Workshops

Till's talk was on making use of web 2.0 for collaboration, best-practice mining and management focussed on NGOs. He explored ways of collaborative creation, understanding social interaction through use of web 2.0 concepts. Click here for full presentation

Using a prototype implementation for a website of a local action group, Sameer discussed how the local group was using new technologies to get locals in an American town engaged in local and political issues. He also looked at some design problems that are often inherent in group websites and proposed some possible solutions for them. Click here for full presentation

Shaun's presentation touched on how development Aid can be more effective through the innovative use of new technologies. He made the case for a web 2.0 based platform which may enable donors, agents and local stakeholders to connect with one another in order to engage in constructive collaboration for development. Shaun posited that this would be a different open marketplace for aid which will allow for the creation of a global network and subsequently encourage direct involvement between philanthropists/donors and projects.

3rd PRaDSA workshop: Technology and Social Action Research Summit – Loughborough, 29th and 30th November

We invite you to join the seven researchers accountable for the PRaDSA project to thrash out some of the underpinning philosophies of this work and plan evaluation of the activities. It is nearly our half-way mark in late November and time to take stock. In the process, we will be discussing the finer points of what social action means and what we can do with action research methods to understand it better and promote its growth. It's going to be a no-holds-barred discussion of what we are doing and why, to shape our practice and research questions - if this interests you and you want to plunge in, please let us know. To register interest, send a note to Kutoma Wakunuma at K.J.Wakunuma@shu.ac.uk as soon as possible.

From a discussion with Alan Dawson, Clodagh Miskelly & Steve Thompson.

Could be called the "Flying by the seat of ones pants" approach to decision making.

As with all approaches to decision making one would gather all the facts, options, problems etc and then form a decision. For some people over time it proves more workable to defer the decision until the last possible moment so that some of the possible decisions naturally fall away as being impractical and the decision almost makes itself by possibly ending up being the only one left standing.

Decision Making Tools

Online decision making tools and projects

The Decider - http://labs.riseup.net
A very simple site that helps groups to make decisions online. It enables the creation of “issues” (e.g. how should we spend this £1000?) and “options” (e.g. i) go on holiday ii) put it in a saving account iii) other). Users can then vote on how good they think each option is and/ or create a new option.

VoSnap - http://vosnap.com

The recent pradsa2 workshop at University of West of England had a session on decision making. Our group decided assess the design decisions in developing this web site. I'll start putting my understanding of that process here.

Before the first workshop I perceived the site to be a place where people would come to ( ie log in ), produce content ( ie blog stuff, post forum questions ), building a corpus of examples and knowledge.

Facebook was introduced as another PRADSA communication platform in the month of June. Conversations on aspects of security in as far as personal and public postings have been highlighted, an example of this is seen through this link sent in by Paula