The web2fordev conference at FAO is currently in its 3rd and final day. The tagline for the event is "Participatory Web for Development", but in many ways I see it as a continuation of Netsquared.

Our series of interviews with the Featured Projects from the NetSquared Conference began last week with Dan Newman of MAPLight.org and Deron Beal of Freecycle.

We continue the series this week with Kim Lowery, the Co-Executive Director of Kabissa, an organization that helps African civil society organizations put information and communication technologies to work, for the benefit of the people they serve. Kabissa's project, Kabissa 2.0, was one of the Featured Projects at the NetSquared Conference in May 2007. You can listen to the interview and their five minute pitch on the NetSquared Podcast.

Kim Lowery: My name is Kim Lowery. I'm the Co-Executive Director of Kabissa. We work with a network of over 1,000 organizations in Africa, all nonprofit organizations. We work with them to help them integrate technology, and specifically the Internet, into what they do, better.

In this videoblog, Lowery tells a story exemplifying the power of Web 2.0 for social action.

• projects
  
  • HELP
  • Freecycle Network
  • Big Brothers, Big Sisters

I voted today.

When evaluating projects, I considered the six net2 attributes and also tried to imagine how, if implemented, they would affect the lives of Africans - and in particular the struggles of African civil society organizations to serve the needs of their communities. The projects I chose seemed to me to offer the most revolutionary impact across Africa (and indeed across the world) in part because they make creative use of Web 2.0 to leverage their impact.

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.'