Wikichild makes some changes!

Hello all,

On November 6^th 2012 the Child well-being portal was updated to improve user experience. We have put together this small blogpost to run you through the new modifications made to Wikichild:

·         Join Button: in order to make it easier for new users to understand how Wikichild works and how can they contribute, a new Join Button was placed on the Child well-being portal. This button not only gives the welcome to new users, but also shows several ways to get involved with the Wikichild project:

·         Create/edit articles.

·         Contribute to the Child well-being portal.

·         Upload reports and research papers.

·         Upload multimedia material.

·         Add an event.

·         Help by blogging.

·         Image banner: in order to improve the overall look portal and focus on a determined topic, a new image banner was added. If you are interested in us showing your pictures, please let us know by sending an e-mail to info@wikiprogress.org.

·         Article Info section: since the Wikichild community has increased its presence during the last 12 months, a recent activity section was created. This section will list all the Child well-being related articles that have been modified and created, and by which users. This way, Wikichild strengthens itself as a community and lets the users to know who is contributing to the cause. To see the last 100 edits/new articles, visit the Wikichild News section in Wikiprogress.

·         Left column suppression: due to the natures of the site, the Child well-being page must be a portal. Thus, the left column that comes within the Mediawiki software per default was taken out, giving a new presence to the Wikichild main page, focusing on what matters and removing article-specific options that are available inside the Create a new article section

Further technological and content changes will be coming within the next months and we'll be happy to hear your needs and feedback. Please let us know your thoughts by sending them to info@wikiprogress.org

All the best,

Robbie Lawrence and Isaac Contreras Sandoval
Wikichild Coordinator and Wikiprogress Technological Consultant

@fladei

@robbielawrence1

The week in review

Hello, glad you could join us for the Wikiprogress week in review - a handful of headlines that have caught our eyes over the last week. You can find all news articles and blog posts on the progress community in the Wikiprogress Community Portal .    

On wikis
2012 Top 100 NGOs: #1 Wikimedia Foundation (The Global Journal 26.01.2012)
The Wikimedia Foundation is best known for its most famous initiative, Wikipedia. The Foundation operates under the belief that information is a not-for-profit commodity; the Wikimedia Foundation has been instrumental to the global phenomenon of user-generated content and the mass sharing of information.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on wikis

On growth and development
Sustainable Humanity (Project Syndicate 31.01.2012)
Developmental Economist Jeffrey Sachs calls for the mobilisation of new technologies shaped by social values in ensuring sustainable development incorporates equality in economic growth and protection of natural resources.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on sustainable development

On measuring progress
The OECD recently produced the video, How’s Life: Measuring Progress – asking experts, “What well-being and sustainability measures are needed to go ‘Beyond GDP’”?
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on the Better Life Initiative

On social development
UN Commission on Social Development kicks off with focus on poverty and youth (UN News Centre 02.02.2012)
In 2011 there were 75 million youths without a job; UN figures show that young people are three times more likely to be unemployed than adults. Over the next 10 days the UN Commission on social development will focus on youth unemployment, poverty eradication and socially inclusive policies.
See more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on employment rates

On gender equality
Land rights for women can help ease India’s child malnutrition crisis (Guardian 20.01.2012)
India has developed significantly over the past decade; however malnutrition rates are among the worst in the world with 45% of children under 5 suffering from malnutrition. New research shows that allowing women ownership of the land they farm could drastically reduce these figures.
See more and contribute to the Wikigender article on access to land

In the Spotlight: UN High Level Panel Report on Global Sustainability - Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing (United Nations 30.01.2012)

A 22-member Panel was established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity. The Panel's final report, "Resilient People, Resilient Planet: A Future Worth Choosing", contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

Read more and contribute to the Wikiprogress article on sustainable development.

We hope you will tune in the same time next week. In the meantime, if anything interesting passes your desk that you would like to see in the next Wikiprogress week in review, please tweet it to us  @Wikiprogress  or post it on our  Facebook page

Yours in progress,

Philippa Lysaght

The 5 Excellences and Collaborative Medicine...

Those of you who have been following this blog know that we look at well-being and particularly how to measure it. Given the latest trends in Wikinomics, citizen created content and data from unofficial sources, there is a movement to encourage citizen participation in creating knowledge even in health.


I recently have discovered Cheng Man Ching who was a famous for his technique of Tai chi and also for his mastery of the 5 Excellences:
1) Poetry
2) Painting
3) Calligraphy
4) Medicine
5) Tai Chi

The Tao teaches that learning these 5 Excellences will help you to attain a balanced and fulfilled life.

