AMARC Asia Pacific Conference – Conclusions

AMARC Asia Pacific Regional Conference is now closed.

After the interventions during Day 3 dedicated to fundamental issues like “Gender equality and empowerment through Community radio” and radio to give voices to diversity, AMARC AP and partner organizations met in the afternoon to discuss about the future and in particular the preparation for AMARC 10, the next AMARC World Conference that will take place in La Plata in Argentina, next November 2010.

It was an interesting meeting with a important round of table composed by FAO, UNICEF India and Bangladesh, UNDP, UNCRD, and Open Society to discuss how to proceed, how to bring relevant proposals to the World Conference, how to work for a smoother implementation of Community Radio in Asia Pacific in the next future.

Now it is time for AMARC AP, after the initial quadrennium dedicated to consolidate the movement in the region, to set up activities in support of the main topics of international development such as food security, climate change, national legislation, gender issues, human rights, knowledge management and capacity building.

Last day was dedicated to the election of the new Board that will be in charge for the next four years:

• Ashish Sen from India was confirmed President of AMARC Asia Pacific,
• Bianca Miglioretto from Philippines will be again Coordinator for WIN – Women’s International Network, and
• Shane Elson, from Australia as Treasurer,
• Maica Lagman, Philippines as deputy president,
• Raghu Mainali, Nepal as vice-president for South Asia, and
• Imam Prakoso, Indonesia as vice-president for South East Asia.

The board has now to front the occasion to follow the growth of the CRs movement in the region, provide support to those countries that still do not have a national legislation or have some problems (like Bangladesh, Thailand, India) and support the spreading of better and more relevant information in the region.

As final act of the Conference, the Assembly adopted the Bangalore Declaration.

Check the list of participants and the documentation on the Conference.

AMARC Asia Pacific Conference – Day 2

Interesting morning dedicated to two major topics: radio for Disaster Risk Reduction and radio for Food Security or Food Sovereignty, as the chair preferred to define it.

Examples on how the radio reacted and supported efforts in Japan, after the Kobe earthquake, and in Indonesia, after tsunami in Aceh, gave an interesting perspective about the role of radio in post natural disaster conditions. While the training radio of the Secretariat of Pacific Community explained how the radio can be used for specific purposes and produce adequate responses.

The debate on Food Security was not only on the food for itself but related to many other surroundings topics like: the local knowledge on food, the techniques for food production and indigenous food. Many people are dedicating radio programs to the creation of a tradition of local food, in the perspective of giving value to nutrition habits and create local Slow Food experiences.

The afternoon, as usual, was dedicated to individual workshops. I followed the one on Community Radio in the Philippines. The panelist gave a brief description of various radios born in collaboration with the Local Government Unit (LGU). He explained how they were able, not being independent by definition, to serve in some cases the territory without political pressures, while in others they were transformed in media center serving the political part of the mayor of the LGU which created the radio station.

In the late afternoon, I had the chance to meet several broadcasters and, in particular, almost the whole delegation from Afghanistan which has been very numerous and active during these days even if language was quite an obstacle.

I also heard the very interesting story of Sunil, from Sri Lanka, who decided, after serving for 30 years in a Community Radio, not to retire but to set up a new webradio, to preserve his experience!

AMARC Asia Pacific 2nd Regional Conference Begins

Very positive impressions after Day one of the AMARC Asia Pacific 2nd Regional Conference that has just started this morning in Bangalore, India.

After the morning Plenary sessions dedicated to the topics of main interest for the members as “Airwaves for Sustainability and Justice” and “Radio friendly legislation in Asia Pacific“, the afternoon was divided into several workshops.

I joined the one about the idea of creating a regional news agency to serve AMARC members but not only. During the discussion, the need of stronger networking among members was clearly stated by the majority of the participants: knowledge sharing is a main issue also in this context.

I think we, at FAO, have the knowledge to provide a major support both on the idea of setting up the news agency and on the side of increasing networking activities.

