Lessons: 1 for Kwanzaa from Pyramid of Peace. 2 for practitioners about researchers from #ICTD2010 December 18, 2010

Hi Andrius

I wish you well at the celebration of Kwanzaa, sharing lessons from Pyramid of Peace. I have copied your letter below.

I agree that Pyramid of Peace (PoP) was a wonderful initiative - both for what it did and for how it did it. The archive (of all the emails and the chats and the fund transfers) is outstanding. There are so many lessons to be learned from it - and relevant to so many different disciplines.

Academics and "us"

I think PoP should be a topic for serious academic research (and I believe that the value of its archive will be recognised at some future point). There are so many lessons to learn from it. However I seriously wonder how long it will be before the academic community sees the research potential of PoP (and other on the ground initiatives).

I was at ICTD2010 last week - with a personal agenda of "better links between academics and practitioners". There were interesting discussions there about collaboration - but it seemed that the practitioners were reaching out to academics far more than the other way around. I am learning lessons about this and increasingly recognise that even if academics do wish to engage with practitioners the systemic barriers preventing them from so doing  are considerable.

Funding mechanisms

I re-learned what I already knew  - that academics, like many others, are trapped by funding mechanisms that - from my view point - are archaic and which reward people for answering "the wrong kind of questions" and measuring "the wrong outcomes" - far too much support for "Hooray for my thingy" type of work  (ICTD2010 - Research needs from a developing world perspective  and ICTD2010- Let's Bridge Those Divides by Pamela McLean  and Dadamac - the Internet-enabled alternative to top-down development )

By the way - the "funding mismatch" is why, at an early point I abandoned my own attempts to get any formal direct funding. I decided it would be less frustrating if I just plodded on with no funding but plenty of freedom. Obviously if I saw a funding opportunity for what I do I would take it - but I am not wasting time trying to sqeeze myself into funding strait-jackets that don't even come close to fitting. I stayed with the balancing act of minimising my paid work (and my related discretionary income) in order to maximise the discretionary time I had available to spend on my "information-related activities - learning by doing and discussing with others".  (I didn't do it as extremely as you did. I was more financially cautious in the continuing attention I gave to a certain minimum of paid work.) Regarding funding  I didn't want to waste time chasing money to do things that would be fixed in advance in some tick list that never really reflected what I was trying to do anyhow. 

Of course we need money, and it is frustrating to see it go on things that we don't value, especially when it goes on things that seem to us to be a complete waste of financial resources (and a waste of brain power too in the case of academia) - but until those with money start to see value in our wealth of information there is little we can do - other than to live as best we can in the two parallel societies:

• the information and knowledge one (where we continue to get richer and richer in information and knowledge)
• the material one - where we need to engage in ways that at least cover our essential material needs

Peer groups

I also understood, before ICTD2010, that academics seem trapped in a system which is heavily reliant on "academics impressing each other" - publishing in peer reviewed journals, writing in each others books, going to each others conferences, getting more and more visible in the academic world.

To a visitor like me, the academic world seems a weird mixture of co-operation (creating and sharing knowledge) and competition (competing for funding and for personal career advancement). I don't really understand it.

I do know that in "my world" - learning online, in a self directed way, it is a world of sharing openly (to the nth degree in your case: including very personal hopes and circumstances, more cautiously in my own, sharing knowledge and my learning journey). We do not have peer-review where information is only shared if our "peers" agree that our information is "worthy of publication" (although we do have some moderation, to keep out spammers and other  'inappropriate content").

Instead of filtering through peer review we share our information freely in online spaces where it costs nothing to share information - and (I would suggest) our "peers" are the people who have an interest that overlaps our own. If "our peers" value what we write then they will read it, and share it, and comment on it. If they don't then it will fade away. It may be that sometimes we are only writing to ourselves. That is okay too, if by making the effort to put something in writing we learn something that we did not know before.

As a learner, interested in exploring new "socio-tech" knowledge and insights, I loved the freedom of Minciu Sodas as a place to learn. I think that, for me, the greatest value of Minciu Sodas was the fact that I was encouraged to "think aloud" - without having to frame carefully what I was going to say beforehand, and without having to find someone else's discussion group that (more or less) overlapped some portion of my own interests and concerns. My peer group was simply people who wanted to exchange information with me. (At some point Andrius I would like to  explore the overlaps between our past shared work in Minciu Sodas, and your developing work now, and my present and future  work in Dadamac.)

Separate disciplines

I now discover (through the ICTD2010 keynote on Wednesday morning) that it is difficult for academics to co-operate with each other, if they are in different disciplines - never mind trying to connect with people outside who have practical overlapping interests. It seems that people in one discipline write to one kind of journal, and people in another discipline write to another kind of journal, and so on, and that somehow, "never the twain shall meet". If that is so, then it is not surprising that there seems to be little connection between ICTD -  research and ICT  - real-life, except through a few exceptional individuals.

Quoting and answering Andrius

Andrius' email (copied in full below) ended "What lessons have we learned, large and small, thinking back? What stories would we like to tell? Who would we like to hear from? What creativity might we contribute to express our stories? I will tell my story, and certainly, I hope you might tell yours, likewise, in the Public Domain, for all to share creatively.

I'm glad to hear from us!"

Sorry I have not really addressed your questions Andrius - I just responded to the "glad to hear from us".

You may also be glad to know, regarding openness, that session 4108 at ICTD2010, organised by Laurent Elder of IDRC-CDRI was on "Open Development" - they are moving away from ICTD programmes to Open Development programmes. See www.idrc.ca/en/ev-131099-201-1-DO_TOPIC.html and http://publicwebsite.idrc.ca/EN/AboutUs/Pages/default.aspx . So maybe things are starting to move in a direction where there will be more overlap between researchers and open practitioners. They were talking about trying to get people to make "open" the default rather than the exception.

Pamela