ICTlogy

More than six years after I set up this site, I’ve just made a dire change on its structure, which is but a change in its purpose, aim or focus.

The site began as a simple blog, and then went on growing by being added more content and sections: the ICT4D Wiki the ICT4D Bibliography, etc. At some point it started to feature information about myself and, especially, the writings and speeches that I was doing.

It is now time to turn it upside down, put the content on the back and the researcher to the forefront. (Almost) everything is still there, but as more people (a) get here through search engines and land directly on a specific page or (b) just subscribe and read content on their RSS feed readers, I thought the home page should be more a presentation of the whole site rather than the last blog post and which kept all other information cornered up to the header menu.

So, main changes:

• New home page — If you’re reading this on your feed reader, I’ll be glad to know of your impressions on design and structure — with new design, and structured as a Personal Research Portal or, if you prefer it, as a Personal Learning Environment (PLE)
• Drop of the ICT4D Calendar. When I set it up, I did it for myself (and most things here) to keep track of ICT4D events. It was difficult to gather that information there but it no longer is. The ICTD.at collective, Christian Kreutz, Pablo Arribas and I are experimenting with an ICT4D Calendar on Google Calendar (but we definitely don’t pour much intelligence in it), Mark Openner is doing a cool work with the Ethnos Project Calendar, the IPID discussion list is terrific, and the ICT4D community on Twitter is gorgeous. So, no need to do something other people are doing much better.
• A new blog, SociedadRed, in Spanish. More information about the reasons to set up a second blog can be found in the first post in SociedadRed, but let us say that this blog — the ICTlogy ICT4D Blog — will remain a mostly scholar, professional, academic one, while SociedadRed, while still dealing mainly with the Information Society, will be more personal and framed in Spain.

By the way: I am sometimes enquired about the odds and ends of this site, how do I work with it, how I benefit from the huge amount of hours that I presumably spend with it, etc. Well, I have been invited to impart a keynote speech at the PLE Conference, which will take place in Barcelona the 8th and 9th of July 2010. Come and find out.

PS: Many many thanks go to Mercè Guillén: she deserves a good share of credit for the redefinition of the site and rearranging the mess it had become. Her advice is like watercolour: comes concentrated and in small drops, but once diluted you can paint a whole sea with it.

With almost everyone certifying the death of blogs, and while witnessing a massive migration towards the fertile and prosperous lands of social networking sites, emotion tears in my eyes won’t stop me from proudly shouting out loud that this personal research portal just turned six.

No, it does not seem like yesterday. A zillion things have passed since the first post in this blog and since the 5th anniversary:

• 786 blog posts, (), 825 comments () and 106 pages.
• A bibliography with 1404 works and 1094 authors ().
• 467 wiki entries (, ).
• 12 learning materials.

What about the events ()? Well, this part is certainly under revision. On the one hand, there are increasingly more people and more ways to share agendas about congresses, conferences, workshops or any kind of meeting than when I set that section up in early 2006. On the other hand, in the last semester we have been discussing with Christian Kreutz and the ICT4D.at team the possibility to team up and create a Google Calendar on ICT4D Events, but everyone (including me) is so busy… Time will tell.

Of course there still are Twitter, delicious, Google Shared, Google Calendar, Slideshare and YouTube to share content and my Lifestream/aggregator or my FriendFeed to rule them all.

Notwithstanding, the huge discovery this year has definitely been Twitter. From the several ways to use it, my main purposes are sharing links to resources, broadcasting “headlines” when attending events, and network, which despite all criticism, works pretty well for me.

Another thing worth noticing — and I thank Michel Bauwens for the idea — was collecting all the conference reviews (liveblogging) in a common place. It now features 280 articles coming from 52 conferences, which gives an idea of one of the main uses of the blog.

All that said, probably the most important thing during this last year was that I got my PhD. My thesis, Measuring digital development for policy-making: Models, stages, characteristics and causes got an “Excellent” from an international examining committee and will, hopefully, be soon uploaded to this site and join the 98 works that it already features amongst writings and speeches.

I’m writing this sitting at IDRC headquarters in Ottawa, just before meeting about their telecentre.org project. I can hardly find a better framework for “my” anniversary.

I want to end up this personal rant by thanking all the interesting people I constantly meet both online and offline. There is no other way I could have learnt so much — at least I guess I did… — without so many people sharing their ideas, data, information, knowledge and warmth. Thank you so much.

I just got an e-mail form Michel Bauwens — whom I met at the I+C+i. Liberty, equality and P2P conference (Part I, Part II) — suggesting that I should collect under a single page all my conference reviews, which, as some of you might know, is my favourite sport whenever I attend (or chair…) any kind of event.

Well, here they are:

As it is stated in that page:

Be aware that these are not proceedings, not objective reports of what was said, or not even faithful lists of topics covered at those events.

On the contrary, these are personal notes, taken on the run and filtered by (a) what I understood, (b) what I was interested in, (c) what I did not know and was worth noting down and (d) what I was able to type at that time.

Some (presumably many…) conferences might be missing, as I’m just collecting in this page the ones for which I created pull-down menus, which are the ones with several sessions. In other words, one-single-session events are not (yet) in the collection of Conference Reviews.

Nevertheless, the list already climbs up to 228 articles coming from 24 conferences, which represent almost 30% of the total or articles in this blog. I maybe should be doing this on a pro-basis and forget about doing research and teaching ;)

This personal research portal just turned five. Five years that turned it from a simple blog to the platform per excellence where to write out thoughts, take down notes, collect lists of places and things, gather people and their works, keep track of some events and, of course, maintain a live CV, becoming, the whole thing, part of my virtual identity or part of my presence on the Net.

Some numbers:

• 663 blog posts () and 570 comments ().
• A bibliography with 1172 works and 924 authors ().
• 394 wiki entries (, ).
• 88 events (), a list/calendar of events (congresses, conferences, symposia, etc.).
• 11 learning materials.

In these last times of web 2.0 fever, I’ve been using some other external services, with variable intensity:

• Slideshare, which now features 19 slideshows
• Delicious, collecting now 183 bookmarks and yet to find its specific use. So far, two main uses: collections of bookmarks to prepare speeches; way to send bookmarks to other websites, by tagging them with an agreed tag (e.g. everything I tag with “IDP” — standing for Internet, Dret and Politics — goes to my department’s intrablog)
• Twitter, with 83 updates, and turning itself into a sort of mix between a linkblog and a nanoblog (i.e. a place to put the links I want to let other people know, but that, for any reason, will not be on the blog, bibliography, wiki or whatever)
• Dopplr, to show where in the World I am (and see where other friends and colleagues are)
• Sweetcron, to gather all this mess in a common place

Last, but not least, two upgrades I’m specially proud of are:

• Being able to present all my works () — speeches, seminars, articles, book chapters, etc. — independently from the rest of the bibliography, but using the same database, so to keep everything up-to-date with minimum effort.
• Put up the website in Catalan and in Spanish, even if some more dynamic places (e.g. the blog) keep English as a main language

Lotta work? Not really. Or, actually, yes, a lot of work, but the work had to be done anyway: impart seminars whose presentations I had to prepare anyway, write articles whose bibliographies I had to collect anyway, take down notes which I would have anyway… It’s actually a hell of reporting, not a lot of work, the key being to make it mainstream in your daily workflow:

• I blog, edit the wiki, twit, bookmark, instead of using notebooks, sticky notes or napkins that I will loose or won’t be able to easily search and retrieve: everything in the same place and digitized
• I use a bibliography manager, not a folder in my hard drive, or a spreadsheet, or just a text document: i.e. I use a database and one that works online
• I keep the interesting events in another blog, so I can realize the ones that have several editions and prepare my attendance to them or to be aware of upcoming calls for papers
• I take really seriously my presence on the Net: I absolutely believe that you and what you do have to be digitized and online to matter, specially if you’re a knowledge worker. Any effort to do so will always pay back.

Three years ago I set up ICT4D Courses, a repository where I would be uploading learning materials related to training courses in the field of ICT4D.

After that time, the repository has not grown at all — it was somehow part of my MPhil’s dissertation.

On the other hand, I had recently created ICTlogy Learning Materials Series, a place where to upload the learning materials that I had created.

Now, it does not make sense to be having two different places for the same thing: open educational resources, so I merged them into one. The URLs have not changed, just the respository, that now holds everything concerning open educational resources:

You’ll see it missing from the top menu, but you can always access it at the Bibliography, and then go to Types of Works and Learning Materials.

Some people now and then ask how I do maintain my bibliography and how do I integrate it with the blog and the rest of the site.

My bibliography runs with BibCiter, a PHP+MySQL (like WordPress) bibliographic manager that just some weeks ago had its version 1.0 released.

The new version 1.1 now supports the use of a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to embed citations in your WordPress blog. See, for instance, the end of this page or this other page to see an example of its applications.

The full integration of WordPress + BibCiter + Mediawiki is not difficult, but it is neither a minor issue, as it requires some coding, as each and every WordPress theme, even if similar, works in different ways.