Communication & Development: The State of the Art

Mini Seminar ‘Communication & Development: The State of the Art'

On April 16th five international experts from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), gave a presentation about their work on Communication for Development, and was followed by a short discussion facilitated by Dr. Albert van den Heuvel.

It was an inspiring meeting, to hear from very dedicated an professional people about their work, experiences and views on communication. Specially for this meeting some handouts were prepared on the work of WACC on the specific ICCO-Alliance themes. As only a handful of colleagues assisted the meeting I would like to use this way to share these handouts with you:

• Uniquely WACC
• WACC's History and the Role of the Netherlands
• Communication - Making a world of Difference
• Media and participatory democracy: Communication rights
• Communication and Poverty
• Media & gender Justice
• Communication for Peace
• HIV&AIDS, Communication and Stigma

After the presentation we had a short discussion which in my words led to the following conclusion:
Promoting the right to - value based - communication is essential to development and analysing well the intended audiences can make this communication effective.

In Oktober 2008 WACC is organising a world wide seminar on communication in South Africa with the title: Communication IS Peace.

Maarten

"The truth is not democratic, if it would be, we would all know it!"

These are the words from Bob McHenry, former chief editor of Encyclopaedia Britannica. He sais these words in a very interesting TV broadcast of the Dutch VPRO on April 7th, 2008 about the Truth in times of Wikipedia, and for that matter also in the times of ComPart. Although I do not know how long the link will be usable, you can view this ±45 minute broadcast via this link. Besides a short introduction and some words in between in Dutch the whole broadcast is in English.

Maarten Boers

RPC's the "spiders in the webs"?

>On Friday 4th April, three new regional process coordinators (Central America, South Asia, West Africa) and colleagues from PIT spent the afternoon exploring the ComPart toolkit.

Maarten Boers set the scene, then Peter Ballantyne introduced how the various tools can be grouped into those that are more 'personal' - to track and share information, and those that are more for a 'group' to share and communicate with each other and with the rest of the alliance. He explained that, ultimately, the idea is that these tools will also provide ways for Alliance partners in a region to share among themselves and with the Alliance. [see his short presentation]

Pier Andrea Pirani then led the group through the toolkit - ComPart toolbar, iGoogle, search, wiki, dgroups, blogging and interwise. Despite jetlag and the end of week timing, the group enthusiastically explored several of the tools, particularly iGoogle, Dgroups and the wikis. The future looks bright!

After the session we asked Frederika and Peter to explain a little about the new RPC roles.

For Frederika Meijer, the RPC has an important role in bringing ICCO closer to the field:



According to Peter Oomen: An "RPC will work as 'spiders in a web', connected to people in Utrecht, to the Regional Councils members and to the Programme coalitions":

Latin America regional councillors interviewed on You Tube

Today in a workshop about the ComPart Flowers with the three RPC 'pilots' - Mariecke van der Glas, Frederika Meijer, and Peter Oomen - and colleagues from the PIT, we came across an ICCO channel on You Tube.

Recent video's by Jack van Ham include interviews with members of the new 'regional' council in Latin America: