Hi Vijay

Thanks for the telling me about three women from Africa getting trained in making and installing solar lamps at a training course at the Barefoot College in Rajasthan  I am trying to think what you already know about dadamac's current interests in solar power. I'll just mention a few things in case we have not discussed them before.

Fantsuam Foundatin uses solar power at the main compound. It is not a very big solar panel, but it is very useful for Zittnet and means that the generator does not need to be turned on every time that the mains power supply fails (which usually seems to be more often than not).

Small scale solar power is also of interest and Fantsuam has looked at the possibility of helping someone to set up some kind of local small business selling solar lamps. We have been discussing this on and off with a company called Barefoot Power. However, Fantsuam Foundation (FF) has never had the money to invest in importing the supplies. As there are so many other things that must be done more urgently at Fantsuam, and so few people to do them, this is something that seldom stays near the top of the agenda for long.

Hi Vijay

I was interested to read your impressions of social media - and glad you enjoyed the twitter session. (All the teaching tips are in the Second Thursday twitter session achive. ) It was the first time we have tried anything quite like that - just a handful of us agreeing to meet onine to learn about something as specific as twitter (Second Thursday twitter session invitation).

Do you still like Facebook?

I joined Facebook because Chris Macrae often sent me information that I wanted to read - but increasingly he sent it through Facebook. For a while I just ignored information sent that way, but in the end I joined. Then I looked at Chris' list of friends - and was intersted to find people I knew.. so I looked at their friends and so on. But I never became an enthusiast. When I do go there it just seems too full of stuff that I really don't have time to plough through.

Hi Vijay

Welcome back. Thanks for your helpful feedback on your First Thursday experience. You raise many good points and I would like to address them all very seriously. I suggest that we take our time to explore them all in more detail, so in this post I will give an overall response and suggest some structure for our discussions.

It seems we are in overall agreement:

• First Thursday has great potential
• There are still serious glitches to be overcome
• We need to clarify the aims
• We need to tackle the glitches
• Our emphasis should be about caring to find out what people really want and then finding solutions
• First Thurdays should listen to problems and play a role in providing advice, help, leads, contacts and seek/arrange funds

Approach to our discussions

i hope you recognise your words and ideas in the list above, and in what I will write below. I am trying to include all that you mentioned, but within a strucutre that will help to guide our future discussions. I have a mental checklist that i use when I look at ICT4D dsicussions, and I will try it out now to see how it fits your post. I call it the "three legged stool" model of ICT for Education/Development. I won't explain it now I'll just use it. It leads me to the following structure in response to your post.

Hi Pam,

It feels good to be back on Dadamac after a long time. The other day, you asked me about my views on the latest First Thursday, in which I tried to participate but could not do much. And I wrote the reason for that in a recent blog comment. Here goes:

"For one, I was having a problem with the Net connection on the First Thursday. And also, to be frank, I just could not connect with the agenda. I felt like a total stranger, groping in the dark.

This is not to belittle the thought and efforts behind First Thursday, but I would ideally like to participate in a lively interaction and exchange of ideas, where I get enriched by the knowledge flow and (try to) enlighten somebody else with whatever little I know.

This time, I felt things were getting quite listless. And I hope I am wrong. For the next chat, can we talk on a couple of topics or more, so that there are enough talking points.

A lot of time gets wasted on pleasantries--and before one gets to focus on the topic, the discussion veers off in some other direction. So as an anchor, you might have to take the tough line, and make participants tow the line.

Hi Vijay

Sorry you could not make it to February First Thursday, but I know you are very busy at present. You would have met some interesting people including members of the Dadamac team in Nigeria. It would have been interesting to compare some of the eco-developments there, such as growing Jatrohpa, with what is happening in India

I mention Jatropha because at our UK-Nigeria meeting yesterday we were told that "we are raising a nursery of 2000 jathropha palnts we intend to transplant when the rains begin"

Regarding Jatropha in India, I have just seen this article which says "Cultivation of the jatropha was prioritised a year ago by the Indian Railway Minister, Lalu Prasad Yadav. Disused railways lands were to be put aside for growing the crop. Brazil’s biodiesel company, Biomasa, plans to plant two million hectares with jatropha this year, and it is believed jatropha will surpass sugar cane as the principle source for bioethanol in Brazil."

