The map emerged from perceiving coworking spaces are next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create. (More on this note: Wayan Vota, Chris Coward, Meaghan O’Connor, Patrick Tanguay, and Christine… I’m sure you could send us more examples!).

The map is supposed to articulate how public-access venues (libraries, telecentres, cybercafes) and co-location/working/production spaces are connected. We were trying to go beyond access to technology while acknowledging its role and ubiquitousness, and to highlight the importance of access to people in innovation and development.

We’re hoping that this framework can help us think about both the theoretical and practical aspects of innovation grounds (design, support, research, policy, etc.).

Development agencies and practitioners should take a closer look at innovation grounds. Figure out how you can make them work for you — and how you can build on existing efforts. Similarly, national and local governments should seek out and leverage innovation grounds: libraries, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, community wireless groups. They’re out there. Start connecting. (And remember there are resources out there. One example is the US IMPACT Study — based on their research they prepared a wonderful toolkit to help libraries document successes and build understanding and support.)

Tell us what you think. Does this framework spark anything for you?

— Christine Prefontaine & Silvia Caicedo

(Shout outs: The term innovation grounds was inspired by Karen Fisher’s concept of “information grounds“. The term “commonspace” comes from Mark Surman. And writing this included a mental walkthrough of the facilities and approach of Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation, Montreal’s Station C and Foulab, various libraries we love, and all of the wonderful people and places that we came into contact with while working at IDRC on telecentre.org.)

As usual, I have more to say on this. Especially in relation to publishing aid information in open formats. We waste a lot of time and money on publishing research and project findings using technologies and formats that make no sense. I’ve always opposed the way publications production works from a process/resource standpoint — but now I understand it also creates accessibility issues. More ammunition!

In the meantime, here’s a bit of a roundup mixed with some to-do notes for myself:

• Read the paper. (DONE!) It’s short and well-written. Just go do it so we’re all on the same page please.
• Pay attention to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATA)
• Pay attention to aidinfo
• Lurk on the Open Development mailing list
• Watch the Open Knowledge Foundation — and especially their Open Development Working Group (happy to see some familiar names there!)
• Figure out how the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network’s (CKAN) development information repository works
• AiDA (sad link) has now morphed into AidData — check it out
• Keep tabs on progress of the International Development Markup Language (IDML) — is it dead? — leads me to lots of dead Bellanet links from its IDRC days and idmlinitiative.org is down
• Tag opendevelopment resources more consistently

I realize from delving more into this that several of us have come to the same conclusion. I’m repeating myself but here goes: It’s not about building a big repository. Stop that. It’s about aggregating, not centralizing. Making it easy to find, bring together, and mash up. And this means, among other things:

• Open — not just accessible! — content and data
• Standard licensing frameworks (legal mechanisms to share and build on others’ work)
• Open, machine-readable file formats
• More thinking about how to integrate semantic tagging into our workflows
• Standard data schemas and metadata

(Oh oops, that’s pretty much the table of contents for the paper that got this whole post going…) Along with this goes something that I have not seen much writing about yet but that I think is really crucial:

Citation practices for open datasets and instruments.

To be clear: Academics should get credit for the data and instruments that they share. It should be right up there with publishing in a kick-ass, prestigious journal. (Make that an open journal! Love to ITID and First Monday). This HAS to count for them professionally. Toward professorship, toward tenure. This gets back to the way the game is played now. Want things to be different? Look at incentives. Re-think the rules of the game.

I’ve got more info on datasets and citations… later.

I spoke about our proposed approach to communications and knowledge sharing. You can read about that and download the presentation on the Global Impact Study website. It’s been tough to work out how to do open research — specifically how much to share about process and learning. (So yes my definition of open research includes working transparently, not just sharing findings, instruments, and datasets at the end.) Also it is anxiety-provoking to stop doing the work and write about doing the work. Like I’m doing now!

All of that by way of an excuse… I’m finally sharing this workshop report (download PDF, 4MB). It’s a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard. I hope this document is useful for others as they work on similar projects or in similar domains.

