If you recall, last month I shared a post from OneWorld US to help choose the "OneWorld Person of 2008". Well, the results are in and while the OneWorld community did not choose an African, they DID choose a social entrepreneur who is devoted to helping Africans "move themselves out of poverty". Now they are asking the community to engage in a dialogue with the winner. Post Your Questions to Social Entrepreneur Martin Fisher. (Pamela Adoyo, who works on HIV/AIDS in Kenya, came in a close second. Congratulations!)

A journalist Hassan Mayow Hassan, 35 was shot dead today on a street corner, near his home town of Afgoye, 30km west of the capital Mogadishu.

The Somali Journalists Rights Agency (SOJRA) has today condemned the murder of radio journalist Hassan Mayow Hassan who was gunned down on a street corner, near his home town of Afgoye, 30km west of the capital Mogadishu.

I have been a vocal critic of the One Laptop Per Child program over the years, and still am - but am beginning to see that things are turning around for the project and that they are starting to do many things right. I see the "give one get one year two" scheme has ended as of December 26th and it's no longer possible to get the laptops - several of my own neighbors participated and the process was quite smooth. Hopefully this will be extended so the laptops contine to be available worldwide to those who need them, or that it is repeated again next fall. I don't know personally how the laptops are being introduced through projects in Africa and would be glad to hear about it through the Kabissa community. In the meantime, below is a link to a useful Negroponte talk on TED about OLPC in Colombia: 

In a special report from the field, TED follows Nicholas Negroponte to Colombia as he delivers laptops to schoolkids in territory once controlled by guerrillas. His partner? Colombia's Defense Department, who see One Laptop per Child as an investment in regional stability. (Want to help out? OLPC's Give One Get One program runs through Dec. 26.) Watch this talk >>

Africa Report N°147, 23 December 2008

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Today is International Migrants Day. On this occasion, December 18 is running the third edition of the Radio 1812 event, a worldwide radio broadcast on migration issues. More than 130 radios from 45 countries are taking part. From Africa we have stations from Senegal, Mali, DR Congo, Ghana, Morroco and South Africa on board. You may have heard one of these programmes today when listening to your local station. I also encourage you to visit the special site: www.radio1812.net and listen to the programmes that are being uploaded thoughout the day.

With hundreds of online projects on NABUUR.com, how do you decide which one to help? Some volunteers have their mind made up as soon as they register, beelining it for the project of their choice.

But many of us are grateful for a little time to peruse what's available - so, if you've asked yourself the question 'how do I choose a NABUUR project?' you're in luck as today, we bring you some tips to make sure you start off your NABUUR experience on the right foot from the get-go.

I am crossposting this very interesting opportunity from the WeMedia.com blog in hopes that we get some entrepreneurs in Africa participating! Note there are two tracks - nonprofit and commercial. Intriguingly, Ashoka will be helping to select the winners and the Ashoka Changemakers portal is the home of the competition. -Tobias

I received an amusing birth announcement this weekend - for a bouncing, beautiful baby... content management system. I've pasted the email below for those who can read French. While the english speaking open source world has focussed on content management systems like Drupal (powering this website) and Joomal (previously powering this website), the francophones have been busy developing their very powerful alternative - SPIP. It's well worth a spin. I first learned about SPIP from the folks at Tanmia.ma in Morocco when we collaborated on a Time To Get Online training programme there, and now SPIP seems to have evolved quite nicely and supports many languages and has many new modern social media features. 

According to the spip.net website: "SPIP is a publishing system for the Internet in which great importance is attached to collaborative working, to multilingual environments, and to simplicity of use for web authors. It is free software, distributed under the GNU/GPL licence. This means that it can be used for any Internet site, whether personal or institutional, non-profit or commercial.

Nous avons le plaisir de vous annoncer la naissance d'un magnifique bébé (18 mois de gestation) nommé SPIP 2.0, d'un poids de 15,56 Mo (dont 8,39Mo de traductions - 80 langues dont 30 finalisées)

The problem in the society today especially the Niger-Delta region which make-up headlines in the newspaper, Television & radio news. Youths restiveness is a major problem in this our part of the world. Majority of the youths if empowered will not participate in all these pain staking activities even though some do it due to ignorance but if the ignorant ones are empowered through proper awareness it also yield a positive result. The energy that would have been used to work towards a better Nation is being used for various societal ills (cultism, drug abuse, gangsters etc)  which in turn expose most of them to their consequences such premature death, destruction of properties as well as contacting HIV/AIDS where a greater percentage of people infected are the youths. The saying that the idle mind is the devil's workshop is not far from our society today as the jobless youths (because they are not empowered) find solace in doing things that are wrong. Many of them are not in school for one reason or the other; those out of school do not have a place where they can empower themselves.