Internal:Speakers/RF1
RF1: Richard Forrest
Title: Utilizing Wikis to Help Achieve Global Sustainable Development (ID RF1)
- Language: English | License: normal copyright
- Room size: Medium+
- Category: DEVELOPING WORLD AND MULTILINGUALISM
- type: 10 or 30-minute presentation
- Budget requirements: {{{budgetrequire}}}
- Budget priority: {{{budget}}}
Author[s]: Richard Forrest.
- Contact: raforrest2004@yahoo.com [OTRS]
- Contacted by:
- (From: Colombo, Sri Lanka. (see about') | available days: All days)
Each day, several species go extinct and millions of people go to bed hungry. Can wikis help to solve such problems?
The term "sustainable development" is used to describe the interlinked environmental, social and economic needs facing humanity. Achieving global sustainable development will require simultaneous, decentralized changes in the policies and practices of institutions at all levels (international, national and local, public and private) and in wide-ranging fields--from fisheries to finance.
Despite the importance of this challenge, information that exists in relevant fields--including environmental conservation, international development assistance, and organizational and professional capacity building--is scattered, specialized, and shrouded in confusing jargon and acronyms. While a great deal of information is documented by many organizations, it is mainly on separate websites focusing on publicizing each organization's own activities and perspectives. Practitioners seeking useful information must sift through enormous amounts of repetitious information and 'public relations' pieces, and often do not know where to turn.
Perhaps most important, current information sharing practices in different knowledge 'silos' do not allow for easily seeing how sustainable development challenges are all necessarily interlinked: one of countless examples that could be given of such complex interlinkages is that access to micro-credit for sustainable utilization of natural resources could help ease gender inequality, thus reducing infant mortality and malnutrition in tsunami-affected areas. Organizations working on aspects of such issues increasingly need to work together and to navigate new fields of knowledge.
As we know from wiki projects such as Wikipedia, information becomes much more useful when it is integrated with other related knowledge 'just a click away,' and when people who have even small amounts of information to share are provided with an easy means to contribute what they know to a collective knowledge bank.
The use of wiki technology thus offers an unprecedented opportunity to create an easy-to-use repository of knowledge useful for global sustainability, and to allow practitioners in government, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and communities to share insights, practical know-how and lessons learned.
A new wiki project is proposed with the objective of capturing knowledge about sustainable development goals, approaches, practices and lessons learned, providing a platform for knowledge sharing within the persistent context of the need to achieve global sustainability.
Key issues for the future are anticipated to include ensuring credibility among users (envisioned as including professional staff of highly bureaucratic and hierarchical institutions), securing the participation of both those who have and who need relevant knowledge, and overcoming the tendencies of fields of study and institutions to create separate "islands" of knowledge.
The author is developing a proof-of-concept wiki within an environmental network organization to spur discussion and adoption of this approach to knowledge sharing. The views of the wiki community are sought in further conceptualizing and operationalizing this effort.
Longer abstract: details
About the author[s]: Richard Forrest has worked for 18 years on issues of international environmental conservation, development and capacity building, mainly in Japan and the United States.
Status information in the templates is not up to date. Please see Internal:Speakers/Categories for final status information.
- accept: JV (as short pres, important issue)
- reject: AB (ok as a poster)
- comment: not too excited about what seems to be essentially a new, highly specific project proposal. Tend to reject unless others care greatly about it.-EM
- status: rejected with poster notice