Congrats on completing the apportionment.

David, it still feels like I need a little more step by step instructions in the manual as what as an individual I am to do.

Mark said:

it still feels like I need a little more step by step instructions in the manual as what as an individual I am to do.

That's exactly right. I need to expand on this bit:

Step-by-step suggestions for getting started (a range of situations will be discussed in which readers of the Manual may feel they may wish to respond.)

While there is a great need for more individuals to get involved in the pre-launch phase of this project, I understand Mark to be referring here solely to what individuals might do post-launch in order to participate.

(BTW By "launch", I mean going public with the project in a large way. We'll only be ready to do this when random partner allocations have been made & verified and listings are ready to be released.)

I think the manual should give dozens of examples of what individuals might do (with an index of course!) depending on their personal circumstances.

But first there is the problem of how they can fit into a local organisation that - at the time of launch - won't actually exist. With up to 4,800 separate connection areas, the project is far too large to be managed centrally. So the first major obstacle to be overcome in each area will be to develop some organisational structure.

What I have in mind is the central registration of a contact person in each area - initially we might call these Acting Correspondents for their WWC # Area.

The idea would be to use the manual to invite anyone willing to do so to register as Acting Correspondent for their area. They would do this by posting their contact details on a central list of all the WWC areas. Anyone else from that WWC # Area interested in participating in the project would then contact them. The Acting Correspondent would be expected to maintain a local list of the contact details of local members so that they might work together to organise inaugural events. His position should be an interim one, to be confirmed or changed by the agreement of all members once a local organisation has developed. Other posts could also be created in the same way.

Hopefully, though, in many cases the Acting Correspondent will become a key figure in helping to set up the area's organisational structure. Since each area will have a catchment of around 500,000 people, members will in practice belong to several different local districts or communities. Hopefully individuals will feel inspired to set up WCP community groups within these separate localities where they themselves live: they might be sub-sections of existing groups or newly formed. Their initial agenda will not only be to get organised, but also to find out more about their partner area, particularly those aspects of their partner area which are related to their own interests. They might be a group at a hospital or clinic with an interest in health or sanitation. They might be school or performing arts centre with interests in education or drama and music. Of course, any or these groups might be particularly interested in some other aspect altogether - say, for example, microfinance or agriculture. Some kind of organisational structure will be needed in order to coordinate these separate inquiries.

It might be a good idea for each area to form a CARG (Connection Area Research Group) to discover where their partner area stands in relation to the factors that go to make up the UN's Human Development Index: life expectancy, literacy, access to clean water, income per capita etc. Also to find out about the work of international development agencies already working in the two partner areas (perhaps using the listings in the nonprofitslist) to see how they might contribute to their efforts. The CARG could also arrange and organise awareness-raising events or exhibitions that could travel around the area's separate localities.

The manual can give examples, introduced perhaps with wording similar to these examples:

"You are a soccer player who aspires to a professional career. You want to know if anyone in your partner area would be interested in giving you a trial or else in helping local talent in your area to develop. What can you do?"

"You believe many of the world's problems could be solved if there was universal access to the internet. You'd like to help improve internet access in your partner area. What can you do?"

"You'd like to get in touch with people in your partner area interested in the same things as you. What can you do?"

"You'd like to start a business to provide better for your family's needs, but you lack the resources to do so. What can you do?"

"You'd like children in your area to link up with their counterparts in your partner area. What can you do?"

"Your village would like to be in partnership with people in your partner area but they do not yet have an Acting Correspondent. Also, you do not know how to contact anyone in your partner area, nor exactly where it is. What can you do?"

And so on.

Perhaps Nedsters could suggest some examples of their own, preferably complete with answers.

I don't mind starting. Bearing in mind Mark's original question:

"You are excited by the possibilities offered by the World Connectory Project and you want to get others in you areas excited too. What can you do?"