Medicine is the one that I am reflecting on today especially in terms of progress. Doctors are to know about medicine. They are the experts and the authoritative sources. Why does the Tao recommend that all people should know about medicine? Of course, time and place will dictate how one determines the interpretation of this.

But, what does that mean for the health dimension of well-being? Since, I came across Chang Man Ching’s 5 Excellences, I added the Lancet to my Google reader. Every day, I am getting all the latest in medical news. These are a few of the links I found from Lancet which have to do with people being able to contribute proactively to their health and to create new knowledge around it:
Don Tapscott discusses participation by patients for a new model health care and the study of medicine:


Macrowikinomics: Collaborative Health Care from Macrowikinomics on Vimeo.

There is also Open MRS which is to improve health care delivery in resource-constrained environments by coordinating a global community that creates a robust, scalable, user-driven, open source medical record system platform.

Open MRS envision a world where:

• Models exist to implement health IT in a way that decreases costs, increases capacity, and lessens the disparities between wealthy and resource-poor environments.
• Open standards enable people to use health IT systems to share information and reduce effort.
• Concepts and processes can be easily shared to enable health care professionals and patients to work together more effectively.
• Medical software helps ease the work of health care providers and administrators to provide them with the tools to improve health outcomes all over the world.

Finally, this app looks really interesting especially in terms of data collection on life satisfaction perhaps. PsyMate  provides a "film" rather than a "snapshot" of a patient's mental state. It monitors daily life experience and behavior over a period of time and not as a one-off. It also offers the possibility of interactivity with the patient.  While this app is made for collecting data on patients, I wonder, could this (or something like this) be used for collecting survey data on a society?

Next post...calligraphy.

Angela

Can the internet help the poor?

A 50 year old father from Harare, Zimbabwe sent us an email, brimming with enthusiasm. Distressed by seeing women in his community suffer as they peel tough, sun-dried peanuts with their hands, teeth and stones, he turned to the internet, and found the Universal Nut Sheller, documented on the Appropedia wiki.

A Kenyan potato farmer turned to Google to find help when his crop was dying. He found the answer, harvested a bumper crop, connected with the Kenya Potato Growers' Association, and found a customer.

The maker of a home biogas system in the Philippines. He got help putting his design online, on the Appropedia wiki, and as a result got much more exposure, and received emails from around the world, with thank yous and suggestions for improvements (some of which he incorporated in his updated design). This is one of my favorite stories, because it shows that people in less developed countries are not only consumers of knowledge, but creators and sharers.

Appropedia is an open wiki project, focused on technologies and practices for overcoming poverty and creating a just and sustainable world. I've been involved since early days in 2006, working on it, telling people and helping to build partnerships. But when we tell people, a reaction we sometimes get is:

What use is an internet site to help the poor, when the poor have no internet access?

But... why the assumption that they're completely disconnected? Travel in less developed countries and you'll see internet cafes in cities and villages. A home internet connection may be too expensive for local incomes, but saving up money to connect from an internet cafe is within reach of many.

Mobile phones are widespread. Text messages and phone calls are surprisingly cheap in some countries - on one occasion a 10 minute off-peak call from my mobile phone in Jakarta cost me less than 3 cents. This matters because of the many applications for mobile phones that support development, and because there are many more phones than computers. A story was told at BarCampAfrica in 2008, by a Google employee who had been in Africa and asked a local "Have you heard of Google?" the local replied "Yes, of course." But when asked "Have you searched with Google from a mobile phone?" the local was confused. "Of course - how else can you search with Google?" In Africa especially, users are skipping land connections, and cell phones are getting smart quickly.

You only need one phone in the village with this capability to significantly increase people's ability to find information, and to allow new ideas to arrive and spread. A farmer with a dying crop now has an alternative to just watching the crop die. The compassionate Zimbabwean can find an answer to the suffering of women in the local community. The local inventor or designer can spread the word about their latest idea. And a teacher can find answers and teaching resources for their class. This is real progress.

Still not sure how this affects those who don't log on themselves? Consider our potato farmer, above. Understandably enthusiastic about how technology has helped him, he is now connecting the global with the local, enabling knowledge from the net to be shared in his community:

In my rural community, it is about making use of simple wooden notice boards, with print outs of text messages, e-mails, photos illustrations and articles, all talking of local issues.

This is clearly a world where tech helps the poor. The question is no longer whether the poor can benefit from wikis, but how good the information will be when they find it?

These issues face all wiki communities, especially those concerned with human progress at a global level. There is more we can do to make wikis more accessible, through improving the interface and making offline versions available. More on that in a later post.

Relevant wiki pages:

• Can the poor access Appropedia?