At last it can go public after a long time in the making.
A 5-year project between Monash and Oxfam, to build links between the two institutions and to particularly support the improvement of Oxfam’s services on the ground has been signed off. 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, and particularly, to get people to ‘tell the story’ in way that crosses professional boundaries and in a way that also makes sense to the broader communtity. 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.
In particular, the project will focus on the following areas
* Accountability – to develop strategy for gathering more effective feedback from communities we serve and to fix the broken feedback loops in aid more generally
* Climate change adaptation – to support community led adaptation to the impacts of climate change
* Gender equality – to address issues around culture and women’s leadership.
It will be a treat opportunity to combine theory and practice and work with people from many disciplines as well as Oxfam staff to improve international development though an interdisciplinary approach that could result in a new body of understandings and practices for university NGO cooperation. Stay tuned for many exciting details and activities. I was recently in South Africa where I had the privilege of visiting some projects on the ground, including the Hillcrest Aids Trust in Durban, where Monash students volunteer. It was a very moving occasion for me, and know that are students prepared to work with people in their final stage of life leaves me humbled. I am sure that many other thinks I will learn and document will be similarly moving, and important for people to know and be inspired by in social change and development work between a first world institution and people in great need.
For more details, see this press release
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 on another site now.
Contact: larryjhs_ AT _ fastmail.fm, and remove all the bits that should be removed to make this work.
dib project
The summary report of the 3-year Doing IT Better project is now available, and the full report will be available shortly.
A nice press release from Monash can be found here.
It’s easy to be cynical about the possibilities for change, but this project might actually result in some community empowerment and skills and knowledge transfer. There really were some community outcomes to come out of it.
I have an essay in the online magazine Galusaustralis, considering the options for the future of Israel as democratic state. The essay was edited down (no complaints there), but there is more information and references in the original, which is attached here.
The long version of the Galus essay
Gaza protest
I’ve blogged an opinion piece about the latest killing of a protester in Gaza, something which has barely hit the news–it’s just ‘ordinary’ news.
It’s remarkable that there has been little in the general press about the killing of another Palestinian protester in the Gaza strip two days ago. It’s another case of a stone thrower suffering from ‘overkill’ and the creation of a popular martyr.
This comes almost exactly a month after a Palestinian teenager was killed, and there are continuing injuries to Western protesters in Gaza. We mustn’t of course forget the case of Rachel Corrie and other protestors…. The increased killing of protesters, and attacks on
foreign protestors does nothing to engender international support for Israel. Instead, it further reinforces contempt for Israel. Tzvia Greenfield in Haaretz has now summed up the problem for Israel as: Make peace or disappear.
Full blog.
