World Connectory Project: launching the first Pilot Partnership

This Sunday, 21 September - on the United Nations' International Day of Peace 2008 - the first Five Year Partnerships between 2,400 areas from the most developed countries in the world and 2,400 areas from the least developed countries in the world will be decided.

The random sequence of numbers that will determine who gets to partner who has already been obtained by Theresa Williamson of Catalytic Communities (CatComm), which is based in "neutral" Brazil, a country that currently falls outside the WCP remit of the top 20% and bottom 20% of countries in the world, based on the Human Development Index, but tempered to some extent also by each country's GDP per capita. The list will consist of the numbers from 6001 to 8400 each listed once in a random order.

Theresa will send this to me on Sunday (Peace Day) and I will list it here on Ned, alongside the numbers 1 to 2,400.

The numbers 1 to 2,400 will denote the WWC area numbers of the List A areas (i.e. the poorer countries). The sequence of numbers (from 6001 to 8,400) sent by CatComm will denote the List B areas (i.e. the richer countries) The definitive list of areas will be that listed in the workspace at http://www.ned.com/group/wwc/ws/ index/ at noon PST on 20th September 2008, the day before the partnerships will first be declared. The time of all revisions is listed and any alteration to the definitive list after the designated time will be invalid.

The first partnership to be announced will be the one involving:

WWC area #1198: Kenya - Rift Valley province: Laikipia and Samburu districts

Once we know which area is to be partnered with Kenyan area #1198, we can work together to raise awareness of the WCP there and help the residents of Laikipia-Samburu and the residents of its partner area to make contact with one another and begin working together in the coming months and years to their mutual benefit.

This is Awesome David I ask for its blessing from the all mighty

Thanks for your good wishes, Kayiwa.

It's only a matter of hours now, but I can hardly wait to get started!

I am heading out to area 1536 in a week or so. Is there somewhere I should browse to which advises:

1. What the partner area is for 1536
2. What proposed "connecting" process there is
3. Which areas are being prioritised

Also, do you have any promotional material, that could be used to market the WCP to interested parties on both sides of the equation?

Anyway - congratulations on what seems to be amazing progress.

Ben Parkinson said:

I am heading out to area 1536 in a week or so. Is there somewhere I should browse to which advises:

1. What the partner area is for 1536
2. What proposed "connecting" process there is
3. Which areas are being prioritised

Also, do you have any promotional material, that could be used to market the WCP to interested parties on both sides of the equation?

Anyway - congratulations on what seems to be amazing progress.

Thanks, Ben. Excellent questions. Taking the question about promotional materials as question (d), I'd like to answer in this order:

(c), (b), (d), (a).

3. Which areas are being priorised?

We thought our chances of establishing the WCP over a wider area would be enhanced if we concentrated on a few pilot areas first and learned from our experience of developing awareness of the project, before extending to other areas.

In the first instance, we decided to concentrate on the Laikipia-Samburu districts of Kenya and whichever partner area the random allocation process decides they shall have.

Hopefully, we will get a small team of people here at Ned ( perhaps on other some sites as well) to try to raise awareness of this first pilot WCP partnership. Then hopefully we will begin to see what approaches work best.

Before the end of 2008, I hope we will have followed this up with a few more pilot partnerships. At least one of these, I hope, will be a "double random" partnership. By this I mean one where both partner areas are selected at random. (I have arranged with someone to pre-select a random number that will decide which partnership this should be)

In 2009, it might be good to allow any areas that express a readiness to get started on their WCP partnerships to do so. In any case the full list of partnerships will need to be published online by 1st January 2010 so that all areas can have a full opportunity to develop their own "Five Year Friendships" before the next allocation of areas is scheduled on 1st January 2015.

2. What proposed "connecting" process there is

It would be good to offer definitive suggestions about this, though the idea ultimately is that areas should feel free to develop their own partnership links in whatever way they think best (provided this remains within the spirit of the project - i.e. not a licence to exploit or engender hate).

The point about having a few pilot projects first is to see which approaches seem to work best. We should then be in a better informed position to issue some guidelines or suggestions.

In the meantime, I would suggest working along these lines

• find out more about the partner area (use the dashboard links for each country in the WWC)
• recruit a few others to work with
• hold a recruitment/awareness event
• make some tentative links with people in the partner area to explain what the WCP is all about
• make the most of any links that may already exist between your areas (including non profit organisations working in the partner area - see the nonprofitslist - international organisations like Rotary, scouting, faith groups etc, plus any links that you discover via local community associations and overseas students bodies)

4. do you have any promotional material, that could be used to market the WCP to interested parties on both sides of the equation?

Not yet. This is partly because no one has yet got round to producing any (though this would be good task to work at, alongside our support of the pilot projects).

And also, it is partly because we don't yet know how best to do this. The pilots should be helpful in this.

There are lots of issues around language and translation. Also, there are no plans to develop a significant renenue stream to fund a world wide project centrally. That would be insanely ambitious in my view.

I hope though, as we develop a website for the purpose, we can put together some downloadable materials that individual areas can use to publicise the project.

1. What the partner area is for 1536

I don't yet know.

As soon as the random number sequence is passed on to me, it will possible to tell you.

I wonder what others think about how best to do this.

My preference would, I think, be to disclose partner areas only where someone is willing to take on the role of temporary, interim or acting correspondent (whichever term is preferred).

This means that there is someone willing to:

• act as a contact point for the WWC area
• give some of their contact details (either email, telephone, postal address etc (in whatever manner the person feels comfortable with) so others can get in touch
• keep a list of those taking part in the project in their area

In return partner area details will be disclosed prior to the general start date of 2010, so that partnerships can be developed.

Once an area has sufficient numbers to warrant this, a local organisational structure should be developed and the acting correspondent replaced by an officer voted to the post.

Would you be willing to be acting correspondent for your area of the West Midlands, Ben?

If so, I'll let you know your partner area straightaway.

Do you know someone in area 1536 who would be willing to act as acting correspondent for 1536?

Is so, I'll publish the partner area as soon as it is known.

Does that sound fair?

Congratulations David, and exciting place to be. Will be fun to watch this a it begins to unfold even more and more.

Must say I'm excited, I'm getting very curious to see the allocations :-)

I've let Richard, Mercy and one other know who the partner area for Laikipia-Samburu is to be...

This is it:

Or another view:

Clue: this is the Canal du Midi as it crosses the city

But this is one of the things I most associate with this place:

But this man was NOT born there:

Le Midi, South of France

Yes. Getting warm.

Toulouse, France

Yes, City of Toulouse. (Toulouse-Lautrec was born in near-by Albi)

I think this is a really interesting challenge. On the positive side, it is coherent centre where there is a local media to approach; on the less positive side, what language barriers will there be?

Let's pool ideas!

6705 France - Haute-Garonne department (city of Toulouse, but excluding communities in Greater Toulouse)?

I'm excited too David. I'm really looking forward to trying to imagine ways to help make this partnership brilliantly successful. Of course I also need to carefully read what you have to say in regards to making this pilot program along the lines you envision.

I'll check back to make sure which partner area was selected. Anyway we know that it's somewhere in the Midi-Pyrenees department of France.

John, you've got it right. It's WWC #6705. That's the city of Toulouse itself, but not the parts of the city outside the city boundaries i.e. Greater Toulouse.

And Haute-Garonne is a department within the Midi-Pyrenees region of France.

If you would like to know the identity of your own WWC Partner Area, you can find out by visiting the Acting Correspondents workspace and signing up there to be Acting Correspondent for your Area. Note: you will still be free to pass on the role at any stage to someone else and there is also no obligation to act as a pilot area.

Sorry there's been a pause here.

Things are still happening, but it's not quite clear yet what the outcome will be.

But if Plan A can't proceed quite to plan, there's a very good Plan B.

If this sound a bit cryptic, I guess it is.

I hope to clarify matters soon .

The image of the seesaw encapsulates my vision of how the Worldwide Connectory should work:

List A____________qp____________List B

.......................||......................

Unless there is someone sitting at each end, the Connectory machine has no power to sustain it: it is only in the active exchange of inputs in turn from each end that will keep it going.

That is why the mechanism requires at a minimum the presence of an Acting Correspondent at either end.

The planned pilot partnership between Laikipia/Samburu and Toulouse currently has no one at either end.

The search for an Acting Correspondent at the Toulouse end of the seesaw was to have been one of the first tasks for this pilot partnership. The presence of people at the other end of the seesaw was something I had taken for granted. The success of the whole project could in theory depend on the readiness of people from Laikipia-Samburu to 'kickstart' this first partnership by speaking out about their aspirations for their own home area and for the project as a whole.

Enticing people from Toulouse to sit on the other end of the seesaw, solely on the promise or hope that someone from Kenya would sit at the other - very empty - end, will necessarily be a far harder proposition.

For that is how things appear to stand at present with Plan A: no-one has shown any sign of being ready to sit at the List A (developing countries) end of the seesaw. Someone may yet come forward - and the partnership will remain as announced until 2015.

The present reality, though, seems to be that the pilot partnership that was planned may now take many weeks before it becomes operative.

Only when there is an Acting Correspondent at one end or the other does a partnership begin to become operational, and not until there are people sitting at both ends of the seesaw does a WWC partnership become active.

I think the need right now is for an active partnership that the Ned community can encourage and support. That is Plan B.

I have spoken to Kayiwa Fred about South Central Kampala sitting on one end of a Plan B seesaw. He says he and the folks at KJT are ready to get started. The idea will be to get many more South of the city centre Kampala people and projects aboard too.

Then with a chorus of aspirations to respond to, the task of finding people to sit at the other end of the seesaw will be so much easier.

And so will the fact that South Central Kampala's allocated partner area is Council districts B and H in Houston, Texas.

I hope that we can get an action team together here to take the message to the people of Houston that there are many enterprises in the south of Kampala worth supporting and many benefits to be had on both sides from starting a dialogue and exchange of ideas and people between some of the world's richest and poorest communities.

I hope we can first get a dialogue and exchange going here in a new Plan B thread about how we should plan our campaign to make this Kampala-Houston partnership a big success.

Please lend your support!

edited to fix links

I like the balance David

Laikipia.

That's where Kuki & Sveva Gallmann live.

www.gallmannkenya.org

Thanks, Greg. That's a useful link. Perhaps it could help lead us to a revival of Plan A.

I like their website's wishlist lay out. Perhaps we could get List A partnerships to copy this kind of specific, direct approach.