post.

For example, I have been mulling over a decision to leave freecycle Bainbridge Island, a really neat Yahoo group community I have been part of for three years now. This would be a big decision for me but if I take it I don’t want to do so alone - thanks to my blog I wouldn’t have to. If I do leave, then I would post my explanation on the blog to try to start a discussion in my community about it so I can understand better how best I personally and we as an island community can keep items out of the landfill that others might still be able to use.

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.

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

Hey 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!

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

The 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’

Casting a ballot for Africa at netsquared.org

Published by

Tobias Eigen

April 10, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Kabissa, Web 2.0, Social Networking, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, Web Development and ICT4D. 1 Comment

I was psyched to see my Casting a ballot for Africa blog post on the frontpage of the Netsquared.org website, and various blog postings about the Kabissa 2.0 proposal at WhiteAfrican.com, globalvoicesonline.org, and Meandering Passage - wow, thanks everyone for helping to get the word out. It would be stunning if plenty of projects oriented towards Africa and the global south were to be among the finalists for the Netsquared Innovation Award, which is being decided between now and Saturday, April 14th at noon. And I certainly hope Kabissa 2.0 is among them!

Netsquared.org is an initiative of Compumentor (the same folks who created Techsoup.org) and is creatively challenging advocacy groups and nonprofits to make good on the promises of the Internet for revolutionary change. According to http://www.netsquared.org/about:

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations.There’s a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as “Web 2.0″; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

Last year I attended their first conference, which was a rather loosely organized event exploring the power of Web 2.0 for social change. I was interviewed then, in fact, about Kabissa 2.0. This year promises to be more “action oriented” - especially given the grandiose competition going on at netssquared.org right now. Last month they issued a call for proposals for innovative Web 2.0 for social change projects, and this week the Netsquared community is voting on the amazing 150 proposals submitted. The top 20 will be represented at the conference - all expenses paid - and duke it out for the top prize for the Netsquared Innovation Award. Of those even the losers are no doubt going to get plenty of attention.

greenlightnigeria.org - it begins!

Published by

Tobias Eigen

April 8, 2007 in Civil Society, nptech, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Politics, Create Peace, Nigeria and Democracy. 0 Comments

In a comment to my Blueprint for a Nigerian Civil Society Election Blog, Tim Concannon announced greenlightnigeria.org - I’m glad to see this development and hope it catches on. Congratulations SDN and IDASA! Please help spread the word and make this - and the Nigerian election - a success!

greenlightnigeria.org

… it begins

Thanks for inspiring us to get this started, Mr Eigen, and for the support. We owe you and Kabissa yet another one.

Apart from some of the technology issues that people are raising here - and which you and I have talked back and forth offblog - I think Imnakoya and Sokari are highlighting the main challenges we have to overcome:

Nigeria and Africa isn’t up to speed with “blog” technology.

(I.e.: How to get Flickr, Technorati, Twitter, Wordpress, Joomla, Tagging, YouTube and everything to work together so you can do something useful with them.)

To be fair… I think some European human rights activists, who think they know a thing or two about websites, are also lagging somewhere behind in understanding how it all works together… I’ve learned a lot this week

The other main challenge for us, which Imnakoya and Sokari are correctly identifying is that the Nigerian “blogverse” is fragmented at the moment.

I think that is a reflection of Nigerian politics… things are not falling apart, so much as very slowly crumbling. (I have written about this here. I also write a little there about my experiences in Port Harcourt at Easter in 2003. On which note, by a coincidence I’m writing this on Easter Sunday 2007 so Happy Easter everyone :))

Greenlightnigeria.org is going to be an interesting experiment, to see if we can get a wave of enthusiasm for blogging going across the whole country.

In fact, why stop there? If this becomes a useful tool during Nigeria’s elections - with the biggest electorate in Africa - it must be possible to use the same technologies and approaches throughout the continent.

But we are very much aware of the fact that this is an experiment. April is the start of the process… the real crunch time is in February, when local government elections are scheduled.

For now, the main advantages greenlightnigeria.org has are for election monitors, activists and indepedent witnesses to the elections; all of whom want to be able to get information, experiences and opinions out, but want to minimise the risks to themselves of going public.

I am going to have to do a bit of editing and managing as we will have multiple bloggers, plenty of opportunity for people to interact through comments and in other ways.

We will have to manage the garbage-in / garbage-out problem with having multiple contributors… there’s no getting around our legal obligations as publishers in the UK, so a certain amount of fact checking is unavoidable.

For this reason we would love people to approach us to become bloggers - as well as to be “commenters” etc - but we will probably have to pick people up slowly, do basic ID checks, etc…

However, despite these limitations I am really excited by the huge opportunities for people to interact and use this as a tool to create debate.

More to come… -t

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’

Stockholm 009

Published by

Tobias Eigen

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

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.

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.

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!’

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.

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!

Archive for the 'Social Networking' Category

Recent Comments

Recent Posts

Blogroll