I have been invited by the Spanish Center of Judicial Documentation (Centro de Documentacion Judicial, CENDOJ) to impart a conference at the III Encuentro de Información y Documentación Judicial de la Red IberIUS [III Meeting about Judicial Information and Documentation of the IberIUS Network].
The idea was to give an overview of what the Network Society is and what are the concepts besides collective creation. Here come my slides (in Spanish):
Full reference and PDF downloadable......
MapAction and BrightEarth both feature in an article in the Independent entitled “Mapping the disaster zones” - how they think up the intensely creative titles for these articles, I just don’t know. Interesting enough, but these articles always leave me with a sense that the writer just doesn’t get it - apparently “Within 48 hours: [...]...
In
Digital Divide,
Web,
Private Sector,
Emergency Telecommunications,
GIS,
olpc,
NetHope,
geospatial,
Communities,
AidWorkers Network,
BrightEarth,
Development Gateway,
Intel,
MapAction,
knowledge management
Katrin Verclas at MobileActive and Sheila Kinkade (of ShareIdeas.org) have finished Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in Mobile Use by NGOs [pdf]. The report covers a wide range of uses, including public health, advocacy and disaster response, with some interesting case studies (including the recent post-election riots in Kenya). You can read more about...
e-STAS is a Symposium about the Technologies for the Social Action, with an international and multi-stakeholder nature, where all the agents implicated in the development and implementation of the ICT (NGO’s, Local authorities, Universities, Companies and Media) are appointed in an aim to promote, foster and adapt the use of the ICT for the social action.
Here come my notes for session V.
Subjects
Free software
Accessibility and usability
Linguistic diversity
Educational programmes
New content programmes
Debate
(random ideas, slightly sorted/grouped)
Muhammad Yunus proposes a new kind of enterprise where the focus is on stakeholders and not on shareholders, where no profit is seek, but only social benefit.
Low cost computers/devices are converging with mainstream infrastructures....
In
ICT4D,
Open Access,
Digital Literacy,
Cyberlaw, governance, rights,
Education & e-Learning,
Participation, Engagement, Use, Activism,
meetings,
knowledge management
Simone Staiger at the CGIAR draws our attention to a new AGRISERVICE Bulletin of GTZ looking at knowledge management in (agricultural) development cooperation.The special issue (PDF format) has reports from a 2007 workshop.As well as some general articles on KM in organisations, it has some interesting 'agricultural' cases....Knowledge Generation and Facilitation in a National System for Agricultural Innovation (Bolivia)Sustainet, the 'Sustainable Agriculture Information Network' that systematically evaluates, communicates and disseminates successful approaches to and concepts of sustainable agriculture.Multi-Stakeholder Fora for the Management of Mobile Livestock Production Systems (Germany and Niger).Social Networks for Information and Knowledge Management - drawing on experiences from...
The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.
Josiah Charles Stamp was many things during his lifetime, including President of the Royal Statistical Society between 1930-32, and his view on government statistics is well worth bearing in mind whenever we look at the sort of statistics that tend to crop up in humanitarian and development work. International organisations tend to act in much the same way as governments when it comes to statistics, which we usually refer to as indicators.
Until very recently, all the...
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:
Peña-López, I. (2008). “The personal research portal”. In Open Source Business Resource, February 2008, 23-27. Ottawa: Talent First Network....
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
Part I: view, download ( 127.01 Mb)
Part II: view, download ( 126.97 Mb)
See, also, the rest of the workshop presentations
Slides
Click here to download,...
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
Part I (begins at aprox past the 2/3 of total running time): view, download ( 165.78 Mb)
Part II: view, download ( ??? Mb)
See, also, the rest of the workshop presentations
Slides
Click here to download, or watch them on Slideshare:...
Next December 3, 4 and 5 I’ll be in Trieste at the Rich-Media Webcasting Technologies for Science Dissemination Workshop, organized by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics Science Dissemination Unit.
The whole set of names is quite eerie — for a social scientist like me — but once read you realize this is a very interesting workshop on scientific diffusion in developing countries, being ICT4D a deepest commitment of the organizers.
As you can see in the programme, I’ll be teaching two seminars and a workshop, namely:
Conferences 2.0: Scientists and Web 2.0, where I’ll speak about the change of paradigm in scholarly communication, mainly inspired by my Conferences 2.0 article in July
Web 2.0 and the Digital Divide, where I will try to...
