Almost ready to the start of the second FSCA Regional Workshop here in Monrovia, Liberia. During the third day I will spend the morning introducing Communication for Development and Knowledge Sharing to the tens of people working in the seven countries (Senegal, The Gambia, Mali, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau) involved in the projects and the Inter-Country Coordination project.
We are all waiting for the FAO Vision Statement Day.
Keep following the #unfao hashtag on twitter to learn more about the Day.
Some thinking on the never ending discussion on “push” and “pull” technology, with particular implication for mobile phones.
I keep on reading commercials and articles about the importance, for professionals, of push access to email. I’ve always thought that time and concentration are key while working. Usually we don’t have time to do things or, whenever we find some, we have to fight with “noises” like phones ringing, people asking, email coming, people talking, etc.
So, from the point of view of a professional, the question is: what’s the need of being bothered by ringtones and messages coming to my phone when I don’t “need” them? Why being forced to receive emails if I don’t have time to read or reply because I’m working on something else?
In the past, the problem was to have people connected, in a way or another. Today, in most of the cases this is not a problem anymore. Once we are sure that people are connected, responsible and able to manage their affairs in the best way is possible, do we really think that “push” technology is so important to guarantee their productivity?
I do this reflection because I keep on hearing that BlackBerry potentiality for business is so much higher because of the “push” technology this kind of phone provides, maybe like no other phone. And that the other phones, like iPhone, which have “push” feature only as addition and just recently, cannot compete for professionals. In parallel I heard many, if not all those who received a BlackBerry from their company, complaining for the fact of being hammered in by incoming mails. As a result, I find all this promotion of “push” technology very strange.
I’d like my device to allow me to connect to my mailbox whenever I do want it and not necessarily whenever one server does. So, I consider the “push” feature interesting but anything more and I appreciate more the option of being connected or “isolated” only according to my needs of the moment.
Technorati just released the latest “State of the Blogosphere 2009“. It is a very useful and interesting collection of data about the blogosphere. Actual trends and needs are coming out from the report. I’ll be back after reading it to reflect on the data.
Today, for the Blog Action Day ‘09, the topic is the connection between Communication for Development, the discipline managed by the Team I’m part of at FAO, and Climate Change, the topic all of us are dealing with these days and in the near future.
Writing this post is not an easy job due to the vastness of the argument. Climate Change influence our actual and, more then anything else, future life. In this perspective, we think communication can be a valid tool if not to solve at least to afford and manage the change. The objective is to avoid that this phenomenon that we provoked could damage our future existence in an unsolvable way.
Communication helps people to manage their life in a better way. The exchange of thoughts from one person to the other and vice-versa can help all of us to reflect and find new opportunities, solutions and ideas to afford and solve our problems. Communication for Development is a discipline which takes care that communication is embedded in development activities. This is because where the future is created, as in such activities, then interaction is fundamental to prepare a better approach to that future. Exchange is a key word for ComDev. Parity is another one. Dialogue, and not monologue, is the forth keyword.
Those are the reasons why we consider Communication fundamental also in facing Climate Change. Adaptation to CC, that’s to say the option to adapt human behaviors and attitudes to the Change of Climate, is the way to prepare ourselves for the future way of living when, probably: temperature will change around the globe, plants and animals will move from equator to poles, agriculture and nutrition will change as a consequence, wearing, eating and working habits will modify, etc etc. We really believe communication can offer a great opportunity to sustain Climate Change Adaptation and that’s the reason why we dedicate our job to encourage, stimulate and support people, organizations and projects which adopt communication when involved in adaptation to CC.
Just to mention one concrete activity in this direction, the Communication for Sustainable Development Initiative – CSDI is one of them. CSDI aims at implementing communication programs and services in selected countries, and to make available suitable ComDev methods and tools at the international level through knowledge networks and partnerships.
Very interesting meeting yesterday in Rome organized by @donatelladr with the stars of the web2.0 scenario in the Middle East:
- Laith M. Zraikat co-founder and chief product officer of Jeeran.com, the largest Arab online community with 1,5 millions registered users and more than 7 millions of unique visitors per month.
- Nadine Toukan co-founder and tribe-leader of UrdunMubdi3 (Creative Jordan), a social network of people who desire to make Jordan a creative economy, lifestyle and mindstyle.
Unfortunately Habib Haddad co-founder of Yamli.com, who was also expected, could not participate due to visa problems.
We always think that in that part of the world is difficult if not impossible to find innovation while these people clearly demonstrated the contrary.
It’s a long time I have the impression that my mind is changing the way it “works”.
In other words, I feel like the tools I use to do my job, and Internet in particular, are modifying the way my mind process information and manage knowledge. So, reading, writing and, consequently, working approaches have been reshaped. Here are the main differences I perceived between today and the past:
Trying to visualize these processes, I see the PATH of my mind, that once was linear,
becoming more fragmented, like a game of connecting pieces of information that are not necessarily distributed one after the other.
So what?
I’m using my personal experiences to introduce the point highlighted in an interesting article called Is Google making us stupid?. The question Nicholas Carr is rising is: “are our metal habits changing?“.
I tried to give my personal answer to this question putting together different consideration like:
- the title of the article can be misleading (the focus is on the Internet and NOT on Google),
- someone, like Stowe Boyd and Kevin Kelly, do not agree with Nick’s ideas,
- some else, like Scott Karp or Bruce Friedman had similar experiences to those described in Carr’s article,
- there are many points of contact with what we discussed at the KM4DEV meeting in 2008, and
- complexity is becoming one of the key of my everyday job (have a look at the image with the list of groups connected or related to the KM4DEV group),
At the end, I agree with most of the thesis proposed in the article.
After this reading, I consider the reflection OPEN and the topic far from being cleared. First of all, I don’t even know if we have to talk about a PROBLEM or just a CHANGE, a CULTURAL change. For sure, we have to consider the long list of dichotomies emerging from this new approach (faster but lighter, larger but less in details, etc.) and see if, at the end, PROs are bigger then COUNTs or not.
Secondly, how deeply the “age” can influence mental processes? When I was young, I completely focused on “creation” of knowledge, without external points of reference whom to look at for help. Today, after more than ten years working, I can both create and “manage” knowledge, having better results in terms of global experience.
The analysis is just started and time will say if this change was deep and real or just an adjustment to the need of the moment.
p.s.: I found great comfort in realizing that OUR brains are changing, and not only mine!
Back from my trip in Tanzania I have to show an interesting collection of images about marketing of mobile telephony around the country. As you can see they are pretty aggressive!
From cars to charts
From walls to houses
From billboards to shops
And they have clients of every age! 
Isn’t it great?
The Internet cafe in Njombe in Tanzania is called TUPO: Time to Unite People Online.
This is my place!!! 
Last week IFAD organized a seminar on Community Driven Development (CDD) and we thought Rural radios could be a very important issue to raise while talking about the way communities can be empowered.
@NancyWhite and the other facilitators chose the following ways to run the workshop:
* Chats Show and Tour of Exhibit during Day 1;
* World Café and final debriefing during Day 2.
We had a stand dedicated to Radios and the opportunity during Day 1 to share with several groups of the participants many information on Radios and the What, When, Where and Why we consider radios fundamental to support communication in development projects.
As you can read below, here are some of the main points that came out during the discussion:
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KM4DevorgNews Nancy White's Full Circle Blog Global Voices Online Netsquared Techcrunch npk4dev
