By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 22 February 2008
Main categories: Digital Literacy, Knowledge Management, Writings
No Comments »
February 2008 issue of the Open Source Business Resource has published a “for the practitioner” version of my work “The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development”.
I slightly adapted the contents to make them more appealing to a non-scholarly audience, but the core idea remains the same.
BTW, I added a cite by the Beautiful South. It’s cryptic, but it is fully relevant — at least to me — when you think of knowledge, knowledge sharing, knowledge binding … and knowledge pimping these days.
I want to sincerely thank Dru Lavigne for betting on it.
More info:
Abstract:
Digital technologies have forever changed the way that knowledge is disseminated and accessed. Yet, the main problem knowledge workers face is invisibility: if people don’t know that you know, and people are not aware of what you know, you do not exist.
Governments and institutions are being pushed to foster Open Access (OA) literature as a way to achieve universal reach of research diffusion at inexpensive and immediate levels. Most efforts have been made at the institutional level, dedicating little energy to what the individual can do to contribute. The philosophy and tools around web 2.0 bring clear opportunities for individuals to contribute and to build a broader personal presence on the Internet and a better diffusion for their work, interests or publications.
We propose the concept of the personal research portal (PRP) as a means to create a digital identity for knowledge workers–tied to one’s digital public notebook and personal repository–and a virtual network of colleagues working in the same field. Complementary to formal publishing or taking part in offline meetings, the PRP would be a knowledge management system that would enhance reading, storing, and creation at both the private and public levels, and contribute to create an online identity that, in turn, will help to create a network whose currency is knowledge.
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 31 January 2008
Main categories: Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, ICT4D, Meetings, Nonprofits
Other tags: cooperacion20, cooperacion20_2008
No Comments »
Use of ICTs in development cooperation models
- More efficacy, based on knowledge-intensive projects
- Usefulness must drive the implementation of ICTs, not hype
- ICTs for a better nonprofit performance and for better project results
- Learn from ICT adoption in developing countries and apply them in developed ones
- ICTs challenge the traditional design of the nonprofit sector
- Capacity building a must for nonprofits to benefit from ICTs
- Usability, accessibility, content, sustainability
- e-Governance to enhance citizen engagement
Networked cooperation
- A necessary response to the Network Society
- Shift from hierarchy to horizontal interaction
- Human networks boosted by technological networks
- Knowledge sharing
- Project-centered cooperation, enabling inclusion
- Multistakeholder partnerships
- Decentralized networks for collaboration, while keeping autonomy
- Centralized networks still useful for certain actions
- Networking requires (network) managing skills
- The network must be properly designed, in transparent ways, making its goals explicit, lead it through confidence
- Network design and building as investment in research, development and innovation
ICTs in the Spanish Development Cooperation
- Great advances in the last times that draw an optimistic future
- Networking to seek harmonization between organizations
- Quality fostering
- ICTs to achieve leadership/excellence in development cooperation
- Effort to share both experiences and capabilities
More info
Development Cooperation 2.0 (2008)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 31 January 2008
Main categories: Connectivity, Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, Education & e-Learning, Hardware, ICT4D, Meetings, Nonprofits, Online Volunteering, Open Access
Other tags: cooperacion20, cooperacion20_2008, cybervolunteer, ICT volunteer, nptech, telecenter, telecentre
2 Comments »
Lady Virginia Mugarra Velarde
Education for HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases prevention
The role of ICTs to educate about sexually transmitted diseases prevention, especially to educate educators.
An important aspect of such education is to ease the communication between the physicists and their patients.
Goals
- Train educators about these diseases… and how to educate about them
- Sensitize youngsters about prevention
- Mobilize policy makers
The main successes are, above all, the speed and spread of information and training, with a strong focus on prevention, which is where information can actually make a difference.
Tools: a platform with three axes (1) content (2) spaces for debate (3) online assistance
[note: in this session, cybervolunteer = ICT volunteer, not online volunteer. See my Online Volunteering Taxonomy for more details]
Volunteers experts in ICTs to help users in telecenters.
Volunteers are trained about attitudes, techniques, the environment they are going to work in, the target beneficiaries of the several activities, etc.
