I thought I knew how today would go - but I was wrong.
Plan A
Plan A was about new beginnings, and the big picture. Each year I set myself up with a new online office. I use google docs and spreadsheets. I maintain some of the core structures from the previous year in my new "master office". (All the old clutter of the abandonned master office is only a click away, should I need it.) What gets copied to the new one is what I really need and value. It's a fresh start.
Today I came back online 'for a couple of hours". I was returning after Christmas, and a break from Dadamac online and the Internet in general. My plan was to start my new office (thus getting the overview of 2012 becoming 2013) and then perhaps write a blog about it.
The planned blog
The planned blog would have explained how 2013 will need to be rather different to 2012. It would have given information about various changes during 2012:
- How the changes would probably affect the online presence of Dadamac
- The greater emphasis on collaboration
- Initiatives and projects completed (or mothballed)
- Things continuing
- New things on the horizon
Dadamac is about people
However, Dadamac is about people. Although I usually work online, from home, the Dadamac office is a friendly, chatty, kind of a place - except that the "chat" is at a distance. Today turned out to be chatty, so this blog isn't a big overview after all. Instead, it's about the Dadamac people I connected with today, and our conversations.
Links to more information
If you want to know more about any of the people or initiatives that I mention below, please try the search box. If that doesn't work please contact Dadamac about the missing information and I will do my best to provide it for you - and add it to the site for others as well.
Getting more involved with Dadamac
If you'd like to get more involved there are various possibilities. Here are a couple. It would be wonderful if someone would take on the task of embedding live links to various pieces of text. Also I often have the raw material for blogs, in the shape of chat archives. That is what Nikki uses as the raw material for her blogs about the Dadamac UK-Nigeria online meetings. I often have permission to share interesting chats - but no time to write them up. First Thursday meetings, adn teh Fast Tractor newlsetter need writing up as well. Perhaps you know someone who'd like to do some writing.
Back to the events of the day...
Fola popped in through google chat
Fola (Folabi Sunday) caught up with me through google chat soon after I started work. It was a precious opportunity, so I stopped what I was doing. He is in Ibadan (Oyo State. SW Nigeria) now, where the bandwidth is much better than in rural Ago-Are (where he teaches). However we were limited by the power in his battery. There was no NEPA (grid power) and the expensive generator, which had enabled him to charge his laptop, had since been turned off. We discussed ongoing problems of the late payment of teachers salaries, government corruption, lack of support for ICT in schools, education provision and the gap between poor rural schools and the education of the elites, and also the work he is doing against all the odds.
Patience, evidence, visibility and collaboration
Fola made some telling comments about slow, patient progress, and how Graham Bell and other innovators could never have guessed how we would be benefitting from their work, and how we had to take a long term view as well. He commented about the importance of evidence to convince people that things were of value, and we started to rub minds again about what evidence we are generating, and how we can best use it to help accelerate and replicate the work that is being done by him and other teachers he knows.
Perhaps we will be able to find some collaborators through the London ICT4D meetup group in 2013. I can't believe I am the only person who believes Fola deserves support and who is willing to give him some. I just have to keep looking until I find the other(s). Perhaps you can help me find some.
Gerry Gleason and First Thursdays
I had thought of asking Fola to move over to the First Thursday online space to make our chat visible to others - but the server was down for maintenance. I realised how long it was since I'd been in contact with Gerry Gleason who hosts our First Thursday etherpad chats on his server in Chicago. Later, I caught up with him on Skype, for a typed chat, exploring old areas of overlapping interest, discovering some new ones for 2013, sharing links - and confirming that First Thursdays can continue as in 2012.
Sasha, bee-keeping in Serbia and New Zealand, and Janary's First Thursday
I will have a problem attending the full January First Thursday meeting, and wondered if my friend Sasha would be free to act as host. He is a great online teacher and enabler, attends First Thursday quite often and has helped me out with hosting in the past. Last time we Skyped he was still living in Serbia. He had been waiting a long time for a visa to take him to a beekeeping job in New Zealand. I'd been part of the job application saga as we'd been using Skype audio sometimes for him to practice his spoken English.
Today, on Skype, I found Sasha in New Zealand, doing industrial scale beekeeping, working long hours with other immigrants, and with little opportunity to go online. We both commented appreciatively about all we have learned through our online networks (including from each other), especially thanks to Andrius Kulikauskas and Minciu Sodas. We discussed the nature of work, networking, and collaboration, swapped some links and agreed to keep on learning together.
Sasha suggested we should find a better way of sharing our links etc more publicly (as Andrius always encouraged us to do), such as a wiki. We agreed to rub minds about our choice of platform in 2013.
Jullliet, Kenya and ICT4D
While I was typing on Skype with Sasha, Julliet Makhapila phoned me. Sasha's connection was slow so I could do both conversations for a while - returning to each separately later.
Julliet runs an impressive project back home in Kenya, but lives in London. I introduced her to the ICT4D London Meetup before Christmas, and we hope that may lead to some kind of collaboration.
I'm also exploring realistic ways to help her with visibility of her project. She'd love to have someone to help her, as Nikki has helped John, but there isn't anyone available and I can't do it as I'm already too much of an information bottleneck.
We discussed ways forward, and also our shared experiences and frustrations as "outsiders" who subsidise our work from our own pockets (as Fola has also done). We see no way to tap into cash flows that feed many of the higher profile projects that we read about online, and which - for one reason or another - seem totally disconnected from the lives of people we know and work with. From our perspective this apparent mismatch of resources and real needs is frustrating and sometimes heartbreaking - but there seems no way to challenge the system. Even mentioning it to others who do not share our experiences is risky - after all, it's not unusual for people who fail to win a prize to consider that the winners were luckier in some way and 'It's not fair!" - perhaps that is what people will think about us if we share our viewpoint.
So - at the end of the day.
So, no blog post with a great over-arching plan for 2013. Just more of the ongoing story of people in the Dadamac community, as we go forward into the New Year, learning from each other, and sharing what we know.
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