Internet and the new way of thinking

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:

• Reading, that is one of my passions, has been transforming, both in type and quality. Since I was in the high school, I considered myself a good reader because of the large amount and variety of books I read. Today, I see a tendency to focus mainly on a certain kind of readings: shorter, lighter, faster. This attitude is probably due to a specific moment of my life: I spend much time in my office, reading documents and absorbing a lot of information. As a result, in the rest of my life of reader I may need something very different. This explanation I gave to myself is true for sure but maybe not exhaustive. In fact, I perceive that also some other factors influence my choice.

• The way I approach writing is also changed. I remember when writing essays at school. Few minutes to make up my mind on the topic and some hours to squeeze the brain to get everything on paper: funny and exhausting at the same time! Today, I spend more time on the preparation of a document rather than on its production. And this process sees a different level of mental concentration: it seems like my brain is working HORIZONTALLY (more than an issue at the time, all of them in parallel) rather than VERTICALLY (one issue at a time, one after the other). Experience and different needs influence the process but they are not alone.

• As a consequence, also my working approach has been changing during the years. Since 1996, when I was entering data for a website of ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment), I got the impression that many things changed in the way my mind is managing information. The process my neurons follow to approach, manage and store bits evolved. Today it resembles the combination of a puzzle, linking together bits and pieces of information, most of which are already existing inside or outside my brain. It seems to me that I’m more involved in the “connection” rather than the “production” of pieces of knowledge.

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!

Communties of Practice

Some notes taken during the meeting with @Nancy to talk about Communities of Practice last week at IFAD with @Gauri, @Roxy and @Michael.

Session on microblogging

Last week we had an introductory session about what micro-blogging is. Most of the attention was dedicated to twitter but there was also time to explain yammer and laconica.

Many different twitterers were in the room like @gaurisalokhe, @mongkolroek, @TheRoadTo and @mariagraziab, with also other friend connected.

Many questions came from the audience. The most representative of the doubts in the room was:  “twitter, like other tools, resembles in many aspects email, so why do we have to move away from email?”

Here are the points and the problems to bypass:

• people are overloaded by communication flows, and
• they do not immediately perceive implicit differences among tools.

Unless they have the chance to test these tools for some time, they won’t be able to familiarize with the differences and realize how their job could benefit. Testing needs willingness, time and desire and these issues are not always “available” in professionals. As a consequence, my feeling is that if we want people to modify their behavior, they must be in the position of  immediately identifying the benefits deriving from changing their habits. If we don’t look at the questions people have in mind everyday and we are just fascinated by technology, we loose the focus and our ideas risk to become sterile.

I think we have to go back to these “simple” questions and try to solve these very basic but fundamental problems if we really want to promote KM, innovation and communication in our job.

Km4Dev has a new house on the Web!

I’m very happy to announce that the KM4Dev list has a pretty new house on the Web:

Thanks Lucie and Michael for setting it up!

Convergence is almost here, somewhere!

IFAD organized an interesting workshop to learn more on the results of the First Mile Project. I really suggest to read here the details of the project because the methodology is quite interesting.

One of the aspects I found particularly interesting is the fact that the whole activity started on a KM project called LinkingLocalLearners, above which a sophisticated commercial activity was built on. Another key point of the project is the massive use of the cellphones and Internet technologies to manage commodity prices in three East African countries: Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania.

At the end of the morning I had a question for Ueli, my fellow friend of KM4DEV list:

“In this interesting communication/business chain (have a look at the image on the left), do you see a place for rural radios to become IBM (Information Business Manager) and use their communication capacity to promote the business model?”

For my experience, I’m really sure that radios, as communication centres, could be perfect partners of this mechanism: on one side, they have all the requisites to do properly the job of market analysis and prices communication. On the other side, thanks to their advanced communication skills and resources, radios could help the mechanism with additional support like: organizing live training, collecting feedback and news, broadcasting the prices of commodities, offering distance learning, etc.

So doing, the “tools triangle” (radio, Internet, mobile phones) would be closed!