Support Awate.com – Report #2:

The Awate Team is grateful for the positive responses to the “Support Awate.com” fundraising call. We hope the enthusiasm is kept alive until we meet our goal. As of today, we are closer to reaching 50% of our goal and hoping to receive the pledged amounts soon. Until then, we will report to you regularly, though we do not wish to continue this campaign any longer than it is necessary—we would like to focus on our regular activities. Thank you for your generosity.

This is our Report #2. We have taken some decisions and we are announcing yet another plan.

1. To date, the fundraising has yielded $2296.35 dollars, and we have received it in full; there is an additional pledged amount of $850 we hope to receive soon. We urge you to continue your efforts so that we can take a break from this exercise and focus on our core tasks.
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2. We have already started developing the technical side of our plan and we have committed ourselves to an agreement and made an initial payment. We expect to finish the task sometime in February unless we face some unforeseen glitches though we think that is a remote possibility. However, since we have some missing information on our current hosting structure, we hope a certain friend who has disappeared on us will cooperate to make matters easier. At any rate, we believe we will accomplish the task smoothly.
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3. Over the last week, the working name for the Forum, “Awate IGAD Forum” was discussed enough–though we wished the discussion focused on the more important aspects of going forward. However, as we have noticed, the IGAD acronym, without prejudice to any entity, is a burden we are not willing to carry. We believed that the “IGAD Region” (for a lack of a better defining name of the perimeter of our focus region), best defines our region—and that had nothing to do with the failures and trepidations of IGAD as an institution, or its member states. At any rate, we are doing away with that working name because it’s inconsequential to the lofty goal we set out to achieve. Instead, we will replace it with AWATE GLOBAL FORUM to epitomize our worldview of “Think global, and act local”. Act local in alignment with our political slogan–inform, inspire, embolden and reconcile—relating to the people of our region, and think globally to reflect the universal values we espouse, the universal and geopolitical issues we keep an eye on, that affect the lives of the people of our region, and our efforts of explicating them to our global community of members, supporters, and friends.
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4. In passing, we have seen an objection to the name Awate itself! Here, we would like to emphasize that the Forum was created by Awate.com and the Forum was created under that umbrella, not the other way around. We hold our flagship brand name dearly and it will be our signature and we hold that Awate is an embodiment of a noble struggle to emancipate our people from occupation, and an inspiration to those who sought to liberate themselves. That inspiration, we believe, was spread by Awate’s humble launching of the struggle. Awate.com is our brand and we will not disown it at any cost.
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5. We were approached by intermediaries to sell the domain name with a relatively large amount of money. Unfortunately for the buyers, Awate.com is not for sale.
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6. We would like to applaud all our friends who are helping the campaign, particularly Beyan Negash for coming up with an excellent idea to help the fundraising efforts by offering his collector-item Tigrinya dictionary, for which the bid has already reached $250. This is a good example of how to support Awate.com if anyone has a collector item that they want to auction for the benefit of the fundraising.
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7. Just for a thought: we have a 1998 HP laptop from with which we launched awate.com, and we also have the first bulky 2000 Sony desktop that we used for many years to manage awate.com. Do you think we should auction them? Look at their pictures on this page and advise us whether to keep them for a future press museum (Hopefully) or auction them on a condition they are given as a custody.
8. Once the design work of the website is finished, we would like your help in
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   .spreading the word to invite proficient writers in both Arabic and Tigrinya, and who would like to be part of the Awate.com family of writers. The current English guidelines also apply to the two languages as.
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9. Now that we have come this far, we would like to see nominations for moderators and task managers to delve into the details of the expansion and smooth running of the Awate Global Forum—including updating the guidelines if need be.
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10. Floating an idea: we have identified one means of reversing the degeneration of our region’s general cyber discourse–particularly on social media where hypocrisy, bigotry, and confusion is being spread. We believe there should be a professional association of writers and Artists who should strive to set the standards for our discourses. Therefore, we are thinking of taking the initiative to form the Awate Pen Association, which can organize all interested and qualified people to do their part in improving the situation–all AGF members and writers should think of being part of this endeavor. However, ideas are as good as the time invested in realizing them—we are presenting ideas and we are committed to working as much as we can—obviously we need committed people who are passionate about such ideas for us to take the lead.Related links:
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    Dear friends and readers of Awate.com (January 8, 2018
    Announcing Awate IGAD Forum January 11, 2018