It seems there are many innovative appraoches to agriculture being tried in various places, and it will be interesting to gradually get local detailed perspectives on some of them.

What do you think?

Pam

Hi Vijay

I am glad that you chose the article on "Pushing up Farm Productivity" to share with us. It looks as if several group interests are overlapping around the topic of food production, and eco-friendly solutions.

I am very aware of approaches to food production and methods of growing things at present because Marcus Simmons is still sharing details of his recent trip to Africa. He was in Benin and Nigeria - and the main focus of his trip was permaculture. He went to Benin to learn more about permaculture as applied in West Africa, then went to share those ideas at Fantsuam and Attachab Eco-Villlage.

I particularly like the bit in the article "Pushing up Farm Productivity" that said "It is not the farmer who makes the food: he is only a facilitator. Food is actually made by plants. Therefore it is important to understand the requirements of plants and supply them without restrictions in order for plants to deliver food. Since plants do not talk, their needs are understood through research and experimentation."

There is a difference in emphasis between the approach in the article and a permaculture approach, as the article seems to refer to artificial fertilisers, and permaculture favours natural fertilisers and composting - but there is a shared concern to be more aware of the needs of the plants.

Hi Vijay

I am so pleased you have started to come to the worknets chat room for our meetings on the first Thursdays of the month and that you are getting to know my friend and teacher Andrius Kulikauskas.

I noticed that you mentioned your project to him  - where you said  " right now i am working on a project monitoring air and water quality in Indian cities and towns:: the idea of this project is to empower citizens with crucial information about air and water quality (24x7)". (Andrius copied to the Holistic Helping group what you said in the chat room, and I am copying it later to add context.)

I am reminded of a conversation I had earlier this year with someone who was interested in monitoring air quality in London. However as it is not one of my key interests I did not note it down and now I am not be certain whose interest it was.

My first thought is that it might have been Andy B - so I will contact him for you and see if it was him (or perhaps someone he knows). I have written about your interest here because it pulls the information together, and even if Andy doesn't know... well... writing it up here may prove useful in finding someone with an overlapping interest.

Hi Vijay

Given your interest in food security and wider issues surrounding it you may like to see this video about Climate Food and Developing-Country Livestock Farmers ILRI film:

In my mind it connects with John's vision for a model farm development at Attachab Eco-village and why it is important to develop models of good practice and effective ways to share them.

Of course at Fantusam Foudation many initiatives are inter-related, so this is also relevant to the idea Cicely was promoting for helping farmers through the Internet services provided by Zittnet. (You may remember this idea and our excitement around trying to win some serious prize money which I covered in my blog.)

Hi Vijay

I think that anyone in 21st century who is interested in studying development (as you are) must also be interested in the development of ICT (as you obviously are, given your input to Dadamac.net)

You might like to read The Googlenet has you By Martin J Young published in the online Asia Times.

I confess I am a Google user and would now be in serious trouble without it. I avoided it at first because I didn't like the "big brother" feel of using Google - but then.. well... Google mail was so useful... and then sharing docs via Google made such good sense and worked so well... and Google spreadsheets made similar sense... and gradually it was easier to do most work "in the cloud" using Google rather than storing it on my laptop.

How about you? Has the Google net got you too?

Pam

Hi Pam,

I don't know if the Copenhagen Summit will end in some kind of a climate deal. But even if it does mark the first decisive step to do something about saving the planet, there are some who think it will amount to nothing, even if nations reach an agreement.

The reason being that reducing carbon emissions by 80% from the 1990 levels - the target for 2050 for rich countries - depends on technological breakthroughs, not political pledges at Copenhagen. Without technological breakthroughs, reducing carbon emissions by 80% will erode living standards in the countries concerned, says leading Indian economics journalist Swaminathan Aiyar.

In his latest column, Aiyar argues that through history, treaties have been junked if they become politically inconvenient. Not only that, he debunks climate science too by calling the projections of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections as "just intelligent guesstimates". His parting shot: IPCC scientists may be the best in the world, yet they cannot predict the weather more than five days ahead.