Last week at the KM4Dev conference in Brussels, I struck up a conversation with Joseph Sikeku, who talked about community leadership and technology stewardship in a radically