The A Spot

Thanks to the new Pipes set up by Marnie Webb at Compumentor which help folks find content related to technology and civil society I was able to find this blog on ICT for Democracy set up by the folks at ELDIS . If you have never browsed ELDIS you should. It is chock full of development research and discussion aimed at helping us create change.

The ICT for Democracy blog is new, launched this past April, but the bloggers have already posted some great bits on the potential for technology to be a Trojan Horse which empowers users to act in ways they never before imagined.

If you dig a bit deeper in the ELDIS community you will find that bloggers can post on multiple, issue or topic based blogs. If you click on a user you can find all the posts they have made to various discussions throughout the community. Very cool.

There is alot of buzz (some deserved and some not) about the potential of web 2.0 to revolutionize how we reach out to supporters and mobilize them around certain issues. As great as all that is it helps to understand how social networks - live, breath, eat, grow - and you cannot always see that with a web-based tool.

The folks with Net-Map have put together a great, resource rich, website to help folks understand and use Net-Map: Net-Map is an interview-based mapping tool that helps people understand, visualize, discuss, and improve situations in which many different actors influence outcomes. Relying on pens, paper, colored tags, stackable pieces you can create sophisticated network maps which help you better understand the network you are trying to influence. (more…)

So along with the blogs and e-mail newsletters which flood my in box every day I am also subscribed to updates from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. They have a great project on leadership and building state capacity which has had a number of interesting meetings over the years and whose staff conduct trainings and programs around the world. Recently the Dir of the project - Howard Wolpe - former Congressman and expert on Africa co wrote an article called Democracy and Peace-building: Rethinking the Conventional Wisdom. The lessons he and Steve McDonald cite underpin much of the work I have been doing with ISC. Working in communities which have been divided by ethnic, religious, political, cultural issues requires a focus on building trust, collaborative capacity and a focus on consensus building not political competition. I think we take on one particular piece of the puzzle - helping divided communities achieve results on issues of shared mutual interest in a collaborative way builds their capacity to work together on other more intractable issues.

Unfortunately it is in a Journal which is only available for purchase so I cannot cite the entire article. I have written Mr. Wolpe and asked for permission to post in its entirety. Click here for an excerpt from the paper. (more…)

Hat tip to Michael Gilbert for alerting me to this 2007 report from the Health Communication Partnership called Taking Community Empowerment to Scale. I am currently working on a few pilot projects as part of our work in Ukraine under the Ukraine Citizen Action Network. Perfect timing to read this report as I am thinking about how to set these pilots up to easily scale if they prove useful and relevant to citizens in Ukraine. I was struck by the 14 recommendations…these are integral to how ISC does its programming and crucial when working to mainstream advocacy and citizen engagement into every day life.
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Idealware has come up with another good article on - A Few Good Tools for Sharing Files with Distributed Groups. I was happy to help Laura out with this article and provide some examples from my experience working with coalitions and geographically distant teams of consultants. We are often faced with how to collaborate effectively over long distances and produce a high quality product with input from the widest range of participants possible. The technology we use is just one variable in the equation but getting it right can help get us over big social and cultural collaboration hurdles.

Read the full text here. A key excerpt appears after the jump…
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