Together with Kwami Ahiabenu I prepared a press release for the second Focuss.Info workshop which will be held in Ghana. Please have a look at the official press release:

Last week I was able to follow all of the TEDxAmsterdam presentations via its own website. As the presentations were running on the background of my desktop, I was being triggered by the presentation from Mark Kamau.

Mark Kamau (1980) grew up in the slums of Nairobi. As he was dreaming of a better future he had the energy to take every new opportunity. As a result, he successfully registered himself at a web design school called NairoBits in 2000. NairoBits is founded by the Dutch foundation Butterfly Works.

The thing that strugged me most, was his view on development aid. He drew a parallel between how he could get out of slums (his personal development) and how development aid should also look like the same. NairoBits challenged him by giving him respect and support, and over time, gave him more and more responsibility. Therefore he is arguing that development aid should use a new model and that is 'Intelligent Engagement' with the cornerstones respect, challenge, support and responsibility. Unfortunately, his presentation is not yet online. However, I will embed his presentation to Focuss.Info as soon as it is online

The reason why I give notice to this interesting analysis is that it also has parallels with the Focuss.Info Initiative. This Initiative is giving information professionals Africa, Asia and South-America the opportunity to host a workshop about the latest information sharing and collaboration tools on the Internet.  Focuss.Info invites these information professionals to submit a workshop proposal. We give a limited set of requirements, because Focuss.Info believes that the development cooperation field should learn from how all these people from all over the world make their case clear. After evaluating the workshop proposal, Focuss.Info supports the information professional with the fee he or she requested for in the proposal.  This is a beginning of collaboration and Focuss.Info gives these information professional the responsibility. As Focuss.Info asks the information professionals to document everything on the dedicated weblogs on www.focuss.info related to the workshop before, during and after, they get a global platform where they can show their expertise.

Isn't this a perfect example of 'Intelligent Engagement'?

Some weeks ago I facilitated a workshop for the Danish Development Research Network (DDRN) about the implementation and implications of organisational social bookmarking. It was an introduction to Delicious.com and because some were interested to get to know it better they requested a step-by-step guide for (1) creating a bookmark account, (2) installing bookmarking buttons, (3) mainitaining a social bookmark collection and (4) understanding the bookmarking collection. As a result, I piled up some of the important issues in a document.  The link to the document is mentioned at the end of this message, because before reading this guide I ask you to watch the next movie (3:25 minutes):

Now you can open the step-by-step guide. Please click here.

The Broker, a bimonthly magazine that aims to contribute to evidence-based policy making and better formulated research questions in the field of poverty reduction and international development, recently published an opinion piece (written by me) discussing why organizations should adopt social media tools to create social learning environments. The Focuss.Info Initiative has been used as example of such a learning environment.

Please read the piece by clicking on this link: http://www.thebrokeronline.eu/articles/Opinion-Social-learning-in-the-21st-century

We would be very pleased if you could add some lines as a comment to the article.

The objective and working of the Focuss.Info Initiative has even been recognised as cutting-edge and valuable by a Danish marketing firm (Mindjumpers) that is specialised in how organizations can enhance their corporate social responsibility by applying social media tools. As a result, I was being asked to write a blog post about, among other things, the working of Focuss.Info (which I have copied in this message):

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Copy from: http://mindjumpers.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/getting-started/

Many of us have played with Lego.  By remixing bricks of different shapes and colours, it is possible to build different objects (from cars and houses to space ships). This sounds like an easy thing to do. However, appearances are deceiving! In most cases, people cannot manage without the instructions to make sense of all the different bricks and decide over which brick should connect the other in order to build the particular object.

This small anecdote can also be translated into the issue of social media. Social media is everywhere and is increasingly shaping our daily life as a way to share and create new knowledge. With social media we communicate (by (micro)-blogging and social networking) and collaborate (by using Wikis and social-bookmarking) through different types of multimedia (by photo-sharing with Flickr  and video-sharing with YouTube).  As a result, all these different tools – social media tools – create a lively environment where people can tell their own stories, connect with other people who are telling their own stories as well and, as a result, engage each other.

In order to create an environment where people engage each other through lively conversations, the trick is to successfully combine social media tools.  Businesses should make sense of all these different tools and decide which combinations will best work for them.  This means that there are different combinations of social media tools that can add value to your business. That is why it is difficult to only give one instruction (as highlighted in the Lego anecdote) to build a social media environment for the business. Social media expertise is required!

A practical example

The Focuss.Info Initiative is a web portal in the domain of global development cooperation and is remixing different social media tools. The domain of global development cooperation aims at collaborating in local, regional, national and international initiatives, in order to get agreement from the developed and underdeveloped countries on a universally accepted way for the development of a greater quality of life for humans. As a result, many institutes from all over the world are being engaged in researching how we best can create a better world.

The institutes are increasingly using the Internet to globally push and pull that knowledge. Additionally, the Internet with its social media tools is also making it possible to communicate and collaborate on a global level. As a result, the Focuss.Info Initiative is asking students, researchers and individual practitioners from all over the world to start using the social media tool Delicious . By using Delicious you can store, share and discover e-resources in their specific domain.  By using Delicious, the collections of favourite e-resources are available on the Internet rather than locally on computers.  Everybody can access and re-use these collections.  As a result, Focuss.Info is indexing the individual collections from peers by another social media tool: the Google CSE search engine.

This search engine is made available for free by Google.  Focuss.Info has embedded this search engine in its website and is now only indexing the selected Delicious collections from peers.  Consequently, Focuss.Info is showing search results that have been selected by peers from Africa, Asia, Europe and the America. This means that peers from more local areas in – for example – Senegal can make their domain-specific e-resources better visible to – for example – the big policy and research centers in Europe and North America.  This is a big step forward in sharing information and knowledge, because how often do you find valuable websites in global development cooperation from Senegal when searching with Bing, Google or Yahoo?

Conclusion

By only maintaining a personal collection of favourite e-resources on the Internet (through Delicious), it is possible to directly share it with other peers. Furthermore, initiatives like Focuss.Info add value to existing information by re-using and remixing the information based on other social media tools.  In this example, the information stored in the individual Delicious collections is combined with the Google CSE search engine . As a result, Focuss.Info is an alternative web portal to information and knowledge in global development cooperation besides the more classical and generic search engines such as Bing, Google and Yahoo.