06/03/06
On Thursday February 16th, 2006, the Welfare Association Consortium held a three day workshop with the Civil Society Systems organization (CSS) delegation to evaluate the Portal (Masader) and to discuss the process of joining the international initiative “GuideStar Alliance of Civil Society Information Systems”. CSS aims to help leaders in countries around the world to build electronic information systems that generate and present timely, comprehensive and accurate information about the work of their civil society organizations.
The CSS delegation consisted of Mr. Buzz Schmidt, the President of CSS, the founder and the former leader of the GuideStar services in the US and UK. Mr. Schmidt has spent 25 years working in both the private and nonprofit sectors and serves on advisory boards of several national and local nonprofit organizations. The Nonprofit Times named him Nonprofit Executive of the Year for 1999 and one of the 50 Most Influential People in the nonprofit sector for 2000, 2001, and 2002, and Ms. Caroline Neligan, the director of programmes at CSS.
Dr. Mohammed Shadid, PMO Director, welcomed the delegation, and expressed WAC’s interest in having Masader join the GuideStar Alliance initiative. Mr. Nael Shabaro, the director of the Sector Support Programme at, said “efforts are made and the SSP team is working on updating the Portal to go along with the criteria of the Civil Society System”. Therefore, Palestine will become the third country to join this initiative after the United Stated and the United Kingdom. Mr. Shabaro also provided the delegation with a presentation about the Palestinian NGO Portal ( Masader).
Mr. Buzz Schmidt, indicated in his presentation that GuideStar collects comprehensive information about all CSOs within a country; provides an online reporting venue for CSOs to supplement data acquired from government sources; rationalizes and streamlines the reporting and acquisition of charities’ information; presents reports on all CSOs to the world through a free public web site; provides aggregate data to policy makers and researchers; and maintains open information/ technologies platform to enable provision of value-added services by intermediaries. Also, he states that “Masader Portal is a very impressive development, which responds to the substantial need for information and communication in Palestinian Civil Society”. Mr. Buzz invited Masader’s team to view the entire exercise as an opportunity to strengthen and streamline CSO reporting, government registration and grant application processes.
At the end of the workshop, the delegation provided WAC with its evaluation and recommendations.
This article was originally published on the Palestinian NGO Portal, a program of the Project Management Organization (PMO) of the Welfare Association Consortium in collaboration with its partners and sponsors. The original article can be viewed here.
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