IDRC is one of the funders of the Global Impact Study. When I worked there, I was lucky enough to get sent to training on Outcome Mapping. The training was led by Terry Smutylo. He pulled out his guitar and sang this song: the Output Outcome Downstream Impact Blues. (During a training at a GOVERNMENT development agency — think about that for a minute…) Listen and you’ll see why I think IDRC and Terry are the coolest coolest folks ever. See? They even put the song on their server! Ooops… looks like it’s been removed… good thing I took a screenshot so y’all believe me.

There’s also a powerpoint of the lyrics to Impact Blues.

Contribution, not attribution! After listening you’ll also understand why I find the naming of our study kinda ironic. Chalk one up to diverse opinions within organizations. Amen to that ;)

1. The backend — Clean WordPress install, giving our researchers the ability for our folks to post their own content. They should not have to fight with the system.
2. The audience — Donors are our most important audience in this round. We have to be able to tell our story quickly — who we are, what we’re good at, and what we’ve done — to prove that we’re a good investment.
3. Show off our stuff — We have a lot of great research assets: reports, evidence narratives, briefs, datasets. Make it easy to connect those to people and to project. And make it easy for folks to access them.

Originally number three was me thinking about the best place to store our pubs. Adding them as separate WordPress posts did not feel right. Not robust enough. All sitting in folders by year and month. No no no. Then I thought I’d put them on the iSchool server in a folder called resources. Nope. Too rudimentary. Then I remembered: You are not the only person to have had this problem. Get on google and poke around. Do your homework. What I found is good, really good.

I started by looking for something that would play nice with WordPress, which led me to Joss Winn’s Displaying a dynamic publications list from a repository on a staff profile page.

This in turn tipped me off to the whole world of cloud repositories. Of course. Duh! There are people out there and all they do is manage collections: repositories. Increasingly digital ones. So… from here I found EPrints. Created by the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, it appears to be a wonderful open-source application to manage, specifically, open-access repositories. They  have a cloud version and a version you install on your own server. (Did I mention that open research is important to us? Yeah. Well it is. Remember that.) So they are cool three ways:

1. They’re a little consulting shop in an academic department. I’ve worked for two of those. We can be friends.
2. They’ve created an open-source app to manage information.
3. They’re promoting open access.

Plus they were super super well reviewed in this overview by Neil Godfrey and this survey by the Repositories Support Project, an initiative of the UK’s Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to support the development and growth of a national repositories network. I called EPrints and they were super nice. (JISC, by way, also has a project called Dura, to embed institutional deposit into researchers’ academic workflow. Cooooool…)

MIT’s DSpace also looks pretty cool. IDRC uses it to manage their digital library. I’ll look into them before deciding. But my view with this sort of thing, increasingly, is this: Don’t spend months trying to find the perfect tool. Find a good-enough tool with an import/export feature and get to work!

In February 2010, JISC and Eduserv held Repositories and the Cloud, an event to discuss the policy and technical issues associated with cloud computing and the delivery of repository services in UK universitites. Adrian Stephenson took rocking-good videos. Watch a few to get an sense of what’s going on in this space. (Also note how they used TwapperKeeper to archive and summarize event-related tweets. More on social reporting.)

Okay, so what’s exciting about this and why should you care if you’re in development?

There are several massive repositories now, mostly stovepiped by donor (topic for another post). This has to stop. The model now should be aggregation. The open data model serves us well here: Standards are important. Build systems that can talk to each other and share with each other. Imagine if we could aggregate knowledge assets from a whole host of places.

So why should you care if you’re a development research group or consulting firm?

Or any organization that produces a lot of publications or digital assets? Ohhhh, here’s where it gets really exciting. Some ideas:

• People profiles that automatically update when you post new content to the repository. This is good good news for all you academics out there with beautiful long publications list. You’ll never have to update it again!
• Project descriptions that automatically display related research/project outputs, generated based on fields you’ve defined (see TASCHA’s draft of research project chunks).
• Track downloads of each asset (example).
• RSS feeds to display on various parts of your site.
• RSS feed to share with anyone else, so they can display your latest resources.

See where I’m going with this? Will keep you posted.

From the abstract for his talk:

Microhistories often work with odd sources of uncertain voice, but they become far more complicated when many of the available texts aim to misrepresent and when the context is silence. When I was trying to determine why so many girls were dying in a Renaissance Florentine orphanage, it became necessary to juxtapose sources and read into the silences in order to piece together a plausible narrative. All historical narratives are hypothetical to greater or lesser degrees, but what makes them plausible?

