By Maureen James

Maureen provides an update to the Global Knowledge mailing list, an insight to a dynamic exchange of ideas on information and development.

This dynamic mailing list revolves around the question: How does the information revolution transform the development process? More than 700 people from academic, activist and other backgrounds have already contributed to the discussion. Hosted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), this list has produced an extraordinary exchange of ideas.

There have been more than 500 contributions (!) to this excellent list so far, from specialists working in the area of IT, and from organisations, such as the Coalition for the Development of Urban Africa, that use IT in their work. According to the Coalition, the use of information technology in a rapidly urbanising African continent calls for the remobilisation of "skills, values and understandings". As they prepare for the upcoming Habitat summit in Istanbul, Turkey, Coalition members are looking into the uses of IT in developing regional and local strategies that address the social and economic changes underway in various African contexts. The area of Health Promotion has been identified by several participants as a key area of concern for community-based IT users.

As social movement organisers lead the way in IT and community development, they are faced with some extremely serious challenges. As one contributor to the GKD97 list asks, how can we talk about IT as a medium of EMPOWERMENT if we do not first address issues of POWER? "What kind of information will be exchanged, who provides it and for whom is it relevant?" Some participants have responded to this query in crass, pessimistic terms, wondering what impact social movements can hope to have in the face of transnational media conglomerates and state-run monopolies. Others have chosen to address this issue by suggesting that collaboration may indeed be possible between local knowledge producers and the communications giants...

One group of African women identify the need to educate and lobby policy-makers interested in social and economic issues, as well those concerned with science and technology. They see hope in building alliances and in working with the continent's currently fragmented bureaucracies to develop institutional and social reforms. According to this model, empowering local knowledge producers may be achieved if state authorities and transnational producers can be convinced to sponsor local initiatives instead of sending expensive teams of "experts" into the field.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then the information revolution is bound to give birth to many extraordinary projects. In this era of government divestment (indeed, many media outlets around the world are being privatised, obliging activists and communications specialists to re-orient their thinking) it may just be that communities and citizens will reclaim the media that used to be under strict institutional control. Just how not-for-profit groups will be able to compete and/or collaborate with for-profit organisations is, as many of the participants in the GKD97 list have pointed out, another matter.

While the bulk of the exchange is taking place in English, efforts are being made to encourage multilingual involvement.

To subscribe to the GKD97 online mailing list discussion, email:

majordomo@mail.edc.org

Write SUBSCRIBE GKD97 in the body of your message.

Maureen James <maureen@web.net> is a freelance Internet consultant and writer working closely with the Association for Progressive Communications and Web Networks.

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