The public-private partnership between the regional administration (coordinating the project) and the local administrations and telecenters a must for success.
Training for nonprofits about technology for nonprofits, with a strong use of Web 2.0 applications, such as feed aggregation, metablogs, wikis, instant messaging, VoIP, microblogging, online volunteering, etc.
Blogs in the field: use of blogs to raise advocacy and transparency by writing within and from a development project.
Blogs at the headquarters: same, but from the nonprofit headquarters (no need to be really there, but the focus)
Directories of projects and institutions.
Metablogs: Global Voices Online
Planets: feed aggregators, automatically updated once have been set up. The information comes to you.
Wikis: Where nonprofits share their information, handbooks, procedures… and with the possibility that this information can be updated/build collaboratively.
Caveat: some of these initiatives are not top-down, not institutional, but raised by individuals, sometimes as a personal answer (critique?) to the bureaucratic slowness and lack of flexible response of some organizations.
Social networks: some of them using richest media, such as The Hub.
We should shift from talking about technology to talking about the uses of it. The Web 2.0 allows this shift, as technological solutions come more and more irrelevant.
Free flow of information: RSS, copyleft or open licensing, syndication
Slides:
Vicente Carlos Domingo González
humania.tv
To enable media diffusion, especially video, for nonprofits and development issues.
Their role is to act as a new information agency to cover events, projects from nonprofits. It runs on a volunteering basis coming from the media sector + a technological platform to broadcast video.
The goal is not only to broadcast, but have audience too, thus the commitment with high-quality low-band requisites of the portal.
José Manrique López de la Fuente
Opportunities of Mobile Web in developing countries
Success bridging the digital divide
- The will, motivation to access the Net
- Material access
- Personal capacity, competences
- Access to advanced uses
The importance to generate local business possibilities based on ICTs.
Part of the material access and personal capacity interaction is about the ease of use, that should be kept clear in all ICT4D projects.
Mobile Solutions
- Specific applications for mobile phones: maximum integration with the device, but device diversity can generate incompatibilities
- Voice and/or SMS based solutions: simple and working, interoperability could be a pro or a con
- The Web as platform: rich, standards are mainstream
Mobile Web
- Advantage: Integration of existing solutions
- Advantage: Technologies based on open standards
- Problem: user experience, diversity and cost in some places
- Problem: low-tech devices that cannot access the web, mobile carriers not providing access
Carolina Moreno Asenjo
Global Networks and social engagement: ICT integration strategies at Entreculturas
Goals
- Improve quality in education, at a global level
- Foster advocacy through ICTs
- Fight the “loneliness” of the teacher in his classroom
- Cut down costs in training and knowledge sharing
- Create a link to catalyze network building
Leverage communities of practice and communities of learning with ICTs.
Challenges
- engagement of the beneficiaries
- funding
- logistics when setting up the hardware and technological platform
- motoring, coordination
- sustainability
Mobile (connected) classrooms.
Eduardo Pérez Gutiérrez
Geographic Information Systems in Educational Centers for Regional Development
Goals: Develop web-based GISs for diagnose and monitoring of educational centers for regional development.
To fight lack of education in remote, rural areas, governments supply these regions with instructors, that are not actually teachers but have a broader profile, socially speaking, but a lower profile as an educator. So, their social profile is good to interact with the community but the quality of teaching might not be as good as expected.
The GIS should help cross data about the reach of an instructor’s activity, the profile of the population reached by this instructor, etc. and then help the decision-making about the instructor, his activity, the way he spends his budget, etc.
Benefits: focused investments, allows centralized administration, transparency and monitoring, enables confidence, provides context and helps strategy design.
Development Cooperation 2.0 (2008)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 30 January 2008
Main categories: Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, ICT4D, Meetings, Nonprofits
Other tags: cooperacion20, cooperacion20_2008
3 Comments »
Ismael Peña-López: Introduction
see my position paper here
Paula Uimonen: Is development cooperation prepared?
No. The structure is too bureaucratic.
But the network logic is horizontal, cross-sectorial, transversal, non-hierarchical.
But it seems that the international arena is working for a more networked development cooperation sector.
Shafika Isaacs: Are organizations prepared to network?
It depends: they’re all in an evolutionary process.