Wow? Really? How does one read into silence? Dude, I want to see your methodology notes. Fascinating. Wikipedia says this:

First developed in the 1970s, microhistory is the study of the past on a very small scale. The most common type of microhistory is the study of a small town or village. Other common studies include looking at individuals of minor importance, or analysing a single painting. Microhistory is an important component of the “new history” that has emerged since the 1960s. It is usually done in close collaboration with the social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology.

I looked up more and found Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s, What Is Microhistory?, from 2006. A few juicy bits:

By reducing the scale of observation, microhistorians argued that they are more likely to reveal the complicated function of individual relationships within each and every social setting and they stressed its difference from larger norms. Micohistorians tend to focus on outliers rather than looking for the average individual as found by the application of quantitative research methods. Instead, they scrutinize those individuals who did not follow the paths of their average fellow countryman, thus making them their focal point. In microhistory the term “normal exception” is used to penetrate the importance of this perspective, meaning that each and every one of us do not show our full hand of cards..

… Nearly all cases which microhistorians deal with have one thing in common; they all caught the attention of the authorities, thus establishing their archival existence. They illustrate the function of the formal institutions in power and how they handle people’s affairs. In other words, each has much wider application, going well beyond the specific case under examination by the microhistorian. The Italian microhistorian Giovanni Levi put it this way in an article on the methods of microhistory: “[M]icrohistorians have concentrated on the contradictions of normative systems and therefore on the fragmentation, contradictions and plurality of viewpoints which make all systems fluid and open.” To be able to illustrate this point, microhistorians have turned to the narrative as an analytical tool or a research method where they get the opportunity to present their findings, show the process by which the conclusions are reached, and demonstrate the holes in our understanding and the subjective nature of the discourse.

What will microhistorians researching the 21st century do with blogs and twitter? There is so much interesting in here… The focus on the local. The personal is the political. Questions about how we create histories and how we do research. What did not get documented? How do we get to that? This also matters in terms of modern political communication: What gets defined as an issue? What are the range of potential solutions? And I’ve been thinking some about research methods — their limits, the use of storytelling, etc. — so this post is a little hint of more to come.

• Good policy and practice depend on good information. Policies are the “big bets” about how to structure things and what to support, generally made by “big” decision-makers: governments deciding about the rules of the game — laws and regulations — and how to allocate resources, and donors deciding what/who to support, and how. Practice is the way we work: nitty-gritty processes, how we design and implement projects, how we structure and manage organizations.
• Good information emerges from the sharing and analysis of processes, experiences, learning, and data. It emerges from getting things done and researching how things work. What matters here? They types of questions we ask, how we ask them, who asks, what we decide to count, the way results are communicated (making evidence edible by highlighting the “so what”, creating visualizations and infographics, layering, etc.). Understanding people/groups and the relationships between them matters here. As does power relations and connections, incentives, and our relationship to failure (see here and here.). Especially incentives — often they are mis-aligned, effectively killing access to good information.
• If development information is generated using public funds then the results should be publicly available in the right formats. (See Tracey’s post on DataLibre.ca for some ideas on what that formats might look like.) A big caveat here is respect for people’s privacy. But you get the idea.
• Communicating about development is an aid effectiveness issue. Communications in the broadest sense includes all of the above as well as stuff like knowledge sharing or knowledge mobilization or knowledge management for development or whatever you’re calling it this month. Seriously folks, we need to get beyond creating insipid lessons learned pieces with points like “take the local context into account” or “plan for sustainability from the outset” — Really? Ya think?

Okay, so here are a few — very few! — things I’ve read or am reading or following lately. Yes I know there’s way way more. Please make suggestions — or even better read it for us, post the 500-word summary, and send on the link!

• IDRC’s work on Open ICT4D (Google IDRC and “open development” or “open ICT4D” and you’ll get lots of good stuff. They rock.)
• The Open Knowledge Foundation‘s Unlocking the Potential of Aid Information (PDF)
• The EU’s Communicating Research for Policymaking
• The Civic Access mailing list
• The Guardian‘s database of development data (From a newspaper? Apparently they’ve partnered with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and created a whole new development section on their website. Interesting…)
• The Institute for Development Studies‘s work on knowledge and information intermediaries
• A bunch of stuff on open access and the rationale behind it
• Anything related to open data, especially questions of licensing, accessibility (formats, archiving)

I’ll add more links for the last two later. But now I have to stop blogging.

