This is an archive of the Dadamac.net website, as it was in 2015, it is no longer being updated.

Blog

Good Wednesday - Unplugged, Civil Society Forum, Secret Conversations.

Submitted by Pamela on 14 February 2013 - 12:21am
Wednesday morning offers a midweek oasis at "Everything Unplugged". Tony Hall and I once decided that it is our slightly time-shifted version of an evening visit to "the local" in an ideal world. Unplugged is where we're confident of finding good conversation and friendly faces - with the exact mix of friendly faces being unpredictable. (See Dadamac's useful links for more on Everything Unplugged and other references in this post) Anyone who spends much time working alone knows the value of getting the right mixture of "doing the work" and "getting the right social vitamins". I find that conversation, with...

Toilets and gas!!

Submitted by Frances on 13 February 2013 - 1:55pm
Market toilets At the meeting on Tuesday John told us about the latest progress in providing pay-as-you-go toilets in the new market in Kafanchan. Pam described in her earler blog the Sulabh toilets in India which have many environmetal advantages. These will be the model for the ones in the market in Kafanchan-developed after the old market was burned down during the tragic religious violence of a few years ago. Bako and John went to visit the Local Government Chairman and Chief who gave their support to the project and its planning approval. Bako has been working in the US...

Market toilets, waste plastic, CISCO costs and the rest of the news from Kafanchan

Submitted by Frances on 10 February 2013 - 2:51pm
New blogger in training! I'm Frances Dada, writing my first blog to report back on the UK-Nigeria Dadamac meeting held last Tuesday, 5th February. I spent three years in Nigeria with VSO in the eighties and have visited Fantsuam Foundation in central Nigeria many times since its beginnings around 2000. I am Fantsuam Foundation's link person in the UK based in Leeds. Daily life in Kafanchan As usual John had to dip in and out of the Dadamac meeting due to the many demands on his time. On Tuesday when we held the meeting it was the woman who is...

Dadamac Learning - Acrobats and Etherpads

Submitted by Pamela on 9 February 2013 - 2:57pm
Ken Owino of Nafsi Acrobats said: ".... learning from your experiences we employed the use of Etherpad as a virtual space through which participants of our "CUlture Of ARts " project drawn from Denmark and Kenya, could meet and have cross- cultural discuassions ... We had a facebook page where we archived the meetings notes and kept all participants updated ..... ICT has really been instrumental in my advancement . i must admit that i have l earnt much virtually . Most the lessons learnt i did not get them from the physical classroom ." Ken told us this at...

Dadamac learners - following in Nikki's footsteps

Submitted by Pamela on 9 February 2013 - 1:49pm
This weekend I've been doing some "distance teaching" to two potential Dadamac bloggers. Fortunately both of them are in the UK, so I didn't have to rely on text for the teaching - we were able to use good old fashioned phone calls. Nikki's successor Blogging regularly is a great way to share stories from the people in Dadmacs's network. For over three years Nikki blogged about the UK-Nigeria meetings, with all its news from in and around Fantsuam, and we are missing her. Last week her successor emerged. During our regular skype (text only) UK-Nigeria meeting I asked for...

An encouraging couple of days

Submitted by Pamela on 7 February 2013 - 10:30pm
1 - Life is a bit of a roller coaster. On Tuesday I came home discouraged and seriously considering the human equivalent of spinning a cocoon, abandonning my present life-form identity, turning into crysalis soup, and not emerging again until I had turned into something completely different. Today things have bounced up again. 2 - Lost in a landscape of change My discomfort was related to how I see the world - and its uncertainties - and our stumbling explorations in this landscape of change. The confusion was about the ongoing dance between connections and disconnections, overlapping interests and apparently...

Call for help in exploring the landscape of change

Submitted by Pamela on 6 February 2013 - 12:13pm
Today I tweeted "I'm looking for fellow explorers, map makers, and social media people to help me map out the #LandscapeOfChange Pls RT" I believe we live in such rapdily changing times that many of us have to find our own way - because there are no well trodden paths to follow. So we are all explorers, making our own little forays out into this unknown landscape of change. As explorers we all have our own travellers tales, our useful experiences, our "rough guide" information and insights. If we share them then we can help each other. The better we...

Witchcraft, Microfinance, Sulabh Toilets, Kafanchan Bandwidth Consortium

Submitted by Pamela on 31 January 2013 - 11:30pm
These were the topics John updated us on in the last week of January in emails and at our UK-Nigeria Dadamac meeting Emails from John - social protection/witch-craft and other updates Microfinance Sulabh Toilets Kafanchan Bandwidth Consortium Goats and running water 1 - Emails from John We lost that case of Social protection. The accused was mysteriously found dead in his room. (This relates to last week's witch-craft accusation - UK-Nigeria meeting: witchcraft, sick child, plastic recycling, solar projects. ) We may be making some headway with the Kaf Bandwidth Consortium which FF (Fantsuam Foundation) is leading. We are yet...

Outputs, Outcomes and Peoples-uni.org

Submitted by Pamela on 28 January 2013 - 10:42pm
Last week at The Challenge of Measuring Social Impact at Hub Westminster I asked about the difference between outputs and outcomes. As I now understand it outputs are the kind of things you can easily put onto tick lists - e.g. "How many people came on the course?". Outcomes are more subtle, may be unpredictable, and often take years to emerge. Outcomes I relate to outcomes far more than I relate to outputs, perhaps because of the way they emerge naturally. I think of a couple of favourites. One relates to the Fantsuam Foundation microfinance programme and a story John...

More than 140 characters for @andy_doodle

Submitted by Pamela on 27 January 2013 - 8:03pm
@andy_doodle asked me some excellent questions on Friday and today tweeted me saying - @Pamela_McLean great to meet you at the Hub. Let me know if those questions helped and we can help you develop it further :) #mixatsix #hub I think it would be hard to reply in 140 characters so I'm cheating and writing a blog instead. The classic questions Andy's questions were the classic ones - "Who?" (Who do you want to share you ideas with?) "What and why?" (What ideas do you want to share and why?) and then (given the answers to the previous questions)...

Pages