There’re more and more organizations working in the field of ICT4D.
And a rising awareness on the issue.
Big leadership behind ICT4D fostering.
Common agenda that enabled collaboration and networking, especially withing the civil society, with an inflection point at the WSIS.
Vikas Nath: What is networking and how can this be achieved?
People join networks for two reasons: (1) more benefit than the cost of joining it and (2) multiplier effect that a network is increased by one member.
There’s no optimum design for a network: the network will shape itself according to its needsl.
Conclusions from my group (the four people above)
Objective facts
- Network culture assumes the character of the leading person/organization, of the dominant personalities
- Networking is about “we”, and ceases to exist when focused at the “I” — not a consensus on this part
- The Network Society is here, and is here to stay
- In developed countries — and their institutions and organizations — infrastructures is not the issue
- Big funding agents foster collaboration through compulsory partnerships
- Network participation implies engagement with the other (which might be different from you), boundary crossing
Criticism
- Where there is power there is resistance, and resistance is also organized in networks (Foucault)
- We lose to dream, we ain’t dreaming enough, we “think small”
- Lack of e-awareness
- Competition for funding
New concepts
- The contradiction that the network compromises the individual with the collective will
- Networks can bring disruptive creation
- I exist because I am on the Internet
- The Network is becoming more “real” than reality itself, we should think digital
Intutitions
- Network creates a more human society
- The power dynamics are designed by the network leaders
- The network is cold and has no emotions
- Big nonprofits will act as hubs, and distribute work to smallest nonprofits and individual online volunteers
Optimism
- The social and cultural aspects of ICTs will promote networking
- We have potential to make positive changes, because we are the network,and networks have potential to make significant changes
- Web 2.0 enabling more collaboration and bottom-up initiatives
Control
- Resistance, which leads to lack of change
- Endorsement, that leads to progress
- Impossibility to keep tight control
- Flexibilize organizations
- Focus on what value you are adding to the network
- Be a statue sometimes and not always the pigeon
General conclusions (from all groups)
- Networks are here and are powerful
- There’s evidence of change and shifting towards networking: in the society, in organizations. And there’s an evolving trend towards more networking
- Networks are catalysts, make things happen, have multiplier effects… but they have no essence on their own, they just mirror the good and bad things of the society, what works and what does not work, there’s nothing new under the (networked) sun but humans
- Strong need to enable individuals so they can work with ICTs, in networked frameworks
- Same with organizations: collective change, organizational change, reshaping according to networking needs
- We have to make networks explicit, design them, rule them, have common goals, a common agenda, managing confidence and leadership. Monitoring and network assessment is a must that comes along with network creation and maintenance.
- We should work towards inclusive networks, fostering capacities, networks that empower their nodes so they can still be a part of the network.
- The Web 2.0 is seen as a (potential) inclusion concept/philosophy/technology, an empowering one
- Caveat #1: all these conclusions are not axiomatic: there are shades, blurring edges, contradictions, etc.
- Caveat #2: this is how we see networks today, but we should also keep in mind that networks (and society) will evolve, so should these conclusions
Development Cooperation 2.0 (2008)
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 05 December 2007
Main categories: Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, ICT4D, Knowledge Management, Meetings, Open Access
No Comments »
Third of my three seminars imparted at the he Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.
Main aspects
Seminar fundamentally based on my article The personal research portal: web 2.0 driven individual commitment with open access for development
, also presented at the Web2forDev Conference, and split in two parts:
- Part I: conceptual presentation of the Personal Research Portal
- Part II: practical workshop based on the building and managing of my own research portal, ICTlogy.net
Live recording of the session
Slides
Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare:
By Ismael Peña-López (@ictlogist), 04 December 2007
Main categories: Development, Digital Divide, Digital Literacy, ICT4D, Knowledge Management, Meetings
No Comments »
Second of my three seminars imparted at the he Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.
Main aspects
Seminar fundamentally based on my notes on the Web2forDev Conference and split in two parts:
- Part I: showcase of different Web 2.0 — and related ICT4D — projects in developing countries
- Part II: open debate with the attendants based on
random thoughts
extracted from the said notes
Live recording of the session
Slides
Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare:
, 535.35 Kb)
127.01 Mb)
