I was not able to attend the aCCCeso, a seminar on Creativity, Community and Science held on Nov 11-13 in my hometown, San José de Costa Rica, but my friends from Sula Batsu were there and they gave me the scoop. It was quite an innovative proposal in Costa Rica, where we have traditionally had more emphasis in discussing connectivity infrastructure, ICT access projects, and the entrepreneurial side of IT as an opportunity for economic development. The fact that this event included discussions on copyright, learning networks, knowledge sharing and alternative media is definitively a step forward.
Lucky for all of us, my friend Juliana Rincón did an amazing job live-blogging the whole thing. Her notes in Spanish, are in her own blog if you scroll down a bit.
The “innovation on the lake” event was co-organized by Common Ground and Aspiration.
The venue, provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, was the Bellagio center in lake Como, Italy. The idea was to bring together a group of facilitators, mostly tech and social media strategy people, with a group of Ashoka Fellows, who have social innovation projects all over the world. These projects had particular problems to solve, and they were looking to incorporate a social media strategy as part as the solution.
I met great people, facilitators and participants, and I’ll be writing about some of their projects in greater detail in the upcoming posts. It was also really great to meet with an excellent group of facilitators, all willing to share their experiences with technology instead of “evangelizing” about their products. We got to talk about social media and advocacy, using mobiles for campaigns, measurements and impact evaluation, digital storytelling, and the use of specific tools such as blogs, twitter and social media dashboards.
You can read more about what the event was like on the website, or you can read almost all the notes on the wiki, where you can also find links to all people and projects.
Information Management Resource Kit (IMARK) is an e-learning initiative to train individuals and support institutions in the effective management of agricultural information. Since 2008, I’be been working with the Association for Progressive Communications to create a learning module on Social Networking.
The web 2.0 and Social Networking module is divided in two units. The first unit illustrates the basic concepts related to Web 2.0, social media, social networking and user generated content and describes their strategic value for an organization. It contains basic concepts, privacy and security issues and some strategic info for individuals and organizations. The second unit talks about social media tools and describes how they can be used strategically to more effectively collaborate and exchange knowledge. This part includes specific lessons on group productivity and collaboration tools, hosted services, Feeds and Syndication, Tagging and Social Bookmarking, Blogging and Microblogging, Online video and image sharing and Podcasting and online radio. More about the module here.
Sulá Batsú is also in charge of translating and localizing the module to Spanish, using local examples and language appropriate resources. We had localized other materials for this series, including the module “Building Electronic Communities and Networks“. Other modules in the series have also been localized to French, Arabic, Russian and Chinese.
*Photo by Ilya Eric Lee
i4d (Information For Development) magazine is a print publication distributed from India, with a global audience in mind. The magazine aims to provide a platform for opinions, research and practice around the ICT4D sector. The website i4d online compliments the print publication with interactive features and up to date information. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of the editorial and program staff of the magazine, and they do an amazing job by keeping a relevant publishing calendar and a rich rotation of authors, both academics and practitioners.
i4d has published two of my articles in English. The first was entitled “A social movement for freedom of knowledge”, a basic first overview of our research objectives for FLOSS communities in Latin America and the Caribbean. It was included in their October 2004 number. The second one was entitled “Commons in Latin America: Creative, collective and for all”, and it was included in their edition for July 2006, presenting some of our findings in the area of the commons, beyond the research of free software communities.
During the year 2007 I had the opportunity to work with the organization team for the 3rd Global Knowldge Conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. GK3 would bring together over 2,000 visionaries, international leaders, practitioners and policy-makers to engage on different conferences and activities around three themes: Emerging People, Emerging Markets, and Emerging Technologies.
As part of GK3. we planned a variety of online interactions and online events will engage a broader audience, leveraging a suite of collaborative technologies to link face-to-face events with expert and grassroots voices from around the globe. The idea behind the interactions website (developed in Drupal) was to amplify the voices of those who would not make it to the conference in person. We tried to take advantage of web video, audio, voice over IP, mailing lists and other media to communicate with a wide audience of practitioners in different continents. We used Skype, podcasts, twitter and youtube to integrate media that people were already using as part of their daily work.
During the event, GK3 online published photographs, videos, interviews, audio files and accounts of the sessions from the conference floor in Malaysia. Some of the materials and archive information can still be found on the site, at GK3onlineinteractions.net
Sulá Batsú es una cooperativa de trabajadores de varias disciplinas, dedicados a la investigación social de las Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación, la apropiación social de las TIC y las metodologías y herramientas para el intercambio de conocimiento. Sulá Batsú está ubicada en Costa Rica y trabaja en toda América Latina y el Caribe.
Sulá Batsú is a cooperative owned and directed by workers of different disciplines, dedicated to the social research of Information and Communication Technologies, the social appropriation of ICTs, as well as tools and methodologies for knowledge sharing. Sulá Batsú is located in Costa Rica and works in Latin America and the Caribbean.
