(Crossposted from my blog on Kabissa.org)

I'm pleased to see that Ushahidi and nearly all of the projects I supported made it to the finalists stage! There were few African projects in the running but there were some really good ones and I think in fact that most of the winning projects show terrific potential to be very beneficial for Africa. Congratulations everyone!

The web2fordev conference at FAO is currently in its 3rd and final day. The tagline for the event is "Participatory Web for Development", but in many ways I see it as a continuation of Netsquared.

I voted today.

When evaluating projects, I considered the six net2 attributes and also tried to imagine how, if implemented, they would affect the lives of Africans - and in particular the struggles of African civil society organizations to serve the needs of their communities. The projects I chose seemed to me to offer the most revolutionary impact across Africa (and indeed across the world) in part because they make creative use of Web 2.0 to leverage their impact.

I recently got into African proverbs - now every day when I ssh into the Kabissa server, I get served up a randomly selected African proverb through fortune. The one above is an Ashanti proverb from Ghana but has a message that is probably very familar just about everywhere in the world (ok, the bit in parentheses was added by me). I like the following one too, because it makes me laugh:

"As the dog said, 'If I fall down for you and you fall down for me, it is playing.'