In
web 2.0,
ictp,
open science,
science diffusion,
scientific blog,
trieste,
development,
ICT4D,
Open Access,
Digital Literacy,
Digital Divide,
meetings,
knowledge management
Marla Petal at RiskRED emailed me following my recent post on PreventionWeb. RiskRed is concerned with promoting education about disaster risk reduction, but its most interesting project from my perspective is the DRRlibrary, a DRR resource site with a social bookmarking approach, using tags to classify useful websites and documents.
When you visit the DRRlibrary, what you see looks almost identical to del.icio.us, the mother of all social bookmarking sites, with a few extra functions. Searching through the tags is quite simple - as well as being able to sort by date, title or URL of each link, there’s also a tag cloud on the main page and a browser (which works fine but is a little confusing). It’s great to see this approach being used, and I assume that Ian...
Elisabetta Cigognini asks me whether I could draw a list of 10 adjectives — concepts, capacities, competences — that qualify the skills of an expert knower 2.0 or learner 2.0.
Difficult, because I get consciously or unconsciously “intoxicated” by John Palfrey’s list of characteristics of a digital native. I believe that a digital native and a knower/learner 2.0 are overlapping concepts (especially if you take digital native as a “syndrome”, as I do, and not as a generational fingerprint, which makes poor sense in a digitally divided world) but are not exactly the same thing.
You can browse Elisabetta Cigognini’s publications and speeches pages for a good bunch of readings about what a knower/learner 2.0 stands for. Regarding myself, and summing up,...
Ambjörn Naeve, Head of Knowledge Management Research Group, KTH/Nada/Media (Sweden)
The Human Semantic Web - Increasing the Global Organizational Performance of Humanity Inc.
From teacher-centric, curricular-oriented “knowledge push” to learner-centric, interest-oriented “knowledge pull”.
The Semantic Web opens the gate towards the globally annotated information age, in opposition to recorded or transmitted information age. We all become librarians.
Being a generalist (knowing less about more things) or a specialist (knowing more about less things). You have to choose, but cannot be both. The question is: how to solve problems when you do need both kind of knowledges?
We need to improve the representation of reality, to make it more and more simple. Reinventing...
In the run-up to the OCHA +5 Symposium (which apparently I’m not going to), Dennis King asks:
How do we get more “Non-geeks” to use information technology and tools on a consistent basis?
This has been the central problem with most of our work over the last decade. It’s particularly obvious in the field, where staff do not have the time to learn how to use new tools. There seem to be a range of considerations if we want any of our projects to succeed:
Embed new tools into existing processes where possible. New processes are even harder to introduce into an organisation than new technologies, so enhance existing processes first. This builds the credibility of the technology and familiarises people with it, strengthening your position within the organisation...
Call it synchronicity: in the last 10 days three major events have taken place in the field of Open Access:
Berlin 5 Open Access: From Practice to Impact: Consequences of Knowledge Dissemination
Open Education 2007: Localizing and Learning
Web2forDev - Participatory Web for Development
Not surprisingly, people such as Peter Suber or Scott Leslie have already noted that there were some connections between those three conferences, some crossover interests.
After having attended the Web2forDev Conference and being right now preparing my speech for the UOC UNESCO Chair in Elearning Fourth International Seminar: Web 2.0 and Education, I can’t help but think on equal terms: open access is — will be… should be — the main axis of Science, Education and Development.
I think that...
Two questions launched to the audience. Gathered on the fly, some might be redundant:
The most inspiring thing that you will take home from the conference
So much going on
All about people
Discovered progress achieved in Africa
Interdisciplinarity, so many people engaged/interested in these issues
RSS feeds to unlock the information on websites
The Web 2.0 allows the dissemination of content
Some people have already implemented some Web 2.0 applications
But there’s still a lot of work to be done, and you have to work hard
Even if there are strong barriers to Web 2.0 implementation, most people in developing countries believe that once you have infrastructures (computers, connectivity) the remaining barriers (literacy, change of mind…) will be easily overcome
These...
Michael Saunby
Climate Change Mashups
Climate change: not a change in the climate but (also) a change in the variability of the climate.
By looking at the map applications, it is easier to see where e.g. there’ll be water stress in the (nearest) future, or human health crisis due to high ozone levels.