• Jasmine
• The Middleman and other Stories
• Wife
• The Oxford book of Irish short stories (Ha! See that?! They’re selling it for $55!)
• Chechnya: A small victorious war
• Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe 1648–1789

Why? I’ve always meant to read some Bharati Mukherjee, the Irish are cool and short stories are my favorite, 1650 is about the time my ancestors decided, all at once and en masse it seems, to get the hell out of Europe, and I’m especially interested in reading history these days. So I’m loving Orlando Figues’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. This summer, I read it to Liam at night before bed. How do I get my teenager to listen, you ask? Trust me: plenty of blood and guts in here to keep any 13-year-old happy.

Then, one day, while I’m reading this…

…I see these bits:

As students of Karl Marx and of history, China’s party leaders will know that labour movements can begin with economic grievances and end in political revolt. By concentrating people in one place, Marx argued, factories turn a crowd of strangers into a “class”: conscious of its interests, united with each other and against the boss. But workers in China’s coastal factories have hitherto shown little class-consciousness. They migrated from all over the country, jumped from one plant to another and retreated to their villages when times were bad.

Their new assertiveness may reflect a labour law introduced in January 2008, which gave workers more contractual rights. The strikers at Honda were better educated than the average rural migrant and also trained together, which may have given them the social glue to organise their protest. The malcontents may also represent a generational shift among migrant workers. According to John Knight and Ramani Gunatilaka of Oxford University, they no longer compare their lot with the rural folk they left behind, but aspire to urban standards of living. (The rising power of the Chinese worker, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

…as well as this:

And although their wages are increasing, their aspirations are rising even faster. They seem less willing to “eat bitterness”, as the Chinese put it, without complaint….In truth, Chinese workers were never as docile as the popular caricature suggested. But the recent strikes have been unusual in their frequency (Guangdong province on China’s south coast suffered at least 36 strikes in the space of 48 days), their longevity and their targets: foreign multinationals. (The next China, The Economist, July 29, 2010)

Wow. I’ve read this before — different country, different century. But so familiar. See for yourself. The following bits are from A People’s Tragedy, from the section where Figues is describing the rapidly shifting personal and class identity and aspirations of peasants going to work in urban factories in during the industrial boom in the 1890s.

The desire for social betterment was very often synonymous with the desire to leave the village and find a job outside agriculture. Becoming a clerk or a shop assistant was seen by the younger peasants as a move up in the world. (p.109)

[T]he experience of the city transformed the way most peasants thought — of the world, of themselves, and of the village they left behind. (p.110)

Most of them supplemented their factory incomes by holding on to their land allotment in the commune and returning to their village in the summer to help their families with the harvest. … In this way they were able to keep one foot in the village, whilst their economic position in the city was still insecure. (p.110)

As they developed their own sense of self-worth, these workers demanded more respectful treatment by their employers. (p.114)

[S]trikes became the principal form of industrial protest and they required the sort of disciplined organization that only the most urbanized workers, with their higher levels of sills and literacy, could provide. (p.115)

Self-improvement was a natural enough aspiration among skilled workers, like Kanatchikov, who were anxious to rise above their peasant origins and attain the status in society which their growing sense of dignity made them feel they deserved. (p.116)

You see? Pretty cool, eh? I showed it to Liam. He, sadly, was somewhat teenagerish and blasé about the whole thing. Meanwhile I was going on about it like a wierdo.

Ughghghhgh. So many books and so little time.

Okay. Enough excuses. I’m back. Really. I’m kicking things off with these:

Now aren’t you in a better mood? Were you dancing? I bet you’re at least thinking about it. Or wishing you were. Simple, joyous music.

My fantasy: I’m living in my grandmother’s time, on the prairies, everyone with ten to twelve kids. Big family gatherings. We eat stew thickened with browned flour and fresh veggies from the garden: corn, beets, small potatoes with thin red skins, and tomatoes and cucumbers sliced and sprinkled with salt. Finish it off with white cake doused in sucre a la creme. Then out comes the whiskey and the cards. The kids are under the table or in some corner upstairs, their world full of whispers and intrigue. Now my family was not so musical but I crave it. So in my fantasy out come an accordion, a fiddle, some spoons.

