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.'

I may be the only one at Kabissa who uses ssh, and I know not all Africans like playing with dogs, but I do know that laughing is an important part of learning and teaching. Over the last 7 years, all of us at Kabissa have been having a tremendous time learning and teaching, and working to make technology a force for change in Africa.

Kabissa started back in 1999 by providing affordable, accessible, and secure Web hosting services to 10 Nigerian human rights organizations. Today, we provide nearly 800 grassroots organizations throughout Africa with Internet services, training, an online technology resource center, and a monthly newsletter, helping them to do what they do better. Moving forward, we are looking at innovative ways for African activists to make better use of both old and new technologies for social change.

To this end, in recent months we have been participating in a cascade of very powerful assemblies, conferences, consultations, workshops and even convergences. At these events, we have learned a great deal about how civil society activists work and how they use (and try to use!) innovative new technology, which we have sought to share through our member newsletter, trainings and other activities. 

I'm looking forward to many interesting sessions and conversations at Net2, and learning and teaching more about the way technology is being made useful by civil society organizations in Africa. And for this conference in particular, my challenge is this: let's figure out how we can make the social web make social sense even in places where access to the web is limited or nonexistent.