What’s been happening
I’ve been a bit quiet - It called being fully committed to projects at the moment, a rare and happy condition - but here is an update on a few things I should have blogged about.
1. Progress on Community Mobile Channels
I have been tied up with client projects so progress has been slow - the internal messaging functionality should be available by the end of the month.
2. The first Netsquared Jozi
Was on July 14th - This was a great session sponsored by Betavine, Sangotech and Netsquared and the Johannesburg Theatre Complex. In total there were 37 attendees which is great for a first meetup.
Betavine Social Exchange is piloting in South Africa in October so I have signed up - anyone can sign up here. The idea is to Get NGOs, solution providers, developers, donors and anyone else together to build useful tools - more about it here.
One briefing was from the had the Praekelt Foundation talking about their mobile phone based projects including the much lauded project Masiluleke which uses donated please call me ads to raise HIV awareness and get people accessing helplines. - more info here
Womensnet also gave a briefing on one of their projects - ‘keep your chats exactly that’ which aims to keep young women and girls safe while online. - more info here
There were also mini briefings from Betavine, a laughter project (Bill Gee) that helps with the psychological aspects of conditions, and from me of course.
Special thanks again to Steve Wolak of Betavine and Matthew De Gale of Sangonet for all their help - without them this event could of been 4 people in a bar discussing their mobile phones.
Feedback from the meetup has been mainly great with a few good suggestions - check here.
Now we need to come up with a plan for the next one which should be next month.
3. CiviCRM stuff - interesting new avenues
I have been spending a fair bit of time working on CiviCRM lately. For the uninitiated it is a system designed to allow non-profits/NGO to manage their constituent details, communications and events. It is a great system but it does require a bit of technical skill to set it up and manage it.
Well CiviCRM version 3.0 Alpha has just been released and it includes some excellent new reporting features (reporting was not its strong point up until now). http://civicrm.org/node/610
Also the CiviCRM team has been Scoping out basic CiviAccounts/CiviBanking http://civicrm.org/node/609 - this could be another great addition and could make civicrm just about the only system a fledging small NGO really needs - very early days though.
4. Twitter experiments
I’ve been running a few experiments around using twitter accounts to drive traffic to non-profit websites. The @bettermzansi account is basically a few feeds plus a few autotweets plus some manual tweets and it has managed to get quite a number of followers in the last few weeks - Even though the Making Mzansi Better site is undergoing a rebuild and is not being updated at the moment it is still experiencing a major traffic boost from the @bettermzansi twitter account. Will be great to see how it starts to develop when the site gets relaunched.
I’ve also connected up a community mobile channels demo site -> madnews.mobi with a twitter account @madnewsmobi which is also experiencing a significant traffic boost from the twitter link.
My twitter account is @roballen101 - it is now in the siderbar