When we started the dadamac.net site our first priorities included:
- raising the visibility of our work in Nigeria,
- demonstrating the effectiveness of our UK-Nigeria collaboration,
- finding out about using Drupal for Dadamac's information (both publicly visible information and also information hidden behind the scenes for internal use)
- setting up effective administrative structures
- developing an "online home" for the various activities of the dadamac community.
We're happy (but not complacent) with what we've achieved regarding 1,2 ,3 and 4. We've made good progress and have created a useful body of evidence about our UK-Nigeria work. All kinds of things have emerged along the way, and we've learned many useful lessons. We've also developed structures and systems that work for us, and that make us confident about increasing our dadamac team as the opportunities and needs arise.
Now we need to give some additional attention to 5 - developing an "online home" for the various activities of the dadamac community i.e. the wider dadamac community, in the UK (with our gorwing face-to-face network) and elsewhere (through ou ronline network), especially in East Africa.
Our focus at dadamac.net so far has tended to be on Nigeria - so the rest of us need to study the example of the UK-Nigeria work, and its visibiliy, and see what could / should be followed or adapted by the wider community.
As a first step we need to do more blogging about dadamac in the UK and elsewhere. Nikki's weekly blogs about the UK-Nigeria meetings (and the way those blogs feed into other parts of the site) are the key to how the site has gradually filled with content from NIgeria. It won't be easy to generate such regular blogs from the UK, because there really is no-one with time to do it (unless we give up on some other things we are doing, and we certainly don't intend to reduce our commitment to the UK-Nigeria activities) but we need to at least start trying to blog some of the wider story.