commonspace

Partnership

Cape Town, South Africa

Yesterday, I shared a podium at the CIRN conference with Lyndall Shope-Mafole, Chief Director at South Africa's Department of Communications.

During an audience discussion on multi-stakeholder partnerships, we got into the "why is IDRC working with Microsoft?" question that I always get asked. As in the past, I outlined the common commitment to the telecentre movement and creating networks shared by IDRC and Microsoft, and talked the huge potential of working on these issues together even if our organizations have different ideas about software. I also stressed that we are focusing on the human capacity issues and that we have a contractual commitment to each other not to push any particular platform through the project.

After I'd talked on this issue, I expected we'd move on. However, Lyndall wanted to jump in, and she did so with passion. "Microsoft is not the enemy," she said. "In this country, we know about working with the enemy, about sitting across a table and negotiating with people who have completely different values. That is how we got beyond apartheid. There may be a few differences around values with Microsoft, but this doesn't make them the enemy. It doesn't mean you don't work with them or talk with them." (this is all paraphrased)

It's interesting to see how others jump into this debate, and the perspectives they bring. I am learning a lot along the way.

testing. testing. testing. 123. testing.

Cape Town, South Africa

The Cape Town meeting gave us a chance to test out a super early beta (alpha? sub-alpha?) version of our telecentre.org event-in-a-box site.

Based on Drupal, the idea is that we have a unique site for every event we do – in this case we put a site up at http://capetown.telecentre.org. Each site includes a front page blog to cover the event as it happens, a wiki page for notes and the evolution of ideas and a photo gallery. Also, there are tons of ways to automatically import content from participant blogs and mobile phones, and to push info out to the main telecentre.org site and other places.

Given the fact that we started from a raw plan and a photoshop file two weeks ago, the site worked brilliantly. The participants added and edited notes, and I did what I could to blog and post photos in spare cycles during breakout sessions. The content got up there and, based on comments in the closing circle, the participants were both impressed and appreciative. A zillion thanks to Alex Samuel, Boris Mann and the team a Bryght for making all of this happen in such a flash. Astounding human beings, all.

Of course, there were tons of problems and glitches. We didn't have user accounts for all the people we expected to be second level facilitators and notetakers. The site was hanging a lot (international bandwidth or too many guest logins?). Access to the notes and gallery from the front page wasn't obvious enough. Generally, we need to make the site look better and be easier to get around.

The next step is to improve the site template based on the experience from the meeting plus stuff we already knew needs to be fixed. Some priorities that came into focus during the meeting:

• Review workflow for an event, and look at ways to reflect key content better in the event-in-a-box template. If think Alex told me that the event template would need to be different than our main site template. If she did, she was right.
• Develop and write up an event prep process – setting up key user accounts, prepping people by e-mail on how to use the site, seeding content and wiki scaffolding, creating e-mail addresses to blog to.
• Test. Test. Test. There are still lots and lots of small glitches and niceties we need to iron out. I was particularly confused by the lack of ability to add an image or URL using the Drupal rich text editor. Possible?
• Figure out how to have a local version of our event site on a wireless laptop. I saw this as a long term priority, but realized with all the page hanging that we need to think about it sooner if it isn't something hard to do.

It will be fun to take this to the next level and then keep evolving it. I think it is an idea that can really work for us.

Phoenix rises in Cape Town

Cape Town, South Africa

Tuesday's South African telecentre network meeting started out looking like a fiery disaster. It ended up as most beautiful phoenix rising from the flames.

Before the Cape Town meeting even started, SangoNet executive director David Barnard walked briskly up to me with spurted the words: "the hotel is on fire." Which hotel? "The St. George's hotel housing five of our meeting participants!" A fiery start, indeed.

As we gathered news of the fire and confirmed our friends were safely on the pavement outside the hotel, other meeting participants began to wander in. We had people from the Universal Service Agency, the Microsoft Digital Villages project, Open Knowledge Network, school-based telecentres and community media. By all accounts, it was a historic gathering – this mix of people hadn't been in the room for years.

With the help of genius facilitator Colleen Crawford Cousins, the group quickly put any cautions they brought to the room behind them and dove into the task of envisioning common future for South Africa's telecentre movement. As described on our event web site, the group moved through an info sharing SpeedGeek, brainstorming on challenges facing the movement and mapping out possible projects the telecentres in South Africa could take on together.

It was in the closing circle that the phoenix rising from the morning fire snapped fully into focus. Almost everyone spoke of the power of being together to share ideas and experiences. There was also a sense of optimism for finding practical, simple, useful ways to work together across the current silos of the movement (see napkin diagram below).

If this optimism and momentum continues, South Africa will certainly have a more powerful and important telecentre movement a year from now. At telecentre.org, we plan to do anything we can to keep feeding this momentum ... and to learn from what emerges. 

PS. All the people from the fire were safe and most had joined us by mid-morning.

PPS. Huge hugs and kudos to David Barnard, Tracey Naughton and, of course, Collen Crawford Cousins for helping to pull off such an amazing event.

Wet, and cool

Cape Town, South Africa

After almost two days of travel, I arrived in Cape Town today -- a city I love. How is it? Rainy, dreary, cold ... and exciting!

I've come here for meeting of South African telecentres, and also to attend part of the Community Informatics Research Network (CIRN) conference. But, as I realized when I entered City Hall, there is a whole Information Society Week going on, gathering everone from mayors to business leaders to grassroots activists.

Today was Sangonet's Thetha event, with community technology people from across the Western Cape talking about the message that South African civil society wants to send to WSIS. It was an amazing gathering, filled with alot of energy, passion and hope for grassroots communication.

Tomorrow is a gathering of people from the South African telecentre movement that IDRC has sponsored. The buzz is building. I can't wait.

PS. I am adding the words capetowntelecentre to my post in the hopes that it shows up on http://capetown.telecentre.org, one of our test sites.

Local. Simple. Connected.

Spring Lake, near Verona, Canada

Over the weekend, I did a quick read of Steven Johnson's great book Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.

Unsurprisingly, I stumbled across a number of things to keep in mind as we start to sow the seeds for the telecentre.org ecosystem we are imagining:

1.    Quote: Local information can lead to global wisdom. Encouraging people to make the right choices locally, and then providing chances to connect horizontally into other localities, makes it possible for good ideas to ripple through a network (or an ant colony, for that matter). Trying to come up with wisdom from the top down is either a waste of time or, worse, causes damage to the ecosystem. So, focus on enabling grassroots, mostly face-to-face telecentre networks first, and then thread things together regionally and globally.

2.    Quote: Emergent systems can grow unwieldy when their component parts become excessively complicated. There is (and will be) constant pressure to create online systems that incorporate every idea that we and our partners can dream up. Yet, success for the online bits of our work means staying SIMPLE. This means using tech that replicates fast (to create many locally-specific, event-specific and project-specific nodes) and is incredibly flexible (so people can adapt a single node without over complexifying the DNA used to create new nodes). We will really need to hold our ground on the value of simplicity!

Of course, the message of the whole book is really the point: strong, vibrant, human knowledge systems are built from the bottom up using organically emerging collective wisdom. This, of course, cannot be forced or manufactured ... but it can be catalyzed.