Two days ago, I wrote a post on the ICT-KM blog on choosing an open source cms and the simple and practical way I went about evaluating different CMS solutions.

What has emerged is a discussion (and even a bit of debate) via the post comments from IT managers, information and knowledge managers.

Join the discussion on WordPress vs Drupal: Choosing an Open Source CMS!

Thank you everyone who voted for Kabissa Connections on Netsquared to get us into the final 15 and thank you judges who selected us to be among the 5 winning organizations to receive a $5,000 cash prize. I also would like to congratulate the other 4 winners, in particular Agricultural Marketing Information Services in Cameroon and Integrated Electonic Peace Building Project in Kenya which are both very innovative and powerful projects deserving of recognition and support. 

In a nutshell, Kabissa Connections will address trust concerns by providing a platform revealing the connections that organizations have with networks, international organizations, supporters and service providers. We will do this for organizations working in Africa while collaborating with others on open source tools, standards and approaches that can be replicated in other regions.

I am very excited to receive this recognition for an idea that has been brewing for years and which it appears we will now have the opportunity to implement. We will have more news soon over at kabissa.org on next steps and opportunities to get involved, so please be sure to join Kabissa and subscribe to our monthly member newsletter.

In the meantime, please help make it happen by making a donation to Kabissa. Thanks!  

Crossposted from http://kabissa.org/news/kabissa-wins-netsquared-fact-social-justice-challenge

I just went through and made another round of improvements to the Kabissa Connections project on Netsquared to Build Reputation and Trust of Organizations By Revealing Relationships Online. I'm feeling quite good about it and am very excited about the possibilities for Kabissa to serve the African civil society sector in a new way.

Besides my role with NetSquared globally, I also organize a monthly NetSquared event locally, in Cambridge, UK. The July Net2Camb event was led by Will Hall, a PHP web developer and open source enthusiast. He discussed the options, benefits, and risks associated with using open source content management systems for SMEs, charities and NGOs.

Will has kindly written a wrap-up of the event to share with you, and included his presentation slides for your reference:

Meaningful Media is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the quality, visibility and impact of social issue media.

We are redesigning our website and need a nonprofit-friendly web developer to bring our vision to life.

Project Details:

The Concerned Citizens Coalition and Slurve are looking for someone to help configure Wordpress, Drupal or a similar content management system for our non-profit organization.  We have the front end, but we need help hooking it up so we can upload content and automatically index articles in the most user-friendly way possible. 

We are looking forward to presenting vozmob at N2Y4 in a few days.We hope to enlist support for our project, especially from MMS-savvy hackers and mobile carriers. In a nutshell, we have been working with immigrants in Los Angeles to build an open-source platform for them to tell stories directly from their cell phones. They take pictures or videos, record sound clips, add a few words, and send that to the vozmob site via MMS.

As part of the NetSquared community, we want to let you know about a special offering from our friends at Lullabot.

Lullabot is offering: 10 discounted tickets to the Do It With Drupal 3-day seminar happening December 10th-12th in New Orleans.

For the past couple weeks there has been a long discussion thread happening on the Net Tuesday San Francisco Meetup list serv about people wanting to form a Drupal for Good group in the Bay Area.

Joshua Wiese set up a Drupal for Good San Francisco Bay Area Google group to help get it organized.  You can join the group by clicking here, and anyone can view any of the group's activity, without joining, by clicking here.

Not in the Bay Area?  Here is a link to the Drupal for Good discussion group that anyone can join wherever they live.  You also might want to check out the Drupal Dojo.