Blog

Regular followers of our Wednesday meetings will realise that we can never predict exactly what will unfold. Predictably, this week was no exception. Despite travelling, John was fully apprised of events at Fantsuam Foundation and joined the Skype meeting to fill us in. His first input was to let the UK team know that no-one else from Fantsuam would be online - because they were in the middle of some exciting developments. These centred around a huge effort to get their new Community Communication Centre up and running. New equipment ordered from the US had just arrived, so workers were...

Today's online meeting illustrated perfectly the type of difficulties which can potentially beset our weekly Skype link-ups between Nigeria and the UK. It first became apparent that all was not well after we were joined in the session by Bala, Manager of Zittnet and a regular team member. The Nigerian team quickly explained that they were experiencing problems with their network. In fact, they had identified the presence of unusual traffic from an external client and - fearing this could mean a viral or hacking attack - had chosen to block the "intruder" for safety. A low-key and unremarkable event...

I have just started to explore posterous - which describes itself as "the dead simple way to put anything online using email" and says "We're super excited to see what happens when blogging becomes as easy as email, and we hope you enjoy posterous as much as we do. Thanks for trying it." Posterous can be used in lots of ways. For myself, I simply hope to use it as a kind of in-between point - somewhere between blogging and sending personal emails. You can see what I mean by checking my first three posts there. They are, in reverse...

I was delighted today to read Mike Gurstein's blog Thoughts on Research as an Element in Telecentre Community Informatics Practice and so I commented on it. I was encouraged because I am always looking for opportunites to close the gaps between academics and practitioners - and he is keen to do that too. Genuine collaboration In his blog Mike Gurstein writes about Community Informatics research and makes a plea for researchers to link more closely with practitioners in a genuinely collaborative way. He points out that they should recognising the value of local knowledge and networks in academic research -...