I have been invited to return to Netsquared as champion for Ipeace, a featured project of the N2Y4 Mobile Challenge. The innovative project is described as follows:

Ipeace, is a safety open source mobile telephony platform and Web 2.0 platform to allow journalist, human rights activist, scientist and people  to expose war crimes and human rights violation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Ipeace open-source mobile  telephony platform will uses J2ME code that can run on a wide range of java-enable phones.  

It will include   different options  (Video, Camera, SMS, MMS, GPS, GIS) to collect information, alerts and spread those information world wide.

I am excited to meet the people behind the project, Narcisse Mbunzama Lokwa and Dueme Patrick Safi, and to learn more about the Ipeace project. I am particular intrigued to find out how the creators intend to very quickly   implement such a challenging set of features on a limiting platform (mobile phones) and all of this in a way that is anonymous and secure. The need is great for such functionality, and not just in the Democratic Republic of Congo!  

Last time I was there was for N2Y2 together with Kim Lowery, presenting our own Kabissa 2.0: Strengthening the Social Web in Africa project which was featured that year. Reviewing Erik's blog post about it, I am reminded that I still think it's well worth doing even two years later!

It will be interesting also to spend more time with innovative friends at the event, including Mary Joyce of DigiActive and Ken Banks of FrontlineSMS. Indeed, it's great that 3 of the 10 finalist projects are based on FrontlineSMS. If you are coming, please let me know @kabissa!