For the past few weeks we had a new addition to the Drug Advice Support (DAS) family, Rae Goedeman (in picture with Bradley Naidoo). She has really been so helpful and the advice and support she is giving is really changing many lives. Not only is the support to those in need but also to the rest of the Reconstructed team. Definitely much more to look forward to from our Mother Advice Support.
Well after managing the amount of conversations with our upgraded server the amount of requests for access to the service has increased over the past week. We are back to 250 conversations in an hour and our new server couldnt handle the amount of requests from the users (See images for Network Traffic and CPU Usage). This means that in a session we could easily reach 500 plus subscribers. This does indicate that we need to expand and enhance our servers, which we hope to do in the next few days. We are happy with the growth DAS has indicated and we hope to reach our 10 000 subscriber mark within the next few months.
It was very encouraging to have The Reconstructed project beaing featured on East Coast Radio and on their “News Watch” blog which shows that their are many who can make a difference using the technology that they have at hand.
With examples this past week from people like Ashton Kutcher using Twitter as medium to raise awareness of Malaria but also to acquire Mosquito nets through using this new media format for donations. Another incident is also a British woman, Susan Boyle, who had the life long dream of becoming a famous singer and at the age of 47 her dream are being realised through her audition on Britian’s Got Talent show, being seen my millions of people accross the world via sharing sites like Youtube.
This shows that with the technology we have at hand and if its being used appropriately that we can Empower our Communities as we see the lives of The Reconstructed being transformed.
We will be presenting at the South African Mobile Media Colloquium at UCT tomorrow and we want to share the first part of our presentation that we will be showcasing.
With the increased interest from NGOs and other community based organisations on how they can use social media for reconstructing communities I’ve found this interesting presentation that will indicate how social media could be used by Community organisations and local Community Leaders. The technology is the medium the conversations and stories are still crucial in the space of Social Media for Community Empowerment.
The article below appeared in the Athlone News, Wednesday 8 April 2009 titled “IT Guru offers debt counselling online” introducing Debt Breaker for the first time to the media. Click on the picture to have it enlarged. 
We’ve just launched the first phase of Debt Breaker’s mobile website where we give consumers more information about the Debt Breaker debt counselling and management service. Debt Breaker is the first debt counselling service provider offering its users access to a mobi site with the opportunity to forward information via the mobile website interface too. You can view the mobile website via http://m.debtbreaker.co.za
1c Blogpost using MXit. We have been exploring ways of how we could ensure that more people especially youth start blogging using their mobile phones and MXit. Using a chat bot and linking MXit with this blog we were able to blog for less than ZaR0.01 using this mobile chat platform. Not bad when bandwidth and accessibility to computers are expensive. This could mean that South Africe is alive with possibilities for ordinary citizens to blog and share their thoughts using this simple technology. Setting up your blog in MXit post will be coming soon.
Visit to CSIR. Today I am visiting the CSIR and will be meeting with the national coordinator from SAFIPA. Our discussions will focus on their involvement of the Athlone Living Lab which was started late last year. One of the new projects we hope to collaborate on is the ‘Community Gaming Education Centre’ (CGEC) in partnership with Cape Peninsula University of Technology and University of Southampton. This project we hope to launch during the next few months as we use Gaming technologies to empower youth at risk.