Koumbit has just moved into a new office on June 15th. Please click here to see our new address and location.

Our new office space is a loft in Parc-Extension (a multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Montreal, next to the Outremont rail yards). To get there, walk six minutes towards the South from Parc metro (blue line) or the 80 bus terminal (if you come from Downtown). By car, take Parc Avenue or Rockland Drive and turn on Beaumont Avenue. On the pictures above, you can see Koumbit's working members enjoying the newly installed wi-fi connexion, as well as the very first sysadmin meeting to be held on the new premises.

The McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) Foundation's new website has won a Bronze award in the Public Service category from the Horizon Interactive Awards, a leading international interactive media awards. The seventh annual competition received over 1000 entries from 20 countries around the world.

A website built in partnership with Koumbit

The Drupal-powered website was developed by Montreal's Design Postimage with the help of Koumbit. Launched in December 2007, it includes a wide assortment of features—events calendar, forums, live chat, photo and video galleries, downloadable audio clips, online donations, etc.—that encourage increased user interaction and participation, and allow for communication to be targeted at specific groups: donors, volunteers, staff and the general public.

http://www.muhcfoundation.com/en/node/2768

The Montreal-based nonprofit publishing company Écosociété and its editorial board have been served with a 6 million dollar SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) by Canadian mining company Barrick Gold in light of the release of their publication Noir Canada: Pillage, corruption et criminalité en Afrique. Once again, it seems that freedom of speech won't prevail in this country in spite of the Charter of Rights and other, not-so-efficient legal safeguards.
Koumbit supports Écosociété in its fight for freedom by taking care of a Web site and ePetition that you can sign at http://slapp.ecosociete.org.

Koumbit's ethical values were summarized in Hour magazine's Job Special section. The article published last thursday is a welcome acknowledgement that it is possible to make a decent living, while promoting social solidarity, participatory economics and the like. (See our Founding Principles).

You can read the whole article online at the following address:

http://hour.ca/news/news.aspx?iIDArticle=14493
Brendan Murphy, Job Special: Navigating the web with Koumbit.org - World Wild Web (April 24th, 2008).

Apologies for the delays in the translation. Note that this translation has not been approved or reviewed by the collective and should not be considered as an official version. Some of the original text is quoted in brackets to clarify. The original version of this press release is available at: http://koumbit.org/fr/node/7757

Also note that no computer was actually seized, contrary to what appeared in La Presse in page A17 of its Thursday march 20th edition.