from the horizon

These are links which I have collected from a number of hand outs from the conference. Some of the summaries have been copied from the hand outs.

DevNet
The Aotearoa New Zealand International Development Studies Network, the organisers of the conference.
www.devnet.org.nz

Dev-Zone
A New Zealand based development resource centre.
www.dev-zone.org

Volunteer Service Abroad (VSA)
VSA were out in force at the conference, it seems worthwhile to give them a mention.
www.vsa.org.nz

Participation, Power and Social Change Team
The Participation, Power and Social Change Team is one of six research teams working on key development issues at the Institute of Development Studies(IDS), UK. These pages tell you more about the work of the team.
www.ids.ac.uk/ids/particip/ Read the rest of this entry �

The highlight of the conference was meeting people in the development sector, and the conversations we had. Robert Chamber’s Workshop presented some really interesting ideas, which flavoured the conference, and stimulated some interesting thoughts for me. Being in a conference environment, surrounded by academic types, absorbing new information, really inspired me to do more study – but there’s still heaps of work to do first!

There were a number of interesting sessions during the conference. Although there were a great deal of speakers who talked about a variety of development/poverty/aid topics, these are the session which I attended AND remember 3 weeks on from the conference:

Read the rest of this entry �

As part of Robert Chamber’s Workshop on Participatory Methods at the DevNet Conference, people were invited to speak on their participatory experiences. I was already thinking about the “participatory” approach I had taken with developing the ProLogs software, and somewhat hastily decided to share my experience.

For those of you who don’t know, ProLogs is a database which I developed for an International Humanitarian NGO to manager logistics information. It is used by the staff of the NGO, many of who do not have a huge amount of computer experience. Read the rest of this entry �

On the day before the conference was a workshop on Participatory Methodology run by Robert Chambers. I had the benefit to come into the workshop unaware of Robert Chamber’s celebrity status in development circles.

He certainly was an interesting man. Although he was at least 70, he went jogging each morning (and was impressed by the disproportionate number of women joggers in Dunedin) and even attended U2 concert in Auckland the previous weekend!

His workshop was delightfully “Old School”. He uses an array of old wall charts, which had been recycled and add to from previous workshops. He wandered around the room, barefoot, encouraging participation. Above all, his witty humility won over the whole crowd. Read the rest of this entry �

Coinciding with my return to the Land of the Long White Cloud was DevNet 2006, a conference on Development in Dunedin (New Zealand). I thought that this was a good chance to touch base (and network) with the development and foreign aid community at home. So having only been home for less than a week, I was back on another plane down to Dunedin.

(More posts follow)