(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!

• A Mashup of 29+ Social Action Platforms -- Social Actions
• Anti-Genocide Action Tracker: Genocide Scores for Every Legislator and State
• Assetmap.org/Uganda
• Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya
• Volunteer Now! - by mobile phone
• OneWorld Connect

Sadly, two other projects I thought were quite interesting, African Soul, American Heart and The Disappeared, didn't make it. These projects remain in the "project gallery" however so please do go and visit them and leave comments if you want to encourage them or give feedback.

Now comes the interesting part of the process for the featured projects, as explained by Britt Bravo on the Netsquared website:

The Featured Projects will be invited to attend this year’s NetSquared Conference (N2Y3) on May 27 and 28 (just after Memorial Day). The Conference will be held at Cisco Systems' Vineyard Conference Center in San Jose, California. Cisco Systems has been our generous host for the previous two NetSquared Conferences.

At the Conference, Project Teams will have an opportunity to display and discuss their mashups, and attendees will vote to select the top three. All 21 Projects at the conference will receive a share of $100,000 in prize money. The share will be determined by voting at the Conference.

This looks to be quite similar to last year's process which Kim and I participated in with our Kabissa 2.0 Project idea. I hope there is more than just discussion at the conference, during which I can personally attest there is really not enough time to do much beyond celebrating the projects. The $100,000 prize money will also not go particularly far, no matter how it is shared out between the 21 projects, so none of these projects should count on that for getting their projects funded.

Between now and then I'd really like to see actual work get done among the projects, nurtured and encouraged by Netsquared. Perhaps the biggest role Netsquared could play is to make sure the featured projects have solid proposals behind them, help with the actual writing of the proposal and assembling the requisite project teams, and then connect those proposals with funders.

For observers on the outside, the best thing to do is to visit the project pages you like best and write comments lending moral support, encouragement and - most of all - ideas!