Answer:

Perhaps you might write a list of all (or many of) the organisations in your locality that have an email address and then send them a message telling them about the project and about the partner area allocated to you. You could arrange a meeting and invite each organisation to send a representative. The agenda for the meeting will be to discuss what you all might do to develop links with your partner area.

(It might be helpful for the WWC Manual to contain specimen wording for emails of this kind)

Does this start to answer your question, Mark?

edited for clarity

"You invited all the organisations in your town to send representatives to your meeting to discuss the World Connectory Project (you sent over 500 emails!) and no-one turned up except you and your pet parrot. What can you do?"

Answer:

Write to your local newspaper or local radio or television station telling them what happened (and asking perhaps why even they hadn't sent a representative!). Ask for their help in finding others in the town (or wider area) who share your interest in setting up an active WWC group.

Check that your parrot is in full agreement with you on this.

edited to change "ider" to "wider"

>>Does this start to answer your question, Mark?<<

It does. To a certain degree I guess perhaps I'm doing this with microfinance as an area of interest already. I've spoken with nine high school classrooms over the last month about microfinance. So if high schools fit one of the orgs, than that might be a match.

Seems like there will be huge variations in people's commitment levels at the start. How to bring in people with the time and desire to really commit the most time and efforts will be a key factor to building momentum.

Mark says:

... perhaps I'm doing this with microfinance as an area of interest already. I've spoken with nine high school classrooms over the last month about microfinance. So if high schools fit one of the orgs, than that might be a match.

Mark, that sounds great! Do you have a link to anywhere where you've written about this?

You better watch out, though. I'm looking for people to include in the Models of Excellence section of the Manual!

;)

Also on the subject of microfinance, does anyone know of a website where potential loan candidates are organised, listed or displayed on a country-by-country basis (or even on a regional basis within those countries)?

Well, "models of excellence" may be overstating my personal efforts so far. Currently I'd fit into either the "model of mediocrity" or "hour of rambling" but I do think the talks have reached some students.

The presentation is about 15 minutes microfinance/poverty chat, 15 minutes the video, and 15-30 minutes Q/A.

Here's my digital worksheet I actually use as a syllabus-type thing to give the presentation from. And the 3 orgs on that workspace, Kiva, Microplace and MyC4 give loan opportunities much like you asked about...with Kiva being the best at this stage (imo).

Thanks, Mark. If the talks "have reached some students", that sounds pretty good. It's what good education is all about.

A "Model of Mediocrity" heading?

Now that's a thought!

:)

Mark also said (of the World Connectory Project):

Seems like there will be huge variations in people's commitment levels at the start. How to bring in people with the time and desire to really commit the most time and efforts will be a key factor to building momentum.

Yes, that seems to be the nub of it.

It makes it quite an attractive idea to try to mobilise an online "Promotion" team to work together on announcing one WWC partnership at a time and then messaging people in the partnered areas to seek out and motivate those who could be key players. It could use the Rule of Five as a benchmark of likely success before moving on to the next partnership announcement.

Would anyone be interested in exploring this further?

I don't know what it is with me, but whenever I get to the WWC threads my thoughts go in so many directions. It's a problem because I always think I'll take some time to straighten my thinking out and never do. So right now I'll just talk out loud and see where it goes.

Something that's very interesting to me about the manual is how it asks people to think locally about their own communities not just about their partner communities. It hadn't really occurred to me before that one of the great benefits of the whole project might be local community organizing.

A thought that has occurred to me over time about questions about what makes WWC different than twining or sister cities is that it seems to me at root a Web 2.0, or peer to peer undertaking. I haven't shared this thought because part because of the sensitivity about the resources of poorer areas; and the idea that it doesn't really have to have anything to do with the Internet. I guess I lean more to the idea that the whole project has a lot to do with the Internet.

Off point as is my custom, a story. Yesterday two friends were to come out to visit and at the last moment called to cancel. I'm probably reading too much into this, but it seems to happen a lot with them. The reason I mention it is because they are both very ardent supporters of permaculture. And they are both, especially the male part of the couple, very down on computers and the Internet. Ha, ha, the plot does thicken: I've long thought that a collaboration between the three of us could work out well. That's the reason I've been trying to get together. Part of the problem may be a two-male and a female triangle thing--something that only lately struck me. But part of it, I think, is also the issue of computers and the Internet.

