This blog’s mission is to help non-technologically focused professionals cut trough technocrapic jargon and hype and help them in their technology-related decision making. The content is strongly focused on web technologies for development.
The need to define and understand the field of virtual collaboration, is universal among non-technologically focused people in development sector. The barrage of geekery and obsession with technical hype we’re all exposed to on a daily basis doesn’t help at all. Professionals in development sector are asking themselves: can this technology serve me in reaching out and connecting to people in a meaningful way, without me becoming a servant of it? Yet, their questions are met with confusing suggestions on how the latest panacea three-letter technology or this and that hype is about to solve all problems and cure the world hunger, if only we install it properly and click on a green button.
The web2fordev conference gave me a glimpse of the scale of people’s problems in understanding electronic collaboration on a larger cross-section of population. Issues we encountered so far working with a few international agencies seems to trouble much larger groups of people.
What’s In It for You
If you are involved in development sector and need to connect and communicate with people in a two-way conversation, this blog will be of interest to you. I’ll help you understand how electronic collaboration works; clarify for you some of the hype; make it more clear for you how to know whether something will succeed or fail when computer people come around to offer you the latest object of their worship.
Finally, I’ll help you answer that nagging question in the back on your mind: is it just me, or does emperor really have no clothes?
What’s In It for Me
This blog is my outlet to pass on some of what I have learned about collaboration. The inspiration comes from my speech Collaboration at the Edge of Network that I gave during the web2fordev conference in Rome and reactions it elicited.
This is also an experiment. My goal is to elicit at least 50 meaningful comments and reach at least 100 readers during the first six months. I want to see firsthand whether what I have to say has meaning in a written form, and whether a blog is indeed the way to reach people and start conversations.
