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Fondation Connaissance et Liberté (FOKAL)

accueil_biblio1 I was very fortunate to hear Elizabeth Pierre-Louis speak yesterday.

Elizabeth was on campus to accept the 2008 Young Humanitarian Award. As Director of the Library Program at Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL) in Haiti, she helped to set up 45 community libraries across the country. She coordinates the training and management of these libraries, which are improving the quality of live for the people there. Elizabeth described a wide variety of programs of FOKAL, including projects on supplying running water, developing basic literacy, supporting the visual arts, dance and music, debate, and economic education.

Throughout these many programs, there is an emphasis on participatory democracy, including organization and responsibility of citizens, leadership, financial and technical management, resolving conflicts, and collective decision making. Elizabeth’s work is just part of an amazing organization helping people work together toward common purposes.

The photo, of the Monique Calixte Library in FOKAL’s Cultural Center, and this text below are from the FOKAL site.

The Fondation Connaissance et Liberté / Fondasyon Konesans Ak Libète (FOKAL) Cultural Center, built in 2003 in the center of Port-au-Prince thanks to funding from the Open Society Institute (OSI) and support from George Soros, is designed for meetings, training, reading, debates, recreation and discovery.

The center is comprised of a public library, with a membership of over 5,000 where children and youths from the poor neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince have access to reading materials in optimal conditions, a small auditorium, a café-terrasse and a cybercafé. The UNESCO auditorium is a hall designed for conferences, debates, meetings, audio-visual presentations, films, concerts and theatre. The center also includes a large atrium where one can discover the works of both Haitian and foreign painters, writers, and sculptors; and a sound and video production studio, a training hall and gardens…

FOKAL’s cultural center offers a place, eminently rare in Haiti, where peasants, women, children and youths from poor neighborhoods have a chance to interact with each other and with representatives of all sectors of society on subjects which concern education, the environment, culture, and democracy…

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How Europe underdeveloped Africa

how_europe_underdevelopedAmita’s interesting post, Education for Liberation…., and the materials she cites (Challenging White Supremacy workshop), reminded me of a book that had a big influence on me. I read it shortly before the author, Walter Rodney, was assassinated, in 1980, at the age of 38.

The book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, is now available online.

Rodney presents a new way of thinking about Africa’s so-called “underdevelopment.” The question was “why are some areas of the world rich and others poor?” I had been taught many reasons for this—that successful countries had better inventions, more adventurous explorers, greater natural resources, geographical advantages, better climate, less corruption, or just good fortune. The implication was that they mostly deserved their status as did the less successful ones. Africa’s underdevelopment was thus to a large extent Africa’s fault. Of course, a generous impulse might lead us to help those less fortunate to develop and share the goods of the world, maybe not to achieve full equality, but at least enough to meet their minimal needs.

Rodney challenges that entire view. He describes an Africa that is more developed than Europe in most ways except military conquest. When Europe fails to compete on even terms with Africa and Asia it turns to war and colonization to take by force what it cannot achieve through fair trade. Africa is then consciously exploited by European imperialists, leading directly to the modern underdevelopment of most of the continent. Thus, “underdeveloped” is an active verb, with an agent who does the underdeveloping; it’s not just a descriptive adjective.

1492Rodney’s thesis was highly influential. James M. Blaut’s works, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (Guilford, 1993) and 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History (Africa Research & Publications, 1993) extends the basic thesis, with more detailed economic analyses.

Other writers have criticized aspects of Rodney’s work, but the general idea seems even more salient in an era of neocolonialism. For example, Haiti today struggles under a crushing external debt. Nearly half of that was incurred under the Duvaliers, puppet dictators of the US. The Duvaliers stole the resources of the Haitian people, then assumed debts that oppress their children and grandchildren. Debt service, a burden essentially imposed by the US, makes economic growth nearly impossible. Yet commonplace accounts would say that “they” (the Haitian people) can’t manage finances, don’t know how to protect their natural resources, have a corrupt economy, lack creativity or initiative, or otherwise are to blame for their fate.

For many countries in Africa, for Haiti, and for other colonized areas, the forcible appropriating of indigenous human and natural resources means underdeveloping those areas. When we turn “underdevelop” into a past participle, “underdeveloped,” we make it easy to forget how that happened. Rodney puts it this way:

The question as to who, and what, is responsible for African underdevelopment can be answered at two levels. Firstly, the answer is that the operation of the imperialist system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent. Secondly, one has to deal with those who manipulated the system and those who are either agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system. The capitalists of Western Europe were the ones who actively extended their exploitation from inside Europe to cover the whole of Africa. In recent times, they were joined, and to some extent replaced, by the capitalists from the United States; and for many years now even the workers of those metropolitan countries have benefited from the exploitation and underdevelopment of Africa. (§1.2)

Rodney’s account of Africa, written 37 years ago, is still relevant for Africa today. But it extends to other international regions and even to communities within so-called “developed” countries. When we see, and label, communities as underdeveloped, low-resource, impoverished, disadvantaged, economically depressed, troubled, or marginalized, we follow the lead of the 1965 Moynihan report, which described a “tangle of pathology,” locating problems within the community with causes in the distant past.

We should ask not only how these communities compare to privileged ones, or even what useful things we might do to help them. We need to look first at the structures and mechanisms of power that caused these conditions in the first place, and now, continue to maintain them. This means turning from the conceit that underdevelopment just happens, that an appropriate and full response is to “give” to those less fortunate. It requires collaborative struggle in which all participants are willing to examine the roots of oppression and to engage in the practice of freedom.

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Cooking up a storm

9780811865777_normFrom Cooking up a Storm, ©2008 Marcelle Bienvenu and Judy Walker. Used with permission of Chronicle Books, San Francisco

Residents of New Orleans lost their homes, their neighborhoods and schools, their jobs and businesses, and the lives of family members because of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The effect on the community was devastating as has been documented in books and movies, e.g., Katrina’s Children and When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. To this day major areas, such as the Ninth Ward, are still struggling to recover.

Of all the losses, losing keepsakes and family treasures was especially hard. One category had an especially acute impact on a city famous for its food: Residents lost their family recipe files. These included the family recipes handed down by generations, as well as those clipped from newspapers, such as the The Times-Picayune. Without these recipes the task of rebuilding families and communities was made much harder.

As residents started to rebuild their lives, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans became a post-hurricane swapping place for old recipes that were washed away in the storm. The newspaper has compiled 250 of these delicious, authentic recipes along with the stories about how they came to be and who created them. Cooking Up a Storm [Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans] includes the very best of classic and contemporary New Orleans cuisine, from seafood and meat to desserts and cocktails. But it also tells the story, recipe by recipe, of one of the great food cities in the world, and the determination of its citizens to preserve and safeguard their culinary legacy.

The collective effort to reconstruct family recipe collections is positive counterpoint to all of the negative stories that came out of the Katrina disaster. It’s a wonderful example of community informatics—people coming together to address a common need, making use of newspapers, fax, email, digital archives, and other communication tools.

The book is edited by Marcelle Bienvenue and Judy Walker. You can learn more about it in NPR’s story: ‘Cooking Up A Storm’: Recipes From The Big Easy.

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Sixth sense machine

The SixthSense “is a wearable gestural interface that augments the physical world around us with digital information and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information.” It could also be described as a low-cost, portable interactive whiteboard, one that integrates sensing, search, display, and interaction. It can use any surface, respond to the environment, and enable much richer interaction.

It was developed by Patti Maes and Pranav Mistry at the MIT Media Lab. For $350, it’s already less than the $10,000 whiteboards that schools and universities are buying. But the current version is a one-off, so the cost should come down considerably in mass production!

Sci-fi needs to reinvent itself.

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Blog surfing

broulee-surfingAnyone who writes a blog is curious about who’s reading it and is usually interested to read on similar topics. Both of those motivations lead to an interest in blog aggregators, sites that bring together blog posts from around the world.

Some of these are automatic, based on keywords in the posts. In most cases these turn out to be spam sites, promoting a product or service. I suspect that the large number of hits I received on a post about youth may have come from an automatic aggregator.

There are also more intentional aggregations such as blog rolls or blog carnivals. At blog carnival, for example, you can find carnivals on many topics, and submit your own posts to them. You can also create a new carnival on a topic of your choice. Some of the existing ones are elaborate, representing considerable effort, such as Carnival of Education. But even the best of the carnivals have a little of that quality of random listing that one sees in the spam aggregators.

smokeThere are now in between sites, such as Alpha Inventions or Condron. For these, new posts are harvested automatically, but you can also submit a post and categorize it. Visitors to the aggregator site see a slide show like presentation of other sites, often constrained by topic or language. This leads to an enormous boost in hits on blog posts, especially from Alpha Inventions.

Lesley Dewar has been running some experiments on this at No Tall Poppies. I plan to replicate those here, and share the results.

The big question of course, is not whether some scheme can produce more visits to a web page, but what if anything leads people to engage in what they read, to think critically, and to integrate that with their own experiences. My guess is that somewhere in all the surfing, syndication, aggregation, cross-linking, and such, that there are occasional sparks of real connection, but that there’s also a lot of smoke without fire.

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What is community informatics?

Community informatics has very definitions, such as that it

…brings together people concerned with electronically enabling local (and virtual) communities; and structuring collaborations between researchers, practitioners (including industry) and policy makers to support community ICT implementation and effective use.

Community Informatics Research Network

Definitions such as the one above appropriately name various constituencies, thus serving organizational needs. But for me they are oddly both too narrow, excluding legitimate elements and activities, and too broad, lacking a principled organization or rationale.

Inquiry cycle
Inquiry cycle

The Inquiry Cycle

I’d like to suggest an alternative, drawing from the experience of the Community informatics Initiative (CII) at the University of Illinois, as well as helpful discussion with CII staff and students. The organizational principle that I’d like to suggest is that community informatics is a form of disciplined inquiry, with central questions, methods of investigation, actions, collaborations, and theories. I’d like to present that here using the the Inquiry Cycle as a framework and CII activities as concrete examples.

The Inquiry Cycle (Bruce, 2009) characterizes inquiry as involving five major aspects: a guiding question (Ask), methods of investigation (Investigate), active participation (Create), collaboration and dialogue (DIscuss), and reflection (Reflect). These aspects don’t necessarily proceed in a prescribed order; inquiry may involve any of the aspects in varying degrees and orders. For example, Reflect is often the beginning point of inquiry, leading to the formulation of the Ask. The idea of cycle (or better, spiral) suggests that inquiry does not complete, but generates further inquiries.

Community Informatics as a Type of Inquiry

The definition below is rather lengthy. Think of the Ask as the core question that defines community inquiry. The other elements then elaborate on that, emphasizing the variety of approaches needed to address the core question.

Ask: How can we work with communities to learn about democratic participation in the digital age, and to promote engagement with information and communication technologies for both individual and community growth?

Investigate: CII investigates the ways that people in communities create and share knowledge, how social networks operate and evolve, how access to technologies is differentially distributed, especially along lines of race and class, and the development of policy regarding information and communication technologies. These communities may be large or small, geographically-based or online. The goal of these investigations is to learn more about the dynamics of communities, their capacities and challenges, and how they make use, or not, of various tools. Basic research such as this is necessary for informed and meaningful action with communities.

Create: CII builds tools, such as Prairienet, Community Inquiry Labs, geographic information systems, media archives, and computer technology centers. It works with organizations such as Books to Prisoners, S.O.A.R. [after-school program]@ B.T. Washington Elementary, Paseo Boricua, and others to expand opportunities for learning and to support social justice. Building as well as using tools in a critical manner not only addresses immediate needs; it’s a key aspect of learning about community informatics.

Discuss: CII provides forums for interaction and collaboration, such as the Journal of Community Informatics, CI Reflections blog, and the CI Research Series. A diversity of theories and methods are not only welcomed, but seen as necessary for understanding diverse and changing social and technological realities.

Reflect: CII helps make sense of experiences of communities as they use information and communication to address their needs. It also critically analyzes its own inquiries, its tools, and its modes of interaction and collaboration. These reflections help build stronger accounts of community informatics, including extensions of critical race theory, political economy, critical literacy, as well as the development of new frameworks, such as the theory of community inquiry, and generate new questions for further inquiry.

References

Bruce, Bertram C. (2009, April). “Building an airplane in the air”: The life of the inquiry group. In Joni Falk & Brian Drayton (eds.), Creating and sustaining online professional learning communities. New York: Teachers College Press. [ISBN: 0-807749-40-0]

Cross-posted on CI Reflections

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End the destructive payroll tax

1192440-4-hands-of-worker1Governments around the world see the need to get people back to work and increase consumer confidence. Knowing that they need to act, they’re bailing out banks, insurance companies, and manufacturing industries, as well as helping high income taxpayers by reducing income taxes.

In the midst of the crisis, they’re ignoring the most effective way to increase jobs and consumer spending: End the destructive payroll tax, thereby helping the unemployed get jobs. When low and middle income families pay only their fair share of taxes, they’ll be able to spend more on the things they value, thus boosting the economy to grow in productive directions. That’s not happening because of the regressive payroll tax scheme.

The US reliance on payroll taxes discourages employers from hiring and workers from working:

  • For most workers payroll taxes amount to 17 percent of salaries (high income workers pay less than that); this represents a huge disincentive to hiring people or to seeking a job,
  • 3/4 of households pay more in payroll taxes than they do in personal income taxes,
  • The taxes are now almost 40 percent of federal revenues; meaning that we’re increasingly running the government on the backs of the lowest income workers.

healthcare_worker_flu_shots_help_patients1Payroll taxes reduce the things we do want: jobs, a healthy economy, individual and family health, spending based on real human needs, social justice. Meanwhile we give a free ride to things we don’t want: pollution, dependence on foreign oil, an unhealthy environment, foolish use of limited resources, increasing income divides.

Why not couple a reduction in payroll taxes with increased taxes on the things we don’t want? Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the New Yorker (“Not insane”), argues that we need a package approach:

A whole good idea would be to make a payroll-tax holiday the first step in an orderly transition to scrapping the payroll tax altogether and replacing the lost revenue with a package of levies on things that, unlike jobs, we want less rather than more of—things like pollution, carbon emissions, oil imports, inefficient use of energy and natural resources, and excessive consumption. The net tax burden on the economy would be unchanged, but the shift in relative price signals would nudge investment from resource-intensive enterprises toward labor-intensive ones. This wouldn’t be just a tax adjustment. It would be an environmental program, an anti-global-warming program, a youth-employment (and anti-crime) program, and an energy program.

construction_worker_handsThe bipartisan coalition Get America Working! emphasizes the fact that payroll taxes exacerbate the true unemployment of discouraged workers, with its consequent toll on both individuals and society:

America has one giant unused resource, its hidden unemployed. There are tens of millions of capable Americans who might seek employment if the job market was better, but who, believing that is impossible, do not look and therefore do not count as “unemployed”. They include many older Americans, women, young people, people with disabilities, minorities, and other chronically underemployed groups. Much of this lost opportunity is the result of ever-rising payroll taxes forcing up the cost of hiring.

The key to change is lowering the price of labor relative to that of the only other basic inputs in the economy—natural resources such as materials, energy and land. Eliminating the payroll tax alone could produce as many as 20 million new jobs. That would (1) profoundly enrich the lives and health of those who get the jobs; (2) power a sharp increase in the production of goods and services; (3) cut today’s enormous public and private costs of supporting so many dependents; and (4) sharply reduce the costs of many social dysfunctions – ranging from crime/violence/drugs to unmotivated students—caused by today’s massive true unemployment.

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Today, the me nobody knows

me_nobody1I came across the poem, “Today,” in the me nobody knows: children’s voices from the ghetto, by Stephen M. Joseph (Avon, 1969). There are many beautiful, and some heartbreaking, stories and poems in the book, which is an anthology of writings by children in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Harlem, Jamaica, and the lower west and east sides of Manhattan. The year after the book was published, a musical based it, The Me Nobody Knows, premiered in New York.

Joseph, a teacher, invited the children to write, offering three choices: to write using their names, in which case he was willing to meet at lunch or outside of school to talk with them about it; omit their names, but still hand in the writing; or write, but neither sign the paper nor hand it in. But he never forced them to write at all.

The pieces in the book give one picture of life in the inner city, or for that matter, many children everywhere. They invite the question: Are we doing any better for children today, 40 years later?

This poem struck me for its rhythm and the ways that things seem not totally to fit, but do fit all the same.

Today
Cynthia L, Age 15

Today is my day,
Today should be your day,
If it’s your day and my day
It’s everybody’s day.
In your way is my day
Because you made a day that comes all the way.
And two days of a way equal today.
That will never fade away.
In our own way let’s find ways
To make great exciting things happen.
In your ways, make my days,
You made a day that comes all the way,
And two days that are made up of your ways,
Those kind of days will never fade away.

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Yale Russian Chorus tours Quebec

My son, Stephen, writes this about the Yale Russian Chorus tour in Quebec:

In March 2009 the Yale Russian Chorus went on tour to Quebec. We sang at a variety of venues, including Laval University in Quebec City and both Francophone and Anglophone retirement homes in Montreal. The contacts we had made with the Russian Orthodox community in Montreal allowed us to end our tour with an exciting concert at St. Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral. We stayed for most of the tour at the house of Paul and Sandy Gauthier, whom my family had met on our sabbatical to China.

To publicize these events, we had the privilege of appearing on Radio-Canada twice. The first was an interview I did over the phone to advertise our first concert, at St. Elizabeth Catholic church in North Hatley.

Halfway through our stay in Montreal, we drove to the CBC/Radio-Canada building in Montreal to appear on the morning show “C’est bien meilleur le matin”. After discussing the history of the Russian Chorus with the host, Franco Nuovo (and surmising possible connections to the CIA), I rejoined the group to sing our version of the Russian folk song “Po moriam, po volnam” (Across the seas, across the waves)

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Why I like to use walking poles

leki_polesOK. I know it looks strange, but here are a few reasons I like to use walking poles:

  1. If I don’t have a baby or a dog with me, it provides something to talk about with strangers.
  2. It add ten years to the usability of my knees (and ankles, hips, back, feet,…).
  3. Even in the short run, my knees don’t hurt so much after a long walk.
  4. I can fend off small animals.
  5. A stick can be handy for opening gates, picking up objects, making an impromptu tent, or hoisting a flag. See more reasons to carry a walking stick.
  6. I get upper body exercise while walking.
  7. I burn more calories, but don’t even feel that I’m exercising.
  8. I walk faster.
  9. I’m less likely to fall when crossing a stream and stepping on slippery, unstable, rounded rocks, or even just stepping on a wet leaf or going down a bumpy sidewalk.
  10. I can use the same sticks for x-country skiing.
  11. They remind me to get more exercise, and to be outside more, providing a partial escape from the computer screen.
  12. They’re reflective, which makes it much safer to walk at night, especially since they move rapidly in the normal walking motion.
  13. They make me feel that I’m in Finland again.
  14. Using them is similar to using a bicycle or roller blades in that walking is suddenly easier.
  15. Cars slow down and avoid me more. I’m not sure why. Do they think I’m disabled? that I might strike them with the poles? that I look larger? that I look strange? Whatever it is, I appreciate their response.
  16. They’re a big help going up a steep hill, because you can use your arms to push up.
  17. They provide a measure of safety going downhill.
  18. They’re handy for retrieving a frisbee stuck in a tree, a hat that fell in a stream, or a ball that rolled under a cabinet.
  19. When you’re tired of walking, you can lean on them to rest.
  20. And they’re especially useful for canoeing!