Thanks for this, I really appreciated reading it and agree that it’s time to make things happen at the grassroots. And I agree with Sokari – it doesn’t take much when we all pull together.

What I find inspirational about you and this remarkable group of “African technorati” that you are a part of is that you have the leadership, skill and creativity to come up with these amazing new ideas and then actually implement them – and quickly! You make it easy to support you!

I think these various new initiatives speak to an approach I have been thinking about for the last several months, in fact since a call I had with Sokari about Web 2.0 and why African civil society organizations are not (yet) very actively using it in support of their missions. It seems to me that people want to take action and join worthwhile initiatives, and they do it when they are exposed to it in an accessible and human readable (read: Web 2.0) form. So is it 10% idea and 90% marketing?

These nifty new initiatives are luring people in, subverting them, and breaking down their resistance to change. People are doing things in new ways because of you.

This is harder to do on an organizational level because of the inherent barriers to change, so even though the individuals involved may “get it” they still won’t necessarily know how to take even the first step to exploiting these new tools within their organizations.

The Kabissa 2.0 site up and running at http://www.kabissa.org since last Sunday is aimed at addressing this, and is designed specifically to promote organizations and encourage “horizontal linkages” between them and the people involved with them. And we are doing it not first and foremost through training, as we would have in the past, but through the more subversive means of simply providing a service that is so useful that organizations will be compelled to use it!

It’s also a platform, so we can do map mashups (not working well now!) and theoretically add other features like mobile phone alerts, blogging by phone, and access to content via mobile phones. Perhaps we could collaborate on a Netsquared proposal for N2Y3 to do a nice mashup project?

Anyway, a short comment turned into a long one. I’m excited – keep up the good work and let’s make it happen.

Cheers,

Tobias

Let’s hope it finds it’s way to the right hands.