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.

• 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.

Ran across this in my online travels tonight. It was written by Sister Corita Kent. My favorites are number 6 and number 8.

I found it because Bruno told me a story about clay pots this week that stuck with me. And so I went googling to find more about it. Both the rules and the story are in the same category: feel-good cheezy stuff you sorta know and good to remember and really hard to apply in the everyday.

Nothing is a mistake. When I was doing my masters I wrote an essay on the importance of failure. And yet I fear it so much. Most of us do. In conversations with Floro and Theresa it’s come up as well. Celebrate failure. I read somewhere that Google encourages employees to fail. And there’s lots of writing connecting failure with innovation. But this is a real challenge in a world of impact assessments, results-based monitoring, and performance-based contracts. Investors and donors like charts with with lines climbing steadily north east. Too much at stake. Too much to lose. Better to stick with the success story. (Recently I watched a video of a Žižek lecture where he talks about the lies we collectively decide to believe. Likely more out of momentum than malice.) And I understand it. I wouldn’t want  you to waste my investment. Learning and growing is uncomfortable territory.

Take, for example, International Development, a concept I find increasingly problematic. I have to confess: Sen, Easterly, and Stiglitz remain on my bookshelf, unread. But here’s a suggestion: Less professional consultants flying about (I have done my fair share of this) and more convenings of community organizers. People rooted in and focused on their own places getting together once and a while to compare notes. That’s a model that I’d like to explore. I’m trying to move in that direction. It’s a better fit for me.

Ooops, all I intended to do here is share Sister Corita’s rules. Seems I got rambling. Sorry about that. My mistake.