I came to the Internet a little late, but caught the cyber-Utopian bug pretty early on. It's interesting to me looking at my cohort of friends, they are mostly non-digital era folks. Some have easily grasped the potential for online collaboration while many others remain deeply suspicious about it.

Most of my friends live in the city or surrounding suburbs. Only a few use social networking tools, in the main two artists who use Flickr.

I do see the Internet as a very powerful tool for community organizing. But I'm surprised that it seems harder than it should be. So local organizing even in the richer areas is a challenging task. But also figuring out ways to do it may be among the most lasting benefits of participation in the WWC.

John, thanks for thinking out loud. Your posts always contain new angles! This time on the extent to which participation in the WWC is dependent on internet access and on the potential benefits to those in the List B (richer) countries.

I think your assessment of the importance of the internet is right. Without all the information available on the web (geographical and demographical information for a start!) there would be no WWC. Yet, as you rightly point out, not all links between WWC partners need to be direct internet links. A package containing a digital camera could be sent from a List B area to a List A area; the camera could take a set of pictures and be sent back. Back in the List B country, the images could be downloaded and printed off. And this set of pictures could then be sent in another small package for display in the List A area. A bit cumbersome maybe, but all in the spirit of connectivity! Then you conclude by saying:

... local organizing even in the richer areas is a challenging task. But also figuring out ways to do it may be among the most lasting benefits of participation in the WWC.

And here, John, I think you put your finger on something very important: List B participants will benefit just as much from the WCP as their counterparts in the Part A (poorer) countries. I think that is so very true. Much of the benefit that more affluent people will get will come from their involvement and participation and their realisation that they personally have been able to make a real difference in the world.

I've been looking at Peru with a view to including some of the poorest regions in the WWC.

Six of the poorest 8 regions could be accomodated neatly within 6 new WWC areas:

Peru - Amazonas region 
Peru - Apurimac & Cusco regions
Peru - Ayacucho region
Peru - Huancavelica region
Peru - Puno region (Azangaro, Carabaya, Lampa, Melgar, Sandia & San Roman provinces)
Peru - Puno region (Huancane, Puno, San Antonio de Putina & provinces to southeast)

That would leave just 12 more WWC areas to be decided. I'll look at South Africa again.

In the meantime, your own ideas or preferences would be very welcome!

Is there a way that the connectory could be linked to googlemaps, or some such?

Erik Hersman who writes the blog White African is very interested in maps and recently attended the Where 2.0 conference. Here's the slide show and notes for his presentation at the conference. Several previous post are about mapping and might be of interest.

One reason that I mention Hersman is that he makes the point in this post that creating online mapping sites has a steep learning curve an requires some coding. There are lots of other challenges too, not the least that often the quality of mapping information in the developing world is sometimes low.

What's great about Hersman and many other techies is they want regular people to do cool things with online maps. And in Hersman's case he's looking of opportunities for African techies as he names some of the challenges. So Erik Hersman's blog is a good one to follow for mapping and much other useful information.

chris macrae said:

Is there a way that the connectory could be linked to googlemaps, or some such?

I think it would be easy enough to add in a link to the WWC listing of all the WWC areas that took you to the general area in which each WWC area was located. I'm not altogether certain how advantageous that would be. One problem with Googlemaps is that it is well developed in well developed parts of the world, so that you can locate the nearest street corner with a burger bar or neighbourhood with an 18 hole golf course, but there's no data available for almost all the developing countries beyond satellite images of distant chunks of forest, mountainsides and sea coasts. The key characteristics of even large cities are not really discernable. You're still invited to tag your favourite shopping malls and local Starbucks, there just aren't any shown!

I think we need to ask what kind of maps would be most useful - not the neatest, Western-orientated, most graphically-sensational map, but one that is available, functional and time-saving.

