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Dadamac and 21stCenturyNetwork December 5, 2011

The information below about Dadamac was prepared for a meeting on Thursday  - http://www.meetup.com/21stCenturyNetwork/events/34255332/ - but may be of wider interest.

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Hi Francis

Ref Thursday meeting

I'm looking forward to the planning meeting on Thursday.

I've always appreciated 21st century network for its wide reach and inter-related issues. Many of the issues are ones I'm practically involved in and I seldom find them "'under one umbrella " outside of 21st century network (snip) This means that now my relationship with 21st century network is both from a personal point of view and  also "on behalf of Dadamac" - I hope I'll be clearer what that means in practice after Thursday.

Some background as preparation for the Thursday meeting

It may help if I give additional background before the meeting.

LIke 21st century network Dadamac is active in many different inter-related areas of change. The Dadamac community (or network) connects through a mixture of online and face-to-face relationships. We relate on a local-to-local level - but our localities are very widely geographically spread. I sometimes  explain about our many areas of interest by pointing out that we are "too small to specialise". It is common experience that a family (or small community) is  inevitably concerned with everything from birth to death and with all the health, housing, food, education, livelihoods, communication and other issues in between.

Dadamac is made up of "people connecting with people' and therefore our focus shifts, depending on current concerns and priorities, and our interests are wide ranging. We're not like specialist organisations completely focussed on one issue. How we connect with each other and why (our structures and motivations) are as relevant as the information we exchange and the initiatives we connect on. Our organisational structures reflect that connectivity as well. We do have traditional organisational identities. We have a registered charily and a registered company - however they are are far less important and central to Dadamac than the informal information sharing aspects the Dadamac community.  

For myself, at the heart of what I do, there is an interest in the disruptive impact of digital technologies. This interest started back in the 1970s when I was a young wife and mother studying with the OU while working as an infant teacher.  The OU gave me confidence to pursue my own investigations and also introduced me to a potent mixture of systems thinking and technology in action. I became intrigued by the potential impact of computers on the roles (and relationships) of teachers and learners. Over thirty years later that is still one of my key interests. However in the intervening years this interest and the related practical investigations have widened out in various ways - all based on things I have happened to be involved in at the time.  

At first my digital technology interest was simply in the context of infant teaching - micro-computers in the classroom - but then other things happened, including the Internet.

By 2001 my relationship to digital technology was connected with my urgent need to learn about Nigeria and "development issues" following the death of my friend Peter Adetunji Oyawale. I was getting information in various ways: "top down" from websites, in a more peer-to-peer "web 2.0 way" through discussion lists, and also by precious and irregular emails from my friends and mentors in Nigeria who wanted me to continue supporting Peter's work.

By 2004 I was involved with an additional grass-roots organisation in Nigeria, called Fantsuam Foundation, and was working with John Dada on a project called "Teachers Talking". It was an ICT training programme relevant for teachers in rural Africa - ie teachers in schools with no electricity, precious few books, and miles from the nearest cyber cafe.

The name Dadamac came into being through my work with John Dada.

In 2007, during the post-election turmoil in Kenya, I was involved in the online part of an online-and-on-the-ground initiative called "Pyramid of Peace". This was part of an ambitious and ground-breaking experiment in online collaboration and thinking called Minciu Sodas (Lithuanian for Orchard of Thoughts).

Online collaboration has always been important in my "UK-Nigeria-and-elsewhere" work/interests.

For about five years I've put aside at least an hour a month - on the "First Thursday" of the month - to be "at home" on the Internet so that different contacts of mine can"drop in" and e-meet each other.  I've experimented with different online spaces, from webinars to text chat, and with various different group dynamics, roles and "cultural norms" for meetings.  

For nearly 3 years I've been meeting online each week with my friend John Dada in Nigeria (and members of "the team"). I've also been creating an online space to reflecting his work, at Dadamac.net. I've been experimenting with aspects of archiving information and sharing it. it is less of a website and more of a transparent and open online office for the organisation. We've done lots of experiments in "pushing, pulling and parking" information, as well as helping people to collaborate and exchange ideas and information online. 

Now I've experimented enough with John's information, I'm starting to widen the reach of Dadamac.net to include more work by other people in the Dadamac community  - including me. My stuff has tended to be more widely scattered around the Internet.

The Dadamac meetup group at Central Station may not seem to be connected to any of this - but in fact it is - because of the way it all relates to patterns of change. The UK work also reflects some of my thinking about shifts in power structures and wealth generation as we move further into the 21st century, and issues around non-formal learning and livelihoods and other changing patterns of how we go about things. 

The links below give additional information in case you want to know more about any of the things mentioned above - but they are more for later reference than because of any expectation that you will see them before Thursday. It just seemed sensible, before the meeting happens, to try to do some kind of introduction regarding the interelated topics and interests that I'm bringing. The links are in the same order they are mentioned above.

I remain fascinated by what is happening in non-formal education, including local-group-to-local-group learning as well as individual learning. I'm interested in the huge new opportunities opening up through peer-to-peer non-formal learning and discovery (some online and some face to face through Internet enabled meetings via meetups, twitter, eventbrite etc) and the increasing normality of "fluid wall" meetings - where the proceedings are streamed to participants who cannot attend in person, where some contributions are live and others are recordings, and where some presenters are on-site and others are contributing by video link, sometimes from thousands of miles away.

I look forward to the Thursday planning meeting for 21st century network (AKA globalnet21 - sorry I keep forgetting that name change) and hope to discover if there are any ways I might usefully contribute. By the way I do appreciate Christina's encouragement to use Globalnet21's facebook page - the idea is lurking in my mind - but it will take a while to turn into comfortable and automatic behaviour at appropriate times.

Pamela 
pamela.mclean@dadamac.net