I’ve had little bits of this. I know what each piece feels like. It’s fun to gather up the fragments and put them together.

Think about it: Wouldn’t it be so nice if making music was something mostpeople did? Like writing and reading. Not something you consume. Not something veryspecial verytalented people make for you. Instead an everyday creative, collective act. A joyous togethering, washing away for a moment pain and discord. I would like that so much.

PS. I hear Eugene Hutz lives in Rio these days ;)

My grandmother is now 92 and lives at the Institut Universitaire de Gériatrie de Montréal. She often thinks my mom is her favorite sister, Yvette, and that I’m her niece. She always remembers who Liam is. Germaine is part of the reason I’m assimilated. I respect her nonetheless. Story for another post.

I’ve been trying to trace my maternal line. It’s frustrating. I have my paternal line all the way back to the 1650s — and then some (Prefontaine, Beauregard). But women are more invisible.  Rose Alba Guindon (1888-1961) > Alexina Perron (1865-1946) > Angele Sarrazin (1832-1886) > Anastasie Cyr (1804-?). Then I hit a dead end. Grrrrrr.

On Sunday, November 22, Liam turns 13. This magnificent creature that I have the honor to mother is passing from boyhood into adolescence and manhood.

So many of us now are hybrids. In between. With that comes freedom. But also the loss of a sense of connection to something bigger and that can contain us in a comforting way. Like a parent’s embrace. The rituals that marked passage and grounded and gathered communities are fading away. I believe that acknowledging and celebrating the milestones in our lives is important and can help us transition and accept change. The public aspect matters — bringing together witnesses and supporters.

I’ve not been so good about organizing a bar mitzvah. Plus somehow it did not seem to fit — we’re not religious and it only speaks to part of his identity. It’s on the back burner. So my gift for Liam is the creation of a ritual. A rite of passage befitting a French-Canadian/Israeli/American boy. Here’s how it goes:

• Everyone selects a book that has deep significance for them and that they want to share with someone who is beginning their transition into adulthood. Any book. It does not have to be new (maybe better if it’s not). It can be complicated or obscure. Whatever. You decide.
• Inside the cover of the book each person writes an explanation of why the book was significant for them and why they chose to give it. And, of course, their name and the date.
• We all come together to celebrate. People in turn present their gift to Liam, explaining why they selected the book.
• Liam has a chance to speak if he likes.
• Food, drink, revelry, ridiculousness.

Books, learning, ideas, debate, and sharing are deeply important to me. They have formed me. I hope this ritual creates a special library that Liam can bump up against and dig through for years to come. A place to discover: fingers over covers and pages, smell, the curves of the letters, the wor(l)ds within. I also hope that Liam has the sense of being guided — that others took the time to share something intimate and meaningful to his journey.

I’ve told Liam it’s a big surprise. Now I find out if he reads my blog ;)

Their latest production is called Sexy Beton — a play about the tragic collapse of a highway overpass. Five people died. The conclusion? The collapse was “nobody’s” fault. The survivors went on to be further victimized by evasion and bureaucracy. Here’s the video:

Pretty amazing, huh? Sexy Beton is playing next week — from November 24 though to December 1st. I’ll likely go on the 28th. Here’s the ticket info.

Why is Porte Parole so important? Because much of our public discourse is what I lovingly call polarized and paranoid. People ferociously hold on to their weird little theories about how the world works and talk at each other instead of l-i-s-t-e-n-i-n-g. Yeah, I know, listening is hard work. I suck at it most of the time. But it’s important. Another reason: The most critical social issues are complex and overwhelming. Enough to make you run in the other direction. Or go shopping. Shoes or the healthcare system… Hmmm….

Porte Parole humanizes controversial social conflicts. They do a ton of research: conducting interviews and combing through legal documents, transcripts, and newspapers. They use all of this to create great theatre. Theatre that becomes the spokesperson — the porte parole — for the issue. Theater that brings you the people and stories and voices (literally!) from all sides. The actors embody the people within the conflict, animating and defending them in a public space. You’re compelled to listen. Dialogue becomes possible. And as you sit at the edge of your seat — laughing, feeling angry, frustrated, touched, wanting to jump in — something has just happened: you’ve become engaged. You’ve taken on step into participating in democracy and in your public life. It’s a gift.