Apart from some kind of overview map for each region or world zone showing where WWC areas stand in relation to one another, providing a centralised mapping component in this project seems to be of questionable priority. Wouldn't it be better leave to mutualities (individual pairings of WWC areas) to decide what kind of mapping would be useful. One of the early tasks for each area will need to be the production of a map (or perhaps sketch map) showing the main centres of population in their area, the main roads, rivers and railways, important geographical features like mountains, deserts and swampland and perhaps some indication of demographic patterns such as population density, employment options and land use.

In Africa & Central America, most areas are covered by Maplibrary which is a brilliant database from which to develop the kind of map that I think is required.

John made the point in an earlier post that one of the strengthe of the WCP is that it has the ability not only to connect with others on the other side of the world, but also to connect with your immediate neighbours. Getting together to map your area and/or set up a website for your WWC partnership is the kind of activity that could be community-building in a very positive and productive sense.

And if you really want what I call a gimmicky map, here's one I prepared earlier.

:D

Mark Grimes said:

Congrats on completing the apportionment.

David, it still feels like I need a little more step by step instructions in the manual as what as an individual I am to do.

I'm answering this for a second time, since clearly different indviduals might do different things. I intend to spell some of these in greater detail in the Manual itself, when I get round to doing some more work on it.

At present though, I have started a new discussion thread (though "discussion" might be a somewhat optimistic description at this slow time on Ned!) called "1412".

I'm about to re-name this thread 1412 - a rich-poor partnership & it will offer you a chance to collaborate in a real life WCC simulation.

It's to be an experimental exploration of what a small group of individuals might do (on their own or working in collaboration) to discover enough about a single area from one of the WWC List A (i.e. Developing) countries to be able to devise appropriate and useful responses that will help people living in that area, especially with problems to do with:

• water supply
• sanitation
• health improvements
• Education
• IT
• Employment prospects
• Agriculture/Horticulture
• Microfinance

So now I'm interested and involved in microfinance and following along how to bring that into any meaningful action/collaboration with area 1412?

Ask yourself, which of these two positions is closest to your own?

1. interested in microfinance primarily in just one setting (only in a particular country (e.g.Uganda), or via a particular organisation (e.g. Kiva etc)
2. interested in the provision of microfinance in whatever setting it's needed by whatever method is best

If (a), that's fine. You probably won't be offering any direct support to Area 1412. On the whole, the more people who become involved the better, but the WCP won't work if people simply switch their efforts to projects in 1412 and away from whatever other anti-poverty strategies they have been supporting elsewhere. The net effect will be nil.

On the other hand, someone with direct and continuing involvement with microfinace schemes elsewhere might still find time to share their experience with people wanting to get involved in good microfinance schemes in 1412. For example, they might to willing to join a small voluntary research team to find out more about the state of microfinance in 1412 and in Niger as a whole.

Back to the initial question:

If (b), in the context of the 1412 simulation, it suggests that some research needs to be done into how much impact microfinance schemes are already having in Niger, and in Niamey in particular. What kind of support for microfinance in Niamey would be best? The research efforts of a small team of like-minded suppporters of microfinance could result in suggestions of the most practical steps that people in 1412's partner area might take.

I'll try to explore this a bit more in the simulation thread.

[BTW, even if you were not already supporting microfinance projects elsewhere, it might still be equally valid to choose not to get involved in the WCP in Area 1412 at all. You might instead, quite properly, choose to support any other scheme you wished (microfinance or whatever), wherever in the world that happened to be.

In other words, there is intended to be no measure of compulsion about participation in the WCP, except the awareness that if sufficient people were to start to work together on behalf on their allocated partner area from a developing country, there could potentially be an enormous, additional contribution towards the fight against world poverty.

There are an average of 500,000 people in every WWC area. If one person chooses to make their effort elsewhere than in their allocated partner area, it will be down to some of the other 499,999 people to get involved instead.]

edited to improve clarity

The 1412 thread has helped to crystallise in my mind a fivefold approach that might be adopted by people from List B countries when thinking of ways they might get involved in supporting development programmes in their List A partner areas.

1. Support the international development aid organisations you already support, but focus particularly on the work they are doing in your partner area
2. Contact people and organisations in your List A partner area to help identify CBOs worth supporting
3. Look through the list of organisations listed as active in the country in which your partner area is situated. Identify those currently engaged on projects within your partner area. Find ways to support their work.
4. Join a locally-based team of people interested in researching specific development issues in the List A partner area
5. Encourage the development of new schemes within your List A partner area

Each of the five approaches may then be broken down into specific action that an individual might choose to take.

For example,

Approach 1: Support the international development aid organisations that you alreadysupport ("your usual NPOs"), but focusing exclusively on their work within your partner area

• find out from each of "your usual NPOs" if they can specify precisely how any money you raise for them will be spent within your partner area
• do a sponsored event to raise money for one (or more) of these organisations (use the event to publicise the WWC partnership and recruit new WCP participants)
• get family and friends to share your enthusiasm (i.e. for the WCP and promoting your WWC partner area) by telling them about the work your chosen NPOs are already doing there
• see if family and friends will agree to do sponsored events themselves
• plan an awareness and recruitment event in your community highlighting the work of these NPOs in the partner area
• seek the support of the community organisations to which you belong in promoting the awareness event: see if one might offer a venue, form an event committee, invite other organisations to attend etc
• alternatively, arrange a public meeting yourself: start by sending an invitation to as many community organisations as possible to send representatives to a meeting to plan this
• see if one of the organisations working in your partner area will provide a speaker or publicity material for your WCP recruitment & awareness event
• find out what further plans each of your "usual NPOs" has for development work within your partner area and whether their plans might be extended if they got greater than expected public support

Each approach might also be explored in relation to the main areas of development needs (abbreviations in brackets relate the planning table that follows)

• Sufficient supply of safe, clean drinking water (Water)
• Improved sanitation systems (Sanit)
• Better medical and health care facilities, including health education (H'lth)
• Better educational opportunities that are accessible to all (Educ)
• Greater access to IT services and improved comnnectivity (IT)
• Improved farming and horticultual methods (Hort)
• Support for community development initiatives (Comm)
• Empowerment of community entrepreneurs though high quality microfinance schemes (Microf)

Approach	Water	Sanit	H'lth	Educ	IT	Hort	Comm	Microf
#1 Usual NPOs								link1
#2 Contacts								link2
#3 By WWC list								link3
#4 Research Gp								link4
#5 New project								link5

I've also added a link to the 1412 thread where the fivefold approach is applied to the issue of microfinance in one particular area of Niger.

Intresting Thanks

Anyone care to read my draft proposal for the Millennium Promise competition and provide some feedback?

It would be very welcome.

Also need ideas for possible images to accompany the text.

Thanks

edited to fix link

I've sent my entry in.

The winner is required to sign a copyright agreement before receiving any financial reward. In the unlikely event that I won, there would be a bit of a dilemma. Although none of the images used are my work, most are covered by a creative commons license and are available for anyone to use (for a good, non-commercial reason). The best image though is one taken by Meron and posted on Onet when Ray and Jackie shipped out a container to Lesotho for SOLID in 2007.

So I guess it would be up to Meron to decide whether or not I should sign the agreement! She would certainly deserve the prize money - but would she want to sign away her rights to the photo?

I guess this is only hypothetical, though. Instead, it could at least result in some useful publicity for both WWC and for SOLID. Also for the Uncultured Project. I was going to use Shawn Ahmed's brilliant video "The Poor aren't Lazy" but he is worried about what he calls their "peculiar and harsh" rules and I didn't want to cause him unnecessary concern. So I cite his project, with SOLID, as an example of how much a few people - or even a single person - can achieve when they are determined to succeed.

Hopefully the competition may lead to some renewed interest in WWC and the involvement of some new faces.