This is, of course, how I bumped into Joy Tang and the OneVillage network ... and why I have stayed in touch on a friendly basis for something over a year.

The development model that I have been encouraged to work with is not quite the OneVillage concept ... thought there are many elements in common ... and the end result might turn out to be surprisingly similar ... but getting there I think is very different.

A growing network of people with different skills is coming together as a "consortium" to manage a portfolio of community franchises (for want of a better term). The starting point is the community (in the South or wherever) and the thinking is that the community almost certainly has some ideas about what it wants and needs to progress. In order to be helpful we need to know what these wants and needs are ... and to know about it efficiently there must be an ability to communicate easily.

We can help with communication with a community level WISP (Wireless ISP) system that also provides local telephone capability within the community ... and perhaps to a similarly equipped community not far away (another franchise though). The communiity franchisee charges enough to pay to run the equipment and pay off the equipment financing (under $1500 ... in say 2 years).

With the knowledge about the community we can then help with community level thinking about development optimization ... their priorities and how to implement them ... not in any way shape or form an outside view of best way to do progress ... but we can listen and modestly talk / communicate.

Various development services can be supplied on top of the communications, of which micro-cinance, mini-finance and muni-finance are going to be among the more important ... together with access to technicians who know good ways to improve water, sanitation, roads, bridges, vehicles, electricity, etc not to mention markets, and health and education.

We started a simple Wiki database a year ago, and it has been OK to start getting some information about organizations in different places around the world ... but it is now slow and clumsy and we need to go to the next stage. And we also want to go to the next stage in terms of communities now in addition to the organizations (many, but certainly not all, of which are community based).

And we also want to use our growing network of people, organizations and (soon) communities to start to provide some management and oversight of development funds which are well documented as the first set of checks are written but very soon get lost in the shuffle ... with next to nothing landing in any "community" anywhere!

There is a lot of overlap in what different people are doing, and I am not informed enough to know what is best but I am starting to get some help: ...... Kris Dev in India is helping the consortium with some open source software his firm has developed to address some of the issues of transparency and accountability (TRAC) ...... Ken DiPietro who has established a WISP business in New England is helping to make WISP a practical proposition for any community in the South ...... John Dada in Nigeria is working on helping to do a WISP demonstration project (having already created most of the elements needed for local success) ... and Pam McLean from the UK is also engaged in ICT innovation in another part of Nigeria and cooperating with John Dada ...... Kevin Jones and some friends are looking into how organizational mapping and people network mapping can help to manage what looks like being a great chaos unless we get serious about understanding it and using ICT to help with the administration and optimisation .... as well as running a community health project in Southern Africa. ...... Robin Kelley in Washington DC is helping to make the database and the network serve as a way to do monitoring and evaluation (especially in the health field) in a way that is more effective and lower cost (TAAME) .......Guido Sohne in Accra Ghana has helped me to get the first phase of our effort going in the current direction, and is involved in various ICT, FOSS, etc networks in Africa ....... Ed Cherlin is in the picture with the Simputer and another network of ICT and development friends (not to mention being in the One Village network ....... and I am trying to figure out how all of this can be used so that development resources are subject to management processes driven by management information. ....... and I am looking to figure out how Keyhole technology might be combined with community data collection so that this whole thing becomes real for anyone that is interested anytime.