Tobias Eigen is the founder of Kabissa - Space for Change in Africa, a nonprofit tech assistance provider based in DC/Seattle. Kabissa began providing web hosting and domain services for African organizations in 1999 and today does training-the-trainers capacity building. They are looking to next move into online social networking tools to facilitate information sharing and networking among African civil society organizations. We sat down at the Net Squared conference for the following interview.

There are 800 member organizations participating in Kabissa, 40% of which are based in Nigeria. Though originally interested in brochure type static web sites, Kabissa organizations have found that the web is now a more interesting place to work actively. Tobias told me he is seeking to offer a turn key social networking suite as easy to use as MySpace, but uniquely tailored for local needs throughout Africa.

Being a US based organization serving Africans is "a daily identity crisis," Tobias told me. On one hand it is very beneficial to be located on the West coast of the US because of the concentration of development activity underway there, but the organization has to deal with feeling out of touch with the local conditions of its constituents. Fundamental access to connectivity and language differences are also key issues that Kabissa must always keep in mind when doing their work. Their strategy is to develop training materials that are then given to people living in Africa to customize, deploy and help revise as appropriate. The organization sends team members to a different African country twice a year to meet with local partners and collaborate in the design of services.

In the next six months, Tobias says the organization wants to remake itself ("Kabissa 2.0") to become a nonprofit with stronger fundamental business practices, to gain funding for ongoing service instead of one-off projects and to become more agile in their relationship with new technologies. While excited about Web 2.0 tools, Tobias says that the absence of continuous connectivity has to be planned for. He said he would like to see more tools like off-line RSS readers that download full articles, blog software that's easy to post to by phone and email services that archive and organize knowledge resources for easy access.

Kabissa also works to help organizations learn to optimize their use of new technologies and understand the importance of best practices like Creative Commons licencing (something Tobias wishes was more prominent on the Net Squared site) and email encryption with tools like Benetech's offline client Martus.

 Tobias Eigen is the founder of Kabissa.org.  The organization's site includes news about ICT for nonprofits in Africa.  The most recent news items appear below.