Larry Stillman
This site contains information about Larry Stillman’s work. I am a Research Fellow at the Centre for Community Networking Research, Monash University. I seek to understand how community and non-profit organisations work with information, knowledge, and technology. My PhD was a deep study of these issues in community-based organisations.
Why?
Since the early 90s I have worked in and with community-based organisations in various information, community development, and research roles, including a number of technology innovations. With the advent of the internet, I saw great opportunities for change — and also great challenges to how we do our work.
I began to become interested in how we know what we are doing with technology, is ‘right’, ‘wrong’, or somewhere in between. I’m particularly interested in how we know what is valuable to both communities and people (usually government) who support such initiatives. They aren’t always the same thing. Different discourse frames and power relations mean that very different world views are frequently at stage (and all the shades therein). I’ve also become active with various networks of practitioners and researchers locally and internationally. A lot of my time has been engaged in organising conferences and workshops because much of what we do and understand doesn’t make for easy writing or documentation. It’s also an obvious truth that nothing works as well as people getting together and–networking! We are engaged in not just simple research, but applied action and research.
I’ll add content as time permits.
You might like to look at the piece on ‘community informatics’ (the academic term that is bandied around these days) that I started off in Wikipedia, and add to it. An increasingly important, cooperative space for community informatics discussions and contributions is cirn.wikispaces.com.
I’ve also got a few political and social justice obsessions which I also blog or and / or put on Facebook. So look for me there.
In my senecditude, I am returning to my real academic love, Assyriology, and the Akkadian language, the greatest language of antiquity. Unfortunately, except for references in the Bible and a few elsewhere, Mesopotamian civilization was lost under the sands of Iraq and Aramaic, Greek, Latin, and then Arabic and Persian took over. I am teaching a wonderful informal group once a week. It’s the best thing I’ve done academically in a long time. It may become a credit course at some point in the future, but the bureaucracy involved is a real disincentive. The internet has of course, revolutioned such allegedly obscure academic fields, with a huge number of resources online.
Contact: larryjhs_ AT _ fastmail.fm, and remove all the bits that should be removed to make this work.
First steps have been taken to put into place a 5-year project between Monash and Oxfam Australia , to build links between the two institutions and to particularly, to support the improvement of Oxfam’s services on the ground. I will be one of the team from the Monash side of things, and I hope to be able to influence Monash to distinguish itself in actively supporting social justice and social change internationally. The commitment of a donor in substantially supporting this large project has to be applauded and I hope it attracts others to support the project as it develops.