Kabissa – Space for Change in Africa Developing Country Access to Online Scientific Publishing October 4-5, 2002 Trieste, Italy

Kabissa’s Mission: Using technology to strengthen organizations working to improve the lives of people in Africa Access to Internet Services Access to Learning Opportunities Networking & Knowledge Sharing

Many African organizations are making use of Kabissa’s services 450 member organizations from 33 African countries 200%+ membership growth rate in 2001 Average of 10,000 unique visitors per month to kabissa.org 50 mailing lists hosted on Kabissa Over 10,000 subscribers to Pambazuka News, Kabissa’s weekly social justice newsletter 450 member organizations from 33 African countries 200%+ membership growth rate in 2001 Average of 10,000 unique visitors per month to kabissa.org 50 mailing lists hosted on Kabissa Over 10,000 subscribers to Pambazuka News, Kabissa’s weekly social justice newsletter

Users of the Kabissa server access the Internet in different ways The Online User –Has access to a reliable connection to the Internet in their own office –Uses the Internet on a regular basis The Cyber Café User –Has regular access to the Internet through a connection outside of their office –Does daily work on a different computer every time The only User –Not a frequent user of Web –Poor Internet connectivity

Kabissa Internet Services Therefore, they need different services from Kabissa services POP www4mail Newsletters/lists Web-based Bulletin Board Web-based Newsletters/lists Domain Hosting The full range Web POP FTP access Newsletters/lists Domain Hosting

Where does www4mail come in? Focus on Kabissa members and newsletter subscribers African organizations with irregular or only connections to the Internet Viewing news articles and documents (Pambazuka news) Browsing and searching online information resources Downloading software Downloading documents Target Audience Uses

Setting up www4mail: The Classic Open Source Experience! With few resources, able to set up up and provide an important and useful tool Found active, self-less support in the www4mail developers and at Bellanet History: First found getweb in 1998 during a training project in Madagascar Found out about www4mail in 1999 – and began corresponding with Clement Onime and Steve Song at Bellanet There was no installer then, so Steve Song sent me the first tarfile which I installed on Kabissa – and then Clement helped to troubleshoot it in my unusual installation environment In 2000, I gave Clement a shell account on Kabissa so that he could install upgrades and fix bugs without my intervention Then for years I let it run unattended in the background and barely touched it.

What we learned It is being used… Successful requests in the past 7 days = 4,200 Distinct files requested = 1,500 Total data transferred = 654 MB …but rarely from Africa Many requests from Russia, Ukraine and Cuba And not with its intended purpose Downloads of zip, exe and pdf files (60% of traffic)

Efforts needed to make it work for us Improve its image for non-technical users Excellent user guide for the non-technical user Simplify the default user interface Add support for other languages Improve administrative interfaces Gather detailed data on how it is being used Require registration (controversial) Make the configuration easier Integrate it with portal projects targeting third world users Pambazuka News VITA-Connect

Important project = VITA-Connect