Kudos to Laurence Miall and Neale McDavitt-Van Fleet for putting together the Porte Parole Pecha Kucha presentation. You guys rock.

A telecentre is a public place where people can access computers, the Internet, and other digital technologies that enable them to gather information, create, learn, and communicate with others while they develop essential digital skills.

Check out the Wikipedia article for a full list of alternative names and an overview of the range of models. (Some of which, I understand, have failed — especially those following the let’s-put-a-squillion-computers-everywhere-then-walk-away approach.)

Telecentre enthusiasts consider libraries with computers to be a type of telecentre. Library folks don’t like that so much. Understandably. Personally, I have way more warm fuzzies toward the word “library” — waaaaay more. Libraries get me all excited. But that’s another post, uh, and likely better suited to a different blog ;)

Right. So libraries and telecentres, telecentres and libraries. It’s a debate. Some folks resolve it by using the term “public-access venues“. Did you just cringe? Good. Welcome to my world.

A public space where you can learn how to make technology work for you. That’s the main takeaway. So maybe we should call them hacker spaces. Hackers understand and manipulate technology — software and hardware — often using it in ways its designers never intended. Hackers take what’s available and tinker with to solve a specific problem. There are plenty of cool examples of this from all over the world. (This is also why open technology is important — designing stuff from the outset to be hackable. Or “extremely configurable” as Mark would say — he’s been  thinking about this in his efforts to build a better Internet. Beth talks about it too — using systems instead of fitting into them.)

But there’s an even more important dimension: public space. Places where people can be in community. Third place, agora, whatever you want to call it. What’s important is the ability to gather with others and the possibility to be accompanied in your work. To be able to ask questions and bounce around ideas. I’ve been thinking for some time that public-access venues and coworking spaces are connected. This is why. They provide access to helpful people — librarians, dinamizador@s, infomediaries, the-guy-sitting-across-the-table-from-you. People willing to help you accomplish your task. And I suspect that people in communities with stronger social ties will succeed faster because they likelihood of being helped, or feeling okay about asking for help, increases. It also has some interesting implications for public-access venues struggling to become more sustainable — what if they pushed the coworking/colocation angle?

There’s more thinking to do here. But here you have the basics.

PS. This is also why mobile devices will complement but never replace telecentres or libraries. We need to come together.

PPS. The photo for this post was taken by Luis Carlos Diaz. The two women in it are taking a citizen journalism class in Venezuela. Luis is part of Global Voices. I like how they appear to be solving a problem together. It depicts l’esprit d’accompagnement that I want to explore here. (Photo used under a Creative Commons license.)

I managed to shield Liam from the worst of it. (I wonder if the need to do that sustained me, because we spent wonderful time together in the middle of this.) My mother was less fortunate, as were some of my friends.

I desperately — not a pretty word, I know, but accurate — sought something, anything to hold on to. To comfort me. To stop the descent. Some of those somethings were not, ummmm, productive. Or very healthy. Then I stumbled upon Naada Yoga.

Now, if you know me, this is where you start giggling. You know that I HATE yoga. The whole visualize-the-yellow-light-and-breathe-in-the-universe bullshit of it. I would point out, and still will, that this practice is from the same folks who brought us sati. Chew on that. Twenty years ago I spent a month in an ashram learning to do massage — and I managed to skip yoga most every day.

But I desperately needed to take care of myself. And I knew that part of this meant physically. Getting out of my head and negativity and into my body. Consistently. So I decided to research Ashtanga yoga teachers in the Mile End. I had done some Ashtanga in the past and found it to be less annoying than most.

At Naada, Elizabeth Emberly and her partner, Jason Sharp, have created a wonderful, welcoming space. Their approach to yoga is practical, simple, and supportive. The mixing in of sound sends me to a far away (or far inside) place. The best part? They serve tea afterward and folks are invited to stay and chat. And they do. Aaaaaah, community space. My favorite thing. Feels good.

Naada is sanskrit for sound, vibration, rumbling. Like a river. I’m going most everyday. Helps (miraculous?) that it is five minutes from my house, and right next to Station C. Last week I did seven hours of yoga. It does make a difference. Making space for myself matters. It is healing.