Mashups are about e.g. enough people collecting, reusing and distributing public sector information on already existing (commercial) online applications — e.g. Google Earth — so anyone can contribute again and close the loop — and make the scope of diffusion way wider.
It’s possible to mashup news RSS feeds with Google Earth so you can geolocate where the news took place.
To my (provoking) “concern” that you might be putting all your eggs in one basket, and...
Akiko Hemmi, Sian Bayne, Ray Land
Research methods for Web 2.0 practices: investigating e-learning using Web 2.0 in higher education
The importance of social context when writing/contributing to a wiki, e.g. others’ consent to be written about. Same, even more, when concerning changing others’ writings.
Second Life seems more suitable for informal chat than for exchange/creation of information and knowledge. Indeed, it is not a really reliable tool at this stage.
Identity issues in Second Life and Facebook and how you present your self (Goffman) in virtual realities.
Paolo Lattanzio, Mauro Sandrini
e-learning and web 2.0 – learning spaces for people or machines
The Web 2.0 is not, as it changes and evolves along time by using it.
Possibilities of strong personalization of...
Graham Lewis & Darren Reed
Science Blogs: Experimenting with practice and performance
What are science blogs?
Do they perform any science?
Or is it just science communication?
Or just merely personal diaries?
What are methodological and theoretical challenges for social science analysis
Partial immortalization blog, RealClimate.org
Mertonian norms or ideals (Merton (1954) The Normative Structure of Science
communism (communalism)
universalism
disinterestednesses
organised scepticism
Science in the real world
messy and complex
competitive
publish, prestige, tenured positions
funding
intellectual property
Scale of science blogging: 4% of the total (tagged “science” and found in Technorati)
ScienceBlogs.com
Nature Network, SciVee, LabAction, Second Life / Nature Island...
Erkki Sutinen
Can an ICT professional be trained to spark innovation? Background for a contextualized ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania
EdTechΔ research group, focusing on educational technology creation, under these premises:
Making a difference in action
Triangulation in research
Multiple perspective in development
Bidirectional partnerships
How come does our education system train professionals who can design an architecture to meet the needs written in a specification, for making existing processes more efficient, but not experts who can creatively, critically and supportingly talk with their customers and identify their real needs?
New project in the ICT undergraduate program at Tumaini University, Iringa, Tanzania, to make the students re-link...
Back in March 10th, 2006, I was asked to impart a workshop about Web 2.0 and diffusion of research. The workshop was improved, improved, repeated and even published with a strong focus on teaching.
The subject quite caught on me and I’ve been working since to (a) strengthen the theoretical framework and (b) give it the “for development” bias that I’m so fond of. There’s quite a bunch or articles that I’ve been publishing here exploring ideas, doubts, thoughts about the issue — just on my previous article, for instance.
Finally, it has taken the appropriate shape and been published in the Knowledge Management for Development Journal, in an issue under the topic of Stewarding technologies for collaboration, community building and knowledge sharing in...
Quick, brief introductions to tools used by researchers in the management of their… uh, life?
BibCiter
http://bibciter.net
by Ismael Peña-López
Free software bibliographic manager. Allows both management of bibliographies and publication on the net (RSS feed included)
Yep
http://yepthat.com
by Daithí Mac Síthigh
File manager. Mostly for PDFs you can tag. Mac version only.
LinkedIn
http://linkedin.com
by Marcus Foth
Social networking. Really effective as based on degrees of separation”
Dopplr
http://dopplr.com
by Marcus Foth
To manage one’s trips. Export to calendar by iCal. Shows who else is going to be in that place.
ClaimID
http://claimid.com/
by Fred Stutzman
User centered identity. Avoid inconsistent identities over different websites.
Tapor...
Lead: Talha Syed
The main criticism Talha Syed makes is that it should be possible to shift the debate from the established mainstream (economic) discourse (for or against, but inside the system) and try and move towards new mental maps, new ways of thinking.
Premises of conventional approach
homo aeconomicus: man is naturally narrowlyh self-regarding material gain
preferences fixed, invariant
policy is neutral
Premises of most critics
heterogeneous rather than unitary motives
but still relatively exogenous to policy
policy should be neutral (efficiency)
Further departures
heterogeneous
but context-sensitive, exogenous to policy, culture
normatively, neutrality untenable, undesirable
Pluralist motives
intrinsic: internal drives and ambitions; enjoyment
social: activity’s...
