LEISA's Farm

Vacancy for (Netherlands-based) webmaster F/M

ILEIA is looking for a WEBMASTER F/M

ILEIA is working on the development of a new website, to be built by an outside company. The webmaster is to play an active, supportive and advisory role in this. Once the site is built, it will be the webmaster’s responsibility to maintain it. The webmaster is part of a web team, which takes decisions regarding web tools, and informs the management.

Availability: 0,8 to full-time. Starting date: preferably October 1, 2009. Candidates need to be based in The Netherlands.

Click here for more info about this vacancy.

ILEIA is an independent organisation based in Amersfoort, The Netherlands, aiming to enhance knowledge on small-scale, sustainable agriculture, particularly in developing countries. ILEIA coordinates a worldwide network of partner organisations with a similar aim. The network shares a website and jointly publishes seven regional editions of a magazine on sustainable, small-scale farming.

ICT and Development: An International Workshop

for Theory, Practice, & Policy
to be conducted by the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), New Delhi, India, during 11-12 March 2010.

Call for Papers
Unpublished, original empirical papers are invited for the forthcoming international workshop on ICTs and Development: An International Workshop for Theory, Practice, & Policy. The workshop aims to provide a forum for scholars to share their empirical research with academic experts, policymakers, and activists from the regional and international development community. Papers should examine how mobile phones, computers, and the Internet influence the empowerment of marginal individuals and communities, including whether ICTs create and enhance livelihood opportunities for people in the developing world.

Papers should be in the range of 5,000-8,000 words (including abstract and bibliography) and should include a clear discussion of the implications of the findings for development policy and/or practice.

No more than twelve papers will be selected by the workshop organizers for presentation.The first author of each paper chosen will be given air fare and lodging/meals.

The workshop is part of the project  ICTs and Urban Micro Enterprises: Identifying and Maximizing Opportunities for Economic Development, and is supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada.

The organizers are committed to finding an appropriate publication venue for all papers accepted for the workshop.

Deadlines:
Submission of manuscripts: 1st October 2009
Announcement of results: 1st December 2009

For submission of manuscripts and other enquiries, please write to ICTD2010[at]gmail.com

Workshop Organizers:
Dr. P. Vigneswara Ilavarasan, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, Prof. Mark R. Levy, Michigan State University, USA.

Click here for further details.

Gleanings: Seedling, Altieri, ICTUpdate

posted by Bertie

• Newly published: Seedling, issue July 2009.

• Miguel Altieri published an online essay Agroecology, small farms and food sovereignty. In: Monthly Review, July-August 2009.

• ICTUpdate Special 50th issue, August 2009. Feature articles on The Women of Uganda Network improving access to ICTs for women farmers and entrepreneurs, on ICT training for rural communities in Kenya, on mobile phone market information services for farmers, etc.

  
  

The spoken web: audio-internet for rural populations

Successful examples of communication methods which have been used to mainstream research findings in Africa and Asia have been compiled into an online resource booklet by the Research into Use Programme.

Here's one of the stories from the booklet, about voice-based internet in Gujarat, western India:

THE SPOKEN WEB: Audio-internet for rural populations

An exciting development in India is an entirely new kind of web, based on the spoken word. Unlike the internet, the spoken web is built around VoiceSites rather than text websites, and is accessed by mobile phone rather than computer.
People who call up VoiceSites on their mobile phones need only to speak and listen. They don't have to read or write. They can create their own VoiceSites or access those of other people. They can also surf the spoken web and jump from VoiceSite to VoiceSite using spoken commands. A caller's experience of an individual VoiceSite is rather like the interactive voice response systems that customers come across when calling a bank.
It's easy for a person to set up a VoiceSite. They dial a number, and software called VoiGen then guides them, in the local language, through the process. When prompted, they record their information, such as a welcome greeting and contact details, and VoiGen creates a VoiceSite. The person is then assigned a VoiceSite phone number, equivalent to a URL.
Anyone who calls the person's VoiceSite number is greeted with the welcome message, and then given help to navigate around the VoiceSite. For example, callers could say "address" and the VoiceSite would tell them the address.
VoiceSites can be linked, just like websites on the internet.
This means, for example that farmers could use a VoiceSite to sell their produce.

Comment
"An audio format would provide much more access and opportunity for local people to contribute," says Tapan Parikh of the University of California, Berkeley. "While a farmer may not be able to write a memo, or an email, or a summary of his work, he can easily talk about it."
Although people often use cellphones, they rarely use text messaging or even the address book. Guruduth Banavar, director of IBM India Research Laboratory, says "They would rather call a friend to find another person's phone number than actually save the number in their address book."
The local radio station archives its content on a VoiceSite, which villagers can access and leave comments on. Others can listen to these comments, and future broadcasts incorporate them into their discussion. "We are using the spoken web tool to make community radio more interactive," says Parikh.