I just watched I, Robot… You, Jane (Season 1, Episode 8). Woven throughout the story is a debate  between the librarian, Giles, and the computer science teacher, Jenny, about adopting technology. Giles is uneasy about technology: “I don’t think something is good just because it’s new.” (Although many Buffy episodes feature a hacker, Willow, who provides Giles with critical assistance using the library’s computer.)

Jenny explains that technology is creating a new society. Her students echo this: “The printed page is obsolete. Information isn’t bound up anymore. It’s an entity. If you’re not jacked in you’re not alive.” Giles is horrified. (And that particular student later gets killed by a nasty demon.) Near the end of the show Jenny asks Giles why he has such an aversion to computers:

Jenny: Honestly, what is it about them that bothers you so much?
Giles: The smell.
Jenny: Computers don’t smell, Rupert.
Giles: I know. Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower, or a-a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell musty and-and-and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is a – it, uh, it has no-no texture, no-no context. It’s-it’s there and then it’s gone. If it’s to last, then-then the getting of knowledge should be, uh, tangible, it should be, um, smelly.

Clearly I love my computer. And sometimes I hate it. Have not been sniffing my books enough lately. Something to think about.

I’ve heard this again and again. So, why’s it so hard? I’ve come to suspect that part of it has to do with the structure of communications within organizations. The centralized structure is a problem. We need to figure out how to make a distributed model work (see an early stab at how this could happen for a network or distributed team). You hear all the time about user-generated content. Well how about staff-generated content? Then the communicator becomes facilitator, supporter, curator. No longer struggling to find out what’s going on but rather focused on packaging and outreach.

This also has implications for knowledge sharing (or whatever KM is called these days) and organizational development. It’s about documenting learning, mistakes, victories. Taking the time to stop and think about process.

So as part of this thinking toward a new model I’ve developed (with help from my friends) a list of observations from my last ten or so years of experience. Mostly these are with international development organizations, most of which were implementing research or social change projects. They all had similar characteristics and issues:

• Multi-cultural teams made up of passionate, opinionated researchers and development professionals (read: herding cats)

• Partners who are at other times competitors

• Far-flung teams and partners facing similar issues and or learning things that are relevant to each other’s practice — they have things to share and are hungry for knowledge

• A “boss” (read: donor) who’s not at home — or several absent bosses each with different (sometimes shifting) priorities and stakeholders — so important spend time building understanding, updating, and demonstrating return on investment

• Disincentives to document or openly discuss failure stifles learning and innovation (this is the down side of the performance-based contract)

• Ability to see organizational issues but no way to fix them — Because of the nature of their work (talking with many team members, needing consistent updates, pushing for clarity on audiences, messages, activities) communicators’ work is affected by organizational issues and information flows, yet addressing these is outside of their mandate

• A “core + support” staff structure, where support staff often feel marginalized, their contributions and needs misunderstood or unacknowledged because they don’t do what the organization does (administration, finance, human resources, communications)

• Communicators not invited — and often must lobby — to attend meetings, events, or site visits that would allow them to better understand issues and activities, create richer content, and build relationships that improve information flows
• The staff closest to the work are least likely to communicate, so key information, learning, and stories often remains hidden
• Expectation that communicators can create compelling content from a mix of existing documents: proposals, contracts, presentations, various reports (coded, jargon-laden, sanitized, noisy)
• Communicators not in direct or regular contact with activities or colleagues in the field must use an investigative-journalist approach to dig up stories, which may annoy field staff as they’ve been preparing reports and communicating regularly with project managers

• Little attention or resources dedicated to internal systems (infrastructure + practices)

• Lack of coordination of basic information such as travel, events, and contacts leads to missed opportunities
• Productivity lost finding and re-finding assets
• Little time allocated to reflect on how the organization is working, what can be learned, and how to work better

Have you observed this? What’s the same? What’s different? How do you think these issues can be avoided or overcome? Any ideas for solutions?

Groups is another awesome Identica feature. By placing an exclamation mark in front of a word you can make it part of a group. Example: Tonight I discovered !shortrecipes. Recipes in 140 characters or less. Do you need any other reason to love this app?

Oh… and I nearly forgot. Karl made this t-shirt. Made me laugh.

