This site contains information about Larry Stillman’s work. I am an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow what is now called the Organisational and Social Informatics ‘area of expertise’ of the Department of Human Centered Computing at Monash University. Being an adjunct means that I am retired, and not longer get paid, but for the ‘glory’ I continue to supervise and do some research. Hopefully this means I don’t need to do admin any more.
I have sought 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. I ha ve worked in Australia and increasingly in South Africa & Bangladesh in the Development Informatics area. From 2015-2019 I was lead researcher in the first-stage of the joint project “PROTIC” (which means sign or symbol in Bengali), with Oxfam in Bangladesh, working with women villages in different parts of Bangladesh. We will be working continue to work on issues associated with mobile technologies through participatory action research until 2024 because of new philanthropic funding.
What’s the rationale for this interest?
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– their information and knowledge.
Different discourse frames and power relations mean that very different world views are frequently on 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. I’ve helped organise 20 conferences on community informatics and communities and technology at the Monash Centre in Prato Italy. This is also turned me into an Italophile. It’s an honour for Italians in Italy to think I am Italian-Australian.
I’ve also got a few political and social justice obsessions which I have published here. I also put a lot on Facebook. .
In my senectitude, I am returning to my real academic love, Assyriology, and the Akkadian language, the greatest language of antiquity in the Middle East. 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 involved with a project to publish all the texts that have ended up (surprisingly) in museums and other collections in Australia and New Zealand. The internet has of course, revolutionized such allegedly obscure academic fields, with a huge number of resources online. More recently, I have taken up the Anglo concertina and the whistle as a release from some of the insanity that surrounds being in academia. I also study Latin and I’m getting back in to Arabic.
I’m also into bookbinding. See my Facebook posts. I do undertake repair and binding work at reasonable rates.
Contact: larryjhs_ AT _ fastmail.fm, and remove all the bits that should be removed to make this work.
