The week between ICTD2010 and the Christmas break. Very cold. More snow. Much too much to do.
Reflections - Need to simplify and build a bigger team
I need to simplify what I am doing - but then, that is what I am trying to do, by getting the website sorted. I hope it will become a comfortable, easy-to-work-in, online "home" for the dadamac community, so that more people can drop in and do useful stuff together.
I know what we do at Dadamac is interesting and worthwhile - and fun. There are some wonderful people in the Dadamac community, and I know there are lots of other people - not yet in the Dadamac community - who would find it a real win-win to join us. The challenge is - until I have more people to help me, how do I find time to find new people? Also - do I try to find an online person, or should I try to find someone local, who can spend time looking over my shoulder and getting up to speed that way? I can see benefits both ways. Maybe that is something else for me to think about openly. Maybe I should start a daily 'thinking aloud blog" for 2011 - accepting that, until I have a bigger team, I can only do a fraction of what I would like to see happen. Maybe a better shared vision would be a better way to build the team.
Postereous posts in the week December 17th - 24th
(Looking back over them just after Christmas - and wondering if I'll see any pattern)
Back from ICTD2010 - first debrief post (refs to sessions 4304 and 4108 ) -
a challenging list of things to do and a couple of detailed debrief notes - looking back at it today I know I will only be able to scratch the surface of what I would like to do as follow up.
Ref Social Connection (Ethiopia) - more from ICTD2010 -
This is a tip of the iceburg story. If I had more time and wisdom I would be responding in greater depth to my new Ethiopian contact. I don't know enough about the political situation in Ethiopia - or the back story of Skype being illegal in Ethiopia (not even mentioned in this post).
Posterous and how to reply, privacy etc
I know that my experiment with "open letters via posterous" can be a bit confusing to anyone first receiving an open letter. I hope this separate post will be useful for future reference.
Anyone know about softexpand software for desktop virtualisation?
This was a response to a request for information from one of my Kenyan contacts. I have been neglecting my wider network over the past year of so, because I've been focussing on making us an online "home" at
dadamac.net. My hope is that by providing
dadamac.net for my contacts then I will be less of an information bottleneck. (It still has a way to go to become sufficiently "user friendly".) My hope is that ultimately more of the people I link with will get the benefits of being part of my network, without the delays of relying on responses directly from me.
Lessons: 1 for Kwanzaa from Pyramid of Peace. 2 for practitioners about researchers from #ICTD2010
This post is part of that same bigger picture problem - the problem of how various complementary intiatives, currently disconnected, can flow together better. It was ironic to be writing this email to Andrius so soon after ICTD2010. The gap between practitioners and academics may be narrowing - but this post that I wrote back to a fellow practitioner shows just how far apart academia and practice still seem to be.
IndieGoGo: Learn More
Another tool we need to know more about - but who is going to find out for us? It's not really relevant to the interests of the Dadamac volunteers I forwarded it to, but maybe one of them will pick it up. I simply can't follow up all the potentially relevant information in my inbox. Maybe later someone (who is not yet a volunteers) will see it and realise that this task would be of interest to them - i.e of following up links, reading the new item or website in detail, and then deciding if there is any relevance to people in our network. I hate ignoring things of possible interest - but equally I hate passing on items that look relevant, but turn out to be a tease (such as one-off, heavily subsidised, "pilot studies" - nothing that we have any hope of replicating, or some "African" initiative that reads as if it was pan-African but is only for a single country, or some hand-picked recipients).
Permaculture Institute of Australia and Attachab
Looks relevant. All I can do is pass it on. I wish we had a volunteer to take the permaculture / Attachab project under their wing and nurture it online. I wish this even more now that Coalition of the Willing is active relating to climate change, and local interventions and sustainalility. We should be tying Attcahab in with that and with the knowledge of the CotW Appropedia people etc. Also, climate change was a key theme at ICTD2010. I could do with someone to pull all that together.
Dadamac - Integrating education and development in Africa and online - ???
I know what that means - but (following ICTD2010) I think an explanation could prove useful for sharing with others in future.
News from the Commonwealth of Learning (COL) - December 2010
I have reason to appreciate COL - especially for the encouragement and support Krishna Alluri (previously of COL) has given me. I thought others might like to know of the newsletter and perhaps subscribe.
December 11th - 17th at Dadamac
The review of what we were dong the week before
Well the only pattern seems to be that there is much more going on in my head than I can write down - and I need to dramatically reduce what I am trying to do - or find more people to enable more to be done.
It would seem that in recessionary times I should be able to find some people who are time-rich, and who could work out some kind of win-win arrangement with me regarding a "Dadamac 21st century style apprenticeship" or "retirement hobby", or "CV-filler while between jobs", or somesuch - I wonder what those scenarios would look like.