And think of that naughty Wii vs. PlayStation 3 video. Which, yes, I know is evil ;)

Visualization is powerful because it gives you a different perspective. Which helps you think differently. I like to tell my friends that I’ve figured out what enlightenment is: It’s the ability to see all different perspectives simultaneously. Imagine that. Of course I’m not able to do it. Apparently I’m struggling with a gap between theory and practice.

Come to think of it good communications practice — to persuade, for social change — is at its core about providing a different perspective in a way that others can receive and act on it. There are lots of ways to do that, from good ol’ one-way broadcast to a collaborative approach, where the focus is on engagement, conversation, and creating together.

Okay so back to Wordle. It’s “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.”

Pretty nice, huh? You can generate your image from a text, a blog, or a Delicious account. I put in this blog. Didn’t turn out so good. “Chopped” and “Pasta” are the biggest words. So clearly it’s fixating on my Spaghetti alla Puttanesca post. Not that I blame it. That is one wicked recipe.

So instead I put in my Delicious account. (I love Delicious. To find great leads you can go to the “popular” section and type in any tag. For example, here’s what’s hot for infrastructure.) When I saw the results I thought “yeah, that’s right.” Uh… but I don’t feel enlightened. Just a nagging feeling that I need to tidy up my tags ;)

Click on image to see it bigger.

Sharing content with empathy. This is a key practice. We must provide sufficient context and metadata in order for our content to be findable and usable.

and

You may also want to add more detailed information to help others create works about similar topics or issues. Documenting who or what is in the picture, why it’s important, and giving a sense of the context will help others immensely. (We like to call this “extending empathy forward”.)

The idea is to make it easier to build on each other’s work.

Then today I heard Nora’s full interview with Ed Burtynsky. There it is again. It also brings up many of the issues around archiving and digital work, which Theresa Rowat has been explaining to me. Theresa is currently the director of the McGill University Archives. She is an amazing. She makes archiving come alive — especially the issues surrounding digital records. I can listen to her for hours. (Seamus Ross summarizes these issues in another conversation with Nora.)

The 10,000-year clock is a project of The Long Now Foundation. Which was part of the inspiration for Neal Stephenson’s book, Anathem. That stayed with me for a number of reasons. One being that I feel like much of what I do is point to ideas and connect them. Not that that’s bad. I like connecting people and ideas. But I’d like to balance it with being able to do some deep thinking of my own.

Sometimes I feel like everything is connected.

Jonathan Torgovnik’s photographs of children born of rape during the Rwandan genocide. By Mia Fineman, Slate Magazine
Powerful article about a photo series, focusing on the children of rape in Rwanda. The mothers photographed had been raped by Hutu militamen during the genocide, and the photographer interviewed them away from their children, then photographed the two together. A powerful reminder of consequences of war that continue a generation after a conflict ends.

I read the article and looked through the photos and testimonies. This part confused me:

(The subjects’ names have been changed to protect their identities. While the women want the world to know what happened to them, they hope to protect themselves and their children from the censure of their own communities.)

What about their faces? These photos are online for everyone to see. The book is on Amazon.com. Doesn’t this assume that Rwandans cannot access this article and these images? Or that they have no friends or relatives in other countries with better access?

I know that there are issues with connectivity Rwanda (starting with unreliable electricity). I know there’s a language barrier. I know that digital literacy is low. But I also know that the number of Internet users and shared access points (telecentres, libraries, internet cafes, etc.) is growing. Since 2000, the number of Internet users in Rwanda has grown from 5,000 to 100,000.

After working with telecentre.org, meeting folks from across the continent, and visiting grassroots telecentres, I see what’s possible and never ever assume that what I post online won’t be seen by all.

We are connected. Ethan and Paul Barera both attended the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis in 2005. Since 2004, Paul’s been running the Nyamata telecentre, in Rwanda’s Bugesera District — one of areas hardest hit by the genocide (out of a population of 62,000, only 2,000 survived, mostly women and children). Paul provides a range of community services, from IT literacy training for adults and kids to computer maintenance and repair. In April 2008 he ran a three-day workshop for women survivors, focusing on how to create and manage a business and access microfinancing.

We are connected. Changing names is not enough to protect these women and their children. When we produce content like this we have to assume that everyone can see it. Including these children, soon young adults, some of whom may read that their mothers love and cherish them, despite the circumstances of their conception. Others whom may read “I never loved this child” — so disturbing.