Sunday, March 28, 2010
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Falling behind in blogging. (Where's my muse? In Jolly Old England!)
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Reawakening an Old Dream
Have you ever felt life was a dream?
Like the character in this movie:
Suddenly to awaken to the lager world:
Having discovered a new sense of urgency?
Perhaps, as I did, about helping people living in economically underdeveloped villages like this one:
.jpg)
What was my dream, how was it reawakened, and, more importantly, what steps will I take to realize it?
MY DREAM: The original dream came to me about 25 years ago while reading Whole Earth Catalog’s daughter magazine CoEvolution Quarterly. 
Perhaps it was this Spring, 1984 issue with an Elephant dramatically posed on it’s cover, but anyway, I began considering how then current technologies could link experts at Western universities, who wrote articles about intermediate technologies (those more advanced than people in underdeveloped countries used yet simple enough to be feasible for them) with people living in third-world villages who had problems that needed solutions. Stewart Brand had once again inspired in a reader an idea years ahead of its time, so I put my dream on the back burner, Stewart moved on as you can see from his answer to this year’s Edge question, One’s Guild, and time passed slowly until my. . .
REAWAKENING: Then recently while donating a few dollars to encourage a freeware developer whose CCleaner I’d found excellent, I suddenly thought, “Hey, I’ve never donated anything to Wikipedia, and that’s probably the most useful free service I know of.” After donating, I was taken to the Donors’ Page where I read this story:
“I'm from Agnam-Goly, a Sahelian village in north-eastern Senegal with a population of 3,143 inhabitants. (...) I used Wikipedia the first time in 2007 for educational purposes while I was studying in Cheikh Anta DIOP university of Dakar. At the beginning, I thought like many other students in Dakar that the Wikipedia articles are all completed work to which I can't add anything- I mean a closed system. (...) But by curiosity, I entered the name of my village
 |
| Adama Diop from Senagal |
(Agnam-Goly) within the Wikipedia search tool, and I noticed that the article entitled "Agnam-Goly" does not exist but I can create it. And I said to myself "wow, how come?!". I was so happy to know that I can be part of the system, I mean becoming an active Wikipedia user and contributor. (...) Well, I started elaborating on the article about Agnam-Goly (...) Then I shared worldwide lots of information about my village: its history, tradition, geography, economic, social organization, myths, beliefs, people, architecture, and culture. As I didn't have a digital camera for my first Wikipedia writings, I said to myself that I can use a drawing which I can scan and share. The first image I used for my village was a diagram of its infrastructures: its school, health clinic, borehole and wells, the central market, the soccer field and the mosques. And that idea works quite good as I do not have a digital camera. But it can be hard to convey every reality of my village through drawing and it is time consuming. So I started saving some money in order to buy a digital camera, which took me four months. I bought a digital camera and took more than one thousand pictures related to my village so that I can share them through Wikimedia commons and use some of them to elaborate on the article about my village. (...) But what I learnt most from all of that is the fact that the best of the communities is the community of knowledge and sharing and that's what WIKIPEDIA means to me. (...) PS: I wish I had money to donate to Wikipedia. I hope to do so one day, after all, I made the digital camera possible!”
This story began to reawaken my dream, so I found the article that Adama started in the French Wikipedia: Agnam-Goly.
From which I discovered the community development project:
The Smarter BlogWelcome to SmarterVillage!
We hope you will come along with us on a great adventure. This project is going to involve lots of people and lots of effort. The two main characters are Adama Diop from Senegal, currently a student in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Winnipeg in Canada; and Karen Keppler, a teacher at the University of Winnipeg, working on this project as a dissertation. Adama showed up on Karen's facebook page, asking to be friends - because both were interested in community development. After a while, they started chatting on Skype. Adama was selected to attend a youth conference in Laval, Quebec. While at the youth conference Adama applied to become a student in Canada. Karen suggested the University of Winnipeg because of its unique blend of international development and social entrepreneurship into the traditional business curriculum. Adama began attending the University of Winnipeg in January 2009. While studying here, Adama will work as an Intern in business incubation, going home in the summers to monitor the SmarterVillage project. The selected village is Agnam-Goly. This summer a survey will be conducted to discover who in Agnam-Goly is interested in running a business, and what their individual visions might be for a business. Pellital, a micro-loan organization, will be available to the entrepreneurs that come forward this coming summer. Pellital has already funded 6 businesses which SmarterVillage will support. In this Blog we will keep you up-to-date on the activities of SmarterVillage. We hope you share our experiences.
|
Related Organizations Members Login |
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 2:32PM This was particularly exciting to me because I saw how now-a-days the internet has evolved enough networking services to make it possible for me to become involved from here in Nagasaki, Japan, where I’m an apprentice baker performing weddings on weekends, but with a few free time hours to devote to realizing my dream.
STEPS TOWARDS REALIZATION: The first step has been learning about social networking on GetGlue, where I’ve made many new friends and even found myself writing puppy-love letters to my “secret” girlfriend before I met my muse, who inspired me to stop wasting time flirting and start re-activating my old blogs by updating my blogging skills with Windows Live Writer, which has been a steep learning curve for me. Sigh!
Next I’m learning how to set up a forum. This forum is a meeting place for problems and solutions. Third- world users may identify a problem in economic development requiring advice, simple equipment, volunteer trainers, and so on. Volunteer experts may address particular problems with advice on intermediate technologies, plans of action, organizational strategies, donation of equipment, and so forth. Student volunteers, or their university or other program coordinators may offer to provide on-the-spot help as part of study abroad field work combining economic development assistance with gathering material for research papers or credits towards examination. Also, it would be good practice for students to not o focus only on assisting, placing the society receiving aid in a “client” status, but also confirm the societies worth by studying its cultural and traditions, so, e.g., musicology or mythology could be studied at the same time as implementing a Grameen Bank, or village water conservation scheme.