Student research seminar: Benjamin Addom
This is a proposal for a theory-driven Evaluation Research using Fourth Generation Evaluation Framework (FGE). The history of agricultural development reveals that agricultural technologies over the years have been bought, borrowed, or stolen and therefore should not necessarily be domestic. The model of diffusion of innovation especially has been applied in the transfer of these technologies to developing countries. TEEAL and AGORA are two initiatives that are transferring scientific knowledge from the North to the South. The proposed research tries to explore or assess or evaluate the merit of the initiative to the primary users (researchers, students and policy makers) and its worth to the secondary users (farmers) in Ghana. The concept of...
Leads: Dan Gillmor, Steve Schifferes
From Lecture to Conversation, by Dan Gillmor
“Democratized” Media
Not in the sense of voting… but participation, production, access
Lots of data, previously unreleased, previously unrecorded, now come to light because there’s someone there, in situ, to collect them and share them in the shape of text, photo, video, etc. And all this data is (almost) immediately made public… enhanced and brought to you by RSS feeds.
Indeed, data is not only collected by treated, thus becoming information. Does this make of all of us journalists? people? academics? nonprofits? corporations? Steve Jobs posts Thoughts on Music instead of conceding an interview: is the he the journalist?
It is, indeed, the best time ever to be an entrepreneur...
As already advanced, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been already published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change.
Abstract
Online volunteering is as old as the World Wide Web… or as the Internet itself. It is, notwithstanding, with the growing use of the WWW circa end of 1994 that it starts to become popular. Nevertheless, we believe that neither the concept nor the tasks that can be carried along by online volunteers are clear at all or, in any case, are the result of a wide consensus.
The research we here present analyzed 17 websites devoted to fostering volunteering to find out (a) if there was a broadly accepted definition of the concept of online volunteering and (b) if there was a list of tasks thus...
The Congress on Internet, Law and Politics has the aim of continuing the task of reflecting on, analyzing and discussing the main changes taking place in law and politics in the information society. This third congress focuses on the questions that currently represent the most important challenges and new developments in the fields of copyright, data protection, Internet security, problems of responsibility, electronic voting, and the new regulation of e-Administration, as well as dedicating a specific area to the current state of the use of new technologies by law professionals.
Lawyers and information technologies: uses and trends
Marta Poblet, researcher at IDT, the Law and Technology Institute, Autonomous University of Barcelona
Left to right: Pere Fabra, Marta Poblet
The topic...
John Palfrey, Executive Director Berkman Center of Internet and Society, presents his seminar Born Digital at UOC headquarters, organized by the University’s UNESCO Chair in e-Learning.
John introduces his speech as a trip through some reflections that arise from the fact that some people (i.e. born in the middle eighties and on) have always lived with the Internet and digital technologies. Those people live/interact on digital landscapes that do have some specific characteristics.
John Palfrey
Digital landscape
Digital identities, in two senses. One is be present on the Internet. Second, to be able to shape one’s identity at one’s will, as the Internet allow one to.
Multi-tasking: lots of windows open and things being done at the same time
Digital media: all your...
Did you know that in the 1950s Sweden had the fourth-largest air force in the world? That was just one of the nuggets that I picked up last week in Sando, where the Swedish Rescue Services Agency has their training facility. I spent most of the day with a small group from NATO’s Partnership for Peace programme - they were on a training course for Information Management in Emergency Operations, and I was telling them about how things work at the international level.
We covered quite a lot of ground, and it was interesting to hear their stories, their experiences - some from places like Bosnia or Afghanistan, but more from their home countries. They were all from a military or government background, so very much from the command and control model, and I tried to get everybody...
That’s a trick question. I know quite a lot about peace keeping - working in UNMIK (Kosovo), UNAMA (Afghanistan) and UNMIL (Liberia) will do that for you - although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, more of an engaged observer. So it was interesting yesterday to meet with the information management team at the Best Practices Unit in DPKO, and find out that they’ve got exactly the same problems as the humanitarian organisations that we usually work with.
As well as the challenges of multilingual, multicultural personnel working in distributed and remote locations, they have the additional layer of a command-and-control structure. While command-and-control structures simplify decision-making processes, they actually obstruct knowledge-sharing between staff. The one...