Research Into Use collected the story from 2008 New Scientist 2679, pages 22-23.

RIU's publication, titled: Communications success stories: mainstreaming research findings to lessen poverty, has 40 pages and can be downloaded here for free.

New potentials of ICT in rural areas

Found on the Crisscrossed Blog:

The Participatory Web: New Potentials Of ICT In Rural Areas,
ed. by Christian Kreutz. Publ. by GTZ 2008.

It's a 44 pages pdf providing a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The brochure serves as a practice-oriented introduction to the theme and discusses both the potentials and the possible limits to the participatory web.

Contents:
- Participatory Web – New Potentials for ICT in Rural Areas
- NABUUR: Effective Online Peer-to-Peer Knowledge Transfer
- Innovation, Interaction, Information: Using the Social Web in Agricultural Development
- Empowering Farmers in India Using the Kisan Blog
- Web 2.0 in Ecuador: Enhancing Citizenship
- Farmer-led Documentation
- Potential of Mobile: Cambodian Farmers Turn to their Phones
- The Knowledge Sharing Kit: CGIAR's Wiki Approach

Find a link here if you wish to download the pdf.

New Agriculturist CD-Resource now available

Many of you probably know of the New Agriculturist online magazine - it is one of our listed links, and is a great source of features and news about agricultural development. The new issue has just come out and this month includes all the usual items - LEISA's Farm particularly liked the In pictures section - nice story, great pictures.

They also provide another useful service - putting back issues of the New Agriculturist on CD, and making it available free of charge. The latest CD with editions of the New Agriculturist from January 2002 to December 2008 is now available. Just go to their website, follow the links and fill the request form in.

And don't forget to read some of the articles while you are there!

Food Security: E-learning courses

A series of free Food Security e-learning courses and training materials from FAO/EU.
Topics include:

• Food Security Information Systems and Networks
• Reporting Food Security Information
• Availability Assessment and Analysis
• Baseline Food Security Assessments
• Food Security Concepts and Frameworks
• Collaboration and Advocacy Techniques
• Livelihoods Assessment and Analysis
• Markets Assessment and Analysis
• Nutritional Status Assessment and Analysis
• Food Security Policies - Formulation and Implementation
• Targeting
• Vulnerability Assessment and Analysis

Languages: English, French, Spanish (forthcoming)

More details: Food Security Information for Action

(Via e-Agriculture)

How to get connected without being online

Remote rural areas often don't have easy access to the internet. But rural communities are finding their own ways to digital tools.
Read here on SciDev.net about inventive methods to participate in the digital blessings without being (constantly) connected.

Via Appropedia on Twitter.

Podcasts to Peruvian farmers

Practical Action has started a podcasting pilot project to get important agricultural information to farmers in remote areas in northern Peru.

Podcasting is a method of publishing audio files via the Internet, allowing users to subscribe to a feed to receive new files automatically. Any digital audio player or computer with audio-playing software can play podcasts, or burn them to CD. Local radio stations can then re-broadcast the podcasts to traditional radio receivers, or computers at community infocentres can be used to create audio CDs of the podcasts.

The Peru podcasting project will send updates twice a month to 8 information centres in the Cajamarca region, where farmers don't yet have the means to listen via portable MP3-players. The centres will download the podcasts on CDs that can be rebroadcasted on local radio stations.

Cajamarca is one of the most important milk-producing areas of Peru. In most remote villages in the Cajamarca highlands, community services such as electricity, piped water and a sewage system are not available.

If the project proves successful, Practical Action may replicate the scheme in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.

Read more on the Practical Action and on the BBC News websites.

Link to Practical Action's Latin American website, in Spanish

Link to pdf Focus on Peru - Practical Action working in Latin-America (6 pages, cover photo on the left).

Global Plant Clinic on YouTube

One of LEISA Magazine's authors has been putting short videos on Youtube. Here (click) you can find some very short videos about the plant health clinics which featured in the Ecological Pest Management issue. Eric Boa, who took the videos using a digital camera, also said:

"...So why not have a go yourself? It's remarkable and also disappointing to note the limited use of YouTube and other web tools for teaching and explaining simple matters in agriculture - like how to apply biocontrol agents, the appearance of a disease, planting crops and so on. The world is full of digital cameras, many of which take reasonable video. I ... suggest we could do much, much more like this. As with good still photography, observe a few simple rules: keep it simple, short, hold the camera steady, let people speak, and have a plan of what you want to say before you start. Away you go ..."