At last I'm rolling up my sleeves and getting down to the real work of trying to to get a real WWC partnership up and running, not just assembling information to make it possible for others to do so.

And the great joy for me is being able to work with others in a team! It is only a small team at present. There are six of us, self-recruited, following a talk about the project that I gave at the Quaker social event held earlier this month. So far we have had just one meeting with another one scheduled for 12th February.

Before then - this coming Monday - I am giving a talk to the local ecumenical group, Huntingdon Churches Together. It will be the first test to find out if the project can attract recruits from different Christian denominations to join what will hopefully become a multi-cultural, multi-faithed local Connection Group.

You may have noticed that I've been changing the name from the "World Connectory Project" to the "Worldwide Connection Project".

That's because the feedback I've been getting has been that the word "Connectory" is too confusing for people encountering the project for the first time and the old title therefore makes no immediate impression on people's imaginations. In contrast, "Worldwide Connection" states on the tin exactly what the project is setting out to achieve.

So the areas are still listed in a Worldwide Connectory and the website is still at http://www.connectory.org but the project itself is now announcing itself more clearly as being all about establishing Worldwide Connection between rich and poor communities across the globe.

Two of the members of the newly-formed group felt that my presentation earlier this month could be improved with some coaching to get me to express my passion for the project more strongly.

At first I was a bit resistant to this, but now I'm really glad I underwent a thorough coaching session with them. My presentation on Monday is now much more clearly focused, more engaging and much more passionate.

You can judge for yourselves: I'm putting the text in the TLC Workspace that I began earlier. Feel free to use any of it in any similar presentation you might make to a similar group.

David, I think you should consider how you might make this into a video podcast. I think the enthusiasm you have can translate through that medium.

Maybe you will consider it?

Thanks. I already have! Great minds and all that.

I need a bit of technical support. But I'm sure I find it.

I know more about pea pods than podcasts!

(though not much more! LOL)

David, I agree that 'WorldWide Connection Project' is a better title, and I really like your presentation text! The video idea is good too, best of luck with it. I've not given much attention to my WCP area, must admit, but it's always in the back of my mind (not forgotten!) and hopefully some of the arts-related ideas that I'm working on will slot in nicely with the project as a whole.

I'll be thinking of you Monday :))

Thanks, Ceris. I appreciate your feedback and good eye for detail. WWC has been used as an abbreviation for the Worldwide Connectory concept for quite some time now, although I've also been using WCP when referring specifically to activities relating to the present project of trying to get as many groups activated as possible.

But by capitalising the second W in WorldWide Connection Project, as you have done, the link with the WWC abbreviation is preserved and enhanced. I like it!

I hadn't even noticed that the second W was not capitalised, it just seems obvious to me!Lols, but glad you like!

There's an old song "Everyone is Beautiful." Of course I think that's true, but also it's hard for us to necessarily see what others see in us. David, you are a gem, a mensch, a person of truly noble character. I do agree very much that video and audio presentations could be great ways to get your message out.

The how-to part gets deep pretty quickly, and naturally I get lost in the weeds when trying to think about creating online podcasts and videocasts myself.

Here are a few options.

You might already have some experience doing presentations using slides--like Powerpoint presentations. LOL I can't afford MS software, I don't know if you have it. Open Office provides very similar tools. Slideshare is a popular site for sharing such presentations.

One reason that playing around with presentations might be a good place to start is that it helps to get the feel of constructing a"movie" from scenes.

If you are using MS you already have a program called Movie Maker (under Programs--Accessories--Movie Maker). This is simple enough to get a bit of practice with this piecing together aspect.

You probably have some sort of digital recorder. You can record directly from a mic connected to your recorder. Again if you use MS you can find the recorder at Programs--Entertainment--Sound Recorder.

Neither of these programs will end up being the ones you use for your videos or audio podcasts in the long run. My point in noting them is you already have stuff that you can begin playing around with.

Audacity is a widely used free audio software accessory.

I'm addicted to YouTube, I particularly love to watch music videos there. Lots of the songs have a video which is simply a photographic slide show. Amazing how effective they are sometimes. Many of the videos for songs are simply a video of the record spinning on the turn table.

You may have seen Michael Wesch's famous YouTube Video called "The Machine Is Us/ing Us." It's about 5 minutes and worth watching if you haven't already. But there is a longer one, an hour-long talk Wesch gave at the Library of Congress that I recommend watching. The video doesn't tell you how, but it does provide a great overview of types of videos and why they are important to us.

From Wesch's video you can see that t a very simple sort of video presentation which involves simply using a Webcam to record your talk is down and dirty, but so effective.

Since I'm addicted to YouTube, I see all sorts of videos. I subscribe to a young Korean guitarist's channel. His name is Sungha Jung. Bottom line, Sungha is a wonderful musician and I love his videos for a few minutes of replenishment. But I'm also fascinated by the phenomena. In the comments stream the other day was a comment by a 14-year old who said Sungha was his role model. I went to check what that kid's videos were all about. I'm easily charmed ;-) I liked the videos very much.

I mention that because I was thinking of your grand children. In a similar vein, you know I like paper hats so I've watched those sorts of videos too, I saw an old guy at a retirement home making a paper hat, from the banter I thought his wife must have made the video. My idea here is one way to get started with your videos is to have someone video you.

The cameras now are quite simple for example the Flip. When Beth Kanter went to Cambodia she took along inexpensive "toy" cameras to give to people to begin experiments with videocasts. From her blog under categories click vblog for lots of useful posts. The equipment doesn't have to be really expensive. If you're willing to spend a bit on a new camera, I've seen the Sanyo Xacti recommended by the likes of Erik Hersman. Anyway the main point is not to try to go it alone. Enlist the kids, your wife, or friends, for the project. LOL the kids may even upload the videos for you to their own video channels.

Man, I sure have a habit of blabbering about stuff I know nothing about. Shorter version of this post: Go for it David, you'll be a video star!

Thanks as ever, John, for the originality and insight of your post. I'm not sure whether I like it more for its power to encourage or for its sound practical advice!

Sophia (rising 8 year old grand-daughter) is quite adept at handling a camera, so perhaps that could be a possibility. Though I'll first need to get hold of a video camera somehow.

Last night's talk felt a bit disappointing at the time. About five new topics were added to the agenda ahead of the Worldwide Connection slot and I was put under pressure to be quick - I was told "there's no time for questions" when I was relying on Q&As to get my message across; and when I started by saying I would speak for about 8 minutes, the chairman immediately interrupted to say "Could you please make that 7 minutes". So my good resolutions to pace my address carefully and to avoid reading too much of the script got a little lost en route. Still some people made favourable comments too. But the audience's mind seemed to be on an earlier agenda item that was all about discussing other plans for the coming year. One of those, incidentally, was a proposal that the local ecumenical guop should build a new school somewhere in Africa - Why not Area 2370 I thought! I didn't get the time to make the connection. But the WWC will be put on the agenda again for the next meeting, in May.

And in the meantime, there could be a very promising lead: the local Baptist Church already has links with Zambia and I was invited to meet a Baptist minister from Lusaka when he comes to Cambridgeshire in a couple of months time.

And there should also be time for me to follow up some of those interesting links that you've provided me with, John!

Thanks!

Hi David - I just want to add my own small encouragement - I've been so glad to watch the progress of this amazing project you've built (and continue to build).

I want to say a lot more and will do as soon as time and life allows - I'm very impressed with this initiative of yours, and I just wish I had more time to actively participate.

Your latest post caught my eye - I'm in the process of preparing a donated laptop to send to Zambia next week.

Its going to a seminary located there, via the partner of a family friend who is travelling to visit him. He is spending time there to help develop their school. They've set up a computer lab, and need equipment, so I'm trying to help in my own small way.

I'm trying to find out more info about the seminary such as the location and denomination.

A nice little coincidence, to be sure!

[edited by Jon A - typo]

In Pittsburgh there's a Project Educate. I met the Executive Director Mbao Ngula once as she helped my friend Peter Otika Okema around his efforts to create Africa Project for northern Uganda. Mbao is so smart, she seems to have a knack for figuring out what's essential. I did not mention Project Educate before because they work in a different region of Zambia. But Jon's work getting a laptop prepared reminded me of it. Sometimes it's helpful to see how various groups manage things.

Quite off-topic, but I'm curious how you are preparing the laptop and how you will send it Jon.

Jon wrote:

I'm trying to find out more info about the seminary such as the location and denomination.

A nice little coincidence, to be sure!

It wouldn't be this seminary, would it, Jon?

Or is the link with Toronto and the need for computer equipment at the St. John the Evangelist Anglican Seminary just another "nice little coincidence"?

Thanks to you and to John Powers too for sharing other links with Zambia. Even if they relate to projects in other provinces of Zambia, they all add to an awareness of how things are also likely to be in Cambridgeshire's partner area in Lusaka West. As John says:

Sometimes it's helpful to see how various groups manage things.

Tomorrow I'm meeting up with someone from Zambia who is living locally. I'm hoping that this might be most helpful in several ways, especially if it leads to making contact with someone in Area 2370 willing to be the Area's contact person.

I'll keep everyone posted about this, and about the second meeting of our fledgling group (on Thursday).

Hi David - very close - well done! Doug is my contact, but I think he's working at the United Church college, which I gather is across the road from St. John's.

I'm sure there's probably need for computers at both locations, in any case. I will post more when I know it.

So far the TLC group in Cambridgeshire has met twice and there are three more dates in the diary. The next is over a meal at the Axe and Compass (this for Linda ;)) and the one after that will involve meeting up with people connected with the Kumbayah Feeding Programme (see Ray's Unbelievable Donations thread). The third will be a week before a couple of us do a presentation at a school assembly about the WWC at the end of March.

Things seem to moving quite well at present.

:)

That's great David - I'm interested to stay updated.

Bring on the Axe and Compass! Wish I could be there.

I need this image for the first TLC Newsletter

Didn't use the image, but distributed plenty of copies of the newsletter.

For an account of our first public appearance at a stand at the Celebrating Difference event in St Neots, see this

We have now had stalls at two local community events in order to get our WWC message out among the people of Cambridgeshire. Some of this is discussed in the Celebrating Difference thread.

What has become clear is that it seems easier to get the message out face to face than via the internet. Whether this is true for all places in the world or whether this is a particularly Zambian characteristic, it does seem that links with Lusaka are going to need a bit more than an exchange of messages on Facebook if real momentum with this project is to be achieved.

Two face to face meetings in Cambridge this week have helped to clarify what the next step forward should be.

The first was a follow-up meeting with someone we met at our first public event. All our TLC effforts to date have been in west Cambridgeshire (the area known historically as Huntingdonshire). The meeting with Samanta was about how we might engage with students - especially Zambian students - in the city of Cambridge. The upshot was that we would continue to talk about this - and setting up a Cambridge TLC group too.

The second was a meeting with two Zambian students in Cambridge. I went into that meeting hoping to explore the idea of a gap year student visiting Area 2370 (west Lusaka) as a way of bridging the divide. I came out of it in a state of high excitement after finding that the ideas being put forward there by Bill Gates Scholar Sathish fitted neatly with the gap year idea, but extended it in a very interesting direction. He has experience of U8 and sees ways we might develop links through the university in Lusaka to send two Gap Year students to Area 2370 as WWC Ambassadors to spread the WWC message and recruit Zambian WWC Ambassadors to make a return visit. Satish, however, will only be in Cambridge for another three or four weeks - so time is now of the essence.

Fortunately, Andrew, the Visiting Scholar in Economics from Harvard (who, Linda will be interested/saddened to hear hasn't even heard of heterodox economics!) will be in Cambridge until the end of August. Both seem keen to work with the TLC group, starting with a meeting next Thursday.

I've been drafting ideas about how WWC Ambassadors might operate and am putting this in a WWC Ambassadors workspace. I would welcome your comments here in this thread or by way of revisions to the workspace documents.

David, it must be so gratifying for you to start making this idea happen in the real world. Congrats on the great progress.

Thanks, Christina. It is gratifying. But there is a huge amount to be done.

It's also a bit of a roller-coaster. After the excitement of meeting with Sathish, Samanta and Andrew last week, I was expecting the next meeting of the TLC planning group (at which all three were present) to be similarly enthused. It wasn't! The whole idea of a WWC Ambassador met with little approval.

In contrast I spoke to a Quaker meeting this evening and had a very warm reception.

And another meeting with the Cambridge students is in the offing.

edited to replace missing words after "a huge..."

It's nine weeks since I added anything to this thread - that may well be because so much has been happening. Although the group has lost our young recruits - to St Louis (by way of South Africa and Lusaka), Chad (by way of Germany) and Boston (direct) - we've been energised by the arrival in our planning group of Sue, who spent six months as a VSO volunteer last year working for CHIN (Children in Need Zambia) much of it in our partner area, to the west of the railway line.

So what have we achieved? Perhaps not so very much in terms of completed accomplishments, but in terms of new developments beginning to bubble away, things are starting to get really interesting. So, in the order we discussed them at tonight's meeting:

• Unity in the Community Event in Huntingdon on 12th Sept. Seemed in a way a bit of a damp squib, but met with some political leaders and put ourselves more on the map locally. Introduced to the multi-national Huntingdonshire Community Group, which has some Zambian members. Good thing for us now to affliate with them.
• Quaker Area Meeting at exactly the same time as Unity in the Community, but up in Peterborough (so I missed most of the Unity event) - I was invited to talk again about the WWCP as I had not had sufficient time to answer all the questions at the previous meeting. But the turnout was low: all those who had been enthusiastic two months before were now notable only by their absence and there was generally a much more muted reception. Positives were the large display about the project I managed to mount (in addition to our display at the Huntingdon event); the generally favourable, if guarded, response; sales of more of my vegetables to go towards the Soup Fund; and last of all (and perhaps it will turn out to be best of all) the Meeting decided not to offer any formal support at present for the project, thus leaving us free to develop exactly as we wish, even though we appear to have lost the prospect of some good publicity and access to a national and international support network that could have proved really useful with the wider launching of the WWCP.
• With much help from Sathish and especially from Ray Brosseuk, we now have costings for transporting four barrels of soup that are less than we have already raised. We just have to get our skates on and get the barrels rolling on their way to the Kumbayah school and feeding programme!
• As a result of representations made to newspaper editors in the UK and Lusaka, and to a headteacher with responsibility for children in a journalism training group (Kidz Kameraz), we are well on our way to setting up our Hands of Friendship Initiative, where the media act as "thumbs" in a concerted effort to hold together, and work work together, with four "fingers" (i.e. at least one school, place of worship, health facility and youth group). This has been a really exciting development and demonstrates what great stories lie just beneath the surface in every community, no matter how unpromising they may appear. In this case, we discover that a former star member of Kidz Kameraz was Thandiwe Chama, who was awarded the 2007 Children's International Peace Award. Try googling her. The prospect of kids writing stories about their communities both here and in Lusaka and getting them published in their local papers seems an incredibly powerful mix!
• We have started a dialogue with a member of the Zambia Ornithological Society who lives within our partner area's boundaries about getting some wildlife education started or minature nature reserves set up. I've the contacts here who will be interested in making this work!
• We are planning to get a wide range of different organisations to send International Day of Peace cards to their counterparts in Lusaka as a way of getting them to engage in grassroots dialogue. Sue's local knowledge may well prove crucial in getting this going!
• Just beginning to introduce the WWCP to Zambians at home and abroad via the Zaningi social network site.
• Scope for working with Tools for Self-Reliance, who have an active local branch in Cambridgeshire, and who are mounting a national campaign in the UK to support young AIDS victims to get vocational training at a centre in our partner area.
• An alliance with my local district councillor that may prove useful ultimately in getting support for clean water projects in our partner area.
• Identification of a youth project worker in Lusaka that may help us identify the feeding programmes for street kids that could benefit most from a second, even larger shipment of soup (thanks again to Ray!)
• Even a few useful ideas about the tricky question of how to publicise the launch/announcement of all the partnerships scheduled to take place in January 2010.

Not bad for an evening's work.

:)

Next time we meet, Sue will be in Lesotho - in Pitseng in Leribe district. I must let Meron and SOLID know!

David, Thanks for keeping us posted on the progress.

A couple of months down the road since I last posted, I guess things have slowed down a bit, but in other ways they have also firmed up.

The soup transport has proved tantalisingly unfinished. I had thought there were two elements: (1) getting the four barrels of dehydrated soup from Ray's store in Swaziland to Celtic Freight's warehouse in Johannesburg; (2) getting them from Celtic Freight's warehouse in Johannesburg to Celtic Freight's warehouse in Lusaka. The final detail was, I thought, being taken care of by Mission Direct and the project's beneficiaries, Kumbayah Ministries, who run the feeding programme.

1. with Ray's help, we have a clear blueprint for the first stage. What we are still waiting for is confirmation of the exact price. Once we have that, I can sent the right amount of money and operations can begin.
2. much to my relief Celtic Freight confirmed their earlier quoted price and their readiness to proceed as soon as they receive the barrels. However, they needed the name of our clearance agents in Lusaka. That was something I'd not really taken into consideration - I rather hoped that clearance by customs in Zambia would be taken care of by Mission Direct who earlier had offered to sort out the safe storage of the barrels. Now they have reconsidered the necessity of doing this and suggest that Kumbayah will be capable of finding storage. Meanwhile we have been given help in getting a quotation from a clearance agent for all the fees, duties and documentation involved in getting the barrels released for collection in Lusaka. That amounts to a third unforeseen element in the tranportation equation. Which is:
3. Clearance fees raise the cost of the whole operation from an expected $610 to a possible $1248 - which is about $300 more than we have managed to fundraise so far. The additional charges that I hadn't taken into (serious) consideration were these:

We've had several helpful suggestions of ways these additional costs might be minimised or reduced, but the bottom line appears to be an additional $400 plus a lot of hassle, good fortune & hard work. And that will still mean a total cost in excess of what we have so far raised.

The real downside to this is that it makes it much less likely that we will be able to interest other groups in helping us raise money to send additional barrels of soup to other impoverished feeding programmes.