Join the Revolution: For the Lady in the Corner (c/o ST4Health)

ST4Health

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

individual

Lady situated assumptions personal experience	one disease - malaria, smallpox, leprosy, TB,  emergency treatment, hospitals, Africa, systems, capacity
people, society, community, village gender, interactions, humanitarian works,	policy, organisations, population health improvement, global health, poverty, economics, outcomes

group - population
BIG PICTURE (above)

My source:  HIFA2015 list

Countries, places and maps (Lahiri)

“The place to which you feel the strongest attachment

 isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth:

 it’s the place that allows you to become yourself. 

This place may not lie on any map.”

– Jhumpa Lahiri
  

My source: Fred Dervin via mailinglist at cosmobilities.net

Call for Papers: Special Issue – Community Informatics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs)

The Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net)

Abstract submissions due June 15, 2013
Full papers due September 1, 2013
Anticipated publication date February 1, 2014

The international peer-reviewed Journal of Community Informatics (http://ci-journal.net/) is a medium for the communication of research of interest to a global network of academics, community informatics practitioners and national and multilateral policy makers. A special issue of the journal will be devoted to examining the relationship between Community Informatics and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Community Informatics (CI) is the study and practice of enabling communities and the grassroots to improve their lives through Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs). This special issue will focus on how community-based use of ICTs can contribute to both the achievement of specific MDG targets and the development of the post-2015 global development agenda. The issue is expected to be published in early 2014 and thus provide inputs to ongoing discussions on the finalization of a new global development agenda.

Call for papers

The field of Community Informatics seeks to explore the potential of ICTs and their applications for social and economic development at the community level. It particularly seeks to ensure that marginalized individuals and communities can benefit from the opportunities that ICTs can provide. Active and meaningful participation by people at the community/grassroots level is arguably one critical element for the successful achievement of the MDGs – and any other development priorities, for that matter. As demonstrated in different parts of the world, ICTs enable the participation of people and give voice to the voiceless.

For this special issue, we are inviting original, unpublished research, points of view, case studies, reviews and field notes. All research papers will be double-blind peer-reviewed. Insights and analytical perspectives from practitioners and policy makers in the form of notes from the field or case studies are also encouraged. These will not be peer-reviewed but will be assessed as to their suitability for publication.

Expected topics in this special issue include:

1. National and local policies needed to foster synergies between CI and the MDGs
2. Local government, CI and ICTs: how to create a sound ecosystem for development and MDG achievement?
3. Enabling communities to participate in local MDG decision making processes via ICTs
4. CI and access to information and open data related to MDG development priorities
5. CI and local participation strategies to meet MDGs
6. CI and social inclusion of groups targeted in MDGs
7. CI and local MDG related capacity development: can ICTs close or widen the gap?
8. The potential role for CI in the post-2015 global development agenda;
9. Assessing the empirical evidence on the role of community ICTs in the MDGs to date

And specifically related to individual MDG targets:

10. Using community-based ICTs to address extreme poverty and hunger
11. CI approaches to achieving universal primary education;
12. CI contributions to the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment
13. CI influence to in the elimination of child mortality and achievement of maternal health
14. CI approaches to combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
15. CI and environmental sustainability
16. CI as a component of national and regional health information systems
17. CI contributions to developing global MDG partnerships

Special Issue Editors:

Charles Dhewa – CEO, Knowledge Transfer Africa (Pvt) Ltd, charles@knowledgetransafrica.com / charlesdhewa7@gmail.com
Jude Genilo – Head, Media Studies and Journalism Department, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, jude.genilo@ulab.edu.bd / jgenilo@yahoo.com
Raul Zambrano – Cluster Leader, Senior Policy Advisor, ICTD and e-governance, UNDP, raul@undp.org
Chris Zielinski – CEO, International Alliance on Information for All, chris@chriszielinski.com

Special Issue Assistant
Michel Castagné – castagne@alumni.ubc.ca

Abstracts should be sent to the Assistant castagne@alumni.ubc.ca no later than June 30, 2013.

Individual - Group: Axes & Histories

What are the dimensions of the axes that make up the structure of Hodges' model?

Can the individual see the group - the global population - beyond the fresh air in their pocket?

In not seeing the individual, as the global corpus shouts about: "choice", "economic growth", "freedom", "human rights", "democracy", "justice" ... do they see the big picture amid the political smog, the corporate dust storm?

One form human society has so far not generally taken is global. There is still virtually no shared consciousness globally of common struggles or common achievements. Enormous groups - the poor in the Global South for instance - have no sense of forming a single community; in an earlier age, the experience of being subjected to European colonial force failed to create a common anti-colonial front. Even today's most urgent global issues tend to be tackled regionally or nationally: the history of global warming or organised crime is a history of multiple actors, as often as not talking at cross-purposes. p.8.

Prof. Mark Mazower, All together now, FT Weekend, March 9 - 10, 2013, p. 8. Reviewing The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences, by David Cannadine, Allen Lane. 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/edb5b2ea-84d3-11e2-891d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2OXNCQ1xD
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b1793262-8d6f-11e2-82d2-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2OXNCQ1xD

Snakes & Ladders - Health & Safety: Blog Action Day - The Power of We

This year's theme for Blog Action Day is The Power of We. Andy Roberts over at DARnet posted about his not taking part given this particularly ambiguous title. I can see what Andy means. I'd signed-up for this year and wondered what to write; but then last Friday morning returning to work up the A59 at the Tickle Trout I was behind a van carrying two ladders...

I used to be a bit reckless in terms of heights, but I was kid then. Can you imagine the sudden lease of mental life from a row of terraced houses in Liverpool to fields and woods? Friends used to climb and go from tree-to-tree, in the summers our football pitches became dusty patches.

In my mid-teens helping out I thought nothing of staining the side of the dorma extension one-handed with about 30cms of standing clearance. In the decade from 1970 to the 1980s attitudes changed markedly as health and safety become firm buddies (see for example HSE). If the ladders were out to stretch their legs then my dad or younger brother were on station ensuring the ladder stayed put. There's the power of we keeping me safe.

The health and independence that the majority of us takes for granted seems to give individuals that childhood tree-to-tree disregard for safety.

H2CM central axis IND - GRP

I can illustrate what I mean; for example, look where this individual has got themselves! Of course, we often depend upon others to get to many places. Our very existence depends on others. 

Central to Hodges' model is a structure built from the key humanistic, that is the psychological and social perspectives of 'I' and 'We'.

This gives the model its spine. Everything else in health and social care follows from this axis. We need the social and political foundations of relationships, families, communities to take us to organisations, political movements, government and global governance. Previously, I pointed to the effort required to deliver person-centred care. We have to conceptually take the individual from the ascendent point in the model and put them at the model's center. Doing this collaboratively that is the communication that counts.

There is however, a responsibility that rests with the person. The Power of We is also not a given. It is possible for individuals to opt out of society, being a citizen is something for others. What difference can I make to political outcomes? There is the political debate about individual responsibility regarding life-style choices. If people are to achieve self-efficacy they need to climb down from that crow's nest and traverse the humanistic and mechanistic dimensions of life.

This responsibility is really telling though when an individual seeks to take, or maintain power for themselves within a nation. They trample on the freedoms, lives and choices of others. The people taking power back, doing so peacefully and gaining evidence of abuse of power that is the real power of we.

A room with a view from on high can still bring unique insights for individuals from which we can all learn:

"I know the whole world is watching right now and I wish the world could see what I can see. Sometimes you have to go up really high to understand how small you really are." Felix Baumgartner, 14 October 2012.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/9607604/Skydiver-Felix-Baumgartner-attempts-to-break-sound-barrier-live.html 

Baumgartner image: BBC
Ladder brush c/o: http://www.trendyrobot.com/brushes/000343/popup.html

Hodges' model paper in the Journal of Community Informatics

As a full-time nurse with an interest in informatics I am already in a sense looking over the fence at that other garden. Well, why not? It looks quite enticing, there's a special sandpit and frameworks to climb with learning curves that run on and on ...

News of a paper on Hodges' model in the Journal of Community Informatics finds me trying to look over not one, but several fences. Whether or not the project is successful is a matter of opinion which sums up this latest exercise.

I'm very grateful to the editors and reviewers who helped to shape what was a very wandersome paper into something that strives to see beyond Central and West Lancashire in NW England:

Exploring several dimensions of local, global and glocal
using the generic conceptual framework Hodges's model

If you have any comments or questions please get in touch - h2cmng AT yahoo.co.uk. I can supply a copy of figure 3.


Jones, P. (2012). Exploring several dimensions of local, global and glocal using the generic conceptual framework Hodges's model. The Journal Of Community Informatics, 8(3). Retrieved from http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/view/876/941

Context, locus, photos and festival-non-goer (Ack. FT)

In the Financial Times, Life & Arts section, June 23/June 24 2012 Francis Hodgson wrote Hocus-focus about the 15th PHotoEspaña festival.

The curator Gerardo Mosquera introduced the broad theme of the festival -

From Here: Context and Internationalisation

- which Hodgson feels provides 'no secure binder between disaprate elements':

' "Context," he writes opaquely, "has ceased to be a 'closed' locus linked to a reductive concept of what is local; instead it is projected as a space from which international culture is naturally constructed."

Apart from giving a broad hint that pictures will come from around the world, I'm not sure that is much help for a festival-goer.' p.10.

Although I'm a festival-non-goer in this case and my access to the images is limited to the three published in the FT and online, I wonder if a link here is the interposition of local and global? The conurbation that can be described as glocal? This is what that single sentence says to me.

In accord with our economic times the festival website notes that:

PHotoEspaña has cut its budget by 25%. The public-private partnership model has been adapted to ensure a broad-based programme of exhibitions and activities.

In this sense here at least art reflects health care. The reliance on partnership, overcoming constraints whilst providing an experience that coheres.

25%

This context.

One care domain.

Which domain do we cut - the interpersonal, the social, political, the scientific? Do we vary the top-slicing across the domains? In health too we must grasp what is local, global and glocal to us.