We recently announced the 5 Winners for the FACT Social Justice Challenge and we are thrilled at the caliber and impact of all the Projects. As such, we want to give you a closer look at these collaborative technology Projects and the people behind them. Each Monday in the month of November, we posted an interview from one of the Winning Projects using the fact interviews tag.

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 have been following the FACT Social Justice Challenge and have been honored by the outpouring of support for the KABISSA CONNECTIONS project in the comments (see below) and number of fans. It appears the other African projects we support are also doing well which I find tremendously gratifying.

If you have not yet decided on all 5 projects you want to vote for and share our vision for empowering African organizations at the grassroots, please consider adding KABISSA CONNECTIONS to your ballot. Our project will help build their repuation online by revealing the many positive relationships they have with each other and with international organizations, foundations and online networks.  

Since there is no open leaderboard, please also tick the star or "add to my bookmarks" link on the Kabissa project page to help us see how we are doing. Add a comment too if you have suggestions or ideas for how you might use the platform. 

A selection of comments follows. 

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.

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. 

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.

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