ICTlogy

Intress, Institut de treball social i serveis socials, organizes La qualitat en benefici de tots: el tercer sector, l’empresa privada, la universitat i l’administració (Quality benefits all: the third sector, the private corporation, the university and the public administration).

It will take place the 5th November, at the Auditori Caixa Catalunya “La Pedrera”, Barcelona (Spain).

Remei Camps and I will be talking about joint ventures among the Third Sector and the University, mainly explaining what the AbSoo Project is all about.

I guess the most interesting part of it is the “new” point of view that interaction among different actors/sectors may be good to reach higher quality levels in the projects they run.

I’m sure I’ll learn plenty about the other speeches.

• More information about the seminar (in Catalan)

Ingeniería Sin Fronteras (Engineers Without Borders) is organizing the IV Conferencia Tecnología para el Desarrollo Humano (IV Conference on Technology for Human Development)

It will take place in Madrid, at the Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional, Avenida Reyes Católicos, s/n, on 25th and 26th November 2004.

Here you may find the program of the conference (in Spanish).

On Friday 26th, at 12:00, I will be talking about the Campus for Peace experience in networking, intranets, virtual headquarters for NGOs and everything concerning the use of Internet to enhance the work of everyone engaged in cooperation for development projects (I’ll surely also speak about online volunteering and e-learning for development, as an application of networking and intranets).

Don’t even dare to miss it!! ;)

I guess I already finished to update to WordPress v1.2.1 “Mingus”

Things I changed (to keep in mind for the next update):

• index.php: functions, template
• wp-admin/admin-header.php: header customization
• wp-admin/menu.php: include own menus
• wp-admin/wp-admin.css: admin header customization, categories column resizing: left position, width, height
• wp-include/template-functions-category.php: function wp_list_cats arguments to sort by name and show/hide empty ones
• clean cookies in cache: if not, unable to login to admin :P
• upload own js, css, images, documents, etc.

My setup is completed and can be always seen in my blog’s right column, at the bottom section: Setup

Consider this a note to self… which I’d like to share ;)

Paolo Palmerini maintains a good “database of projects, entities, events and documents” about the digital divide. It’s just a gathering of bookmarks, as there’s no content uploaded on his site but links out of it.

Anyway, the collection, as I wrote, is quite good.

• www.palmerini.org
• resources on ICT for development

Added to my bookmarks too :)

BTW, he’s speaking in a workshop on ICT4D at the European Social Forum next Sunday:

• Appropriate ICTs: tools for development in the era of Digital Divide

A UNESCO report states that ICT based interventions can help reducing poverty.

I think the point is in “based” as the research focused on digital content and applications of ICTs, much further than usual studies about infrastructure or ICT capacitation:

[…] there is little evidence as to how ICT can be used to respond to the needs of the poor in their specific communicative ecologies. This project tries to address this gap with research inputs from all the project sites.

Thus, conclusions rely on locally produced content, communication among communities, e-learning and ICT uses in schools, etc.

The reference:

Don Slater, Jo Tacchi: Research in ICT Innovations for Poverty Reduction (Editors: Ian Pringle, Savithri Subramanian). – UNESCO: New Delhi, 2004 ISBN-81-89218-01-8 (841 Kb)

Nabuur.com is a community of on-line communities to provide assessment to villages in need of help all over the world.

It’s an online volunteering project and, according to their web site, it works thit way:

1. A community has an urgent question

It all starts with a local community in a developing country looking for assistance. After a screening by NABUUR this community gets a ‘Village’ on NABUUR.com. On this Village the representative of the local community describes the question or problem to be solved.

2. Virtual Neighbors look for solutions

NABUUR invites visitors to NABUUR.com and they become ‘Neighbors’ of a Village. These virtual Neighbors then start looking for solutions to the question described by the local representative. They work together and report their findings on the Discussion boards of the Village.

3. Best solutions are selected

After several solutions have been found and the best ones selected, the Neighbors present these solutions to the local representative. The local representative discusses the solutions with his or her people.

4. Solutions are implemented

If the solutions found by the Neighbors fit the local situation they are implemented. The Neighbors get to see the results (photos, stories) on NABUUR.com.

In most cases further assistance of the virtual Neighbors is required. A new question is put to the Neighbors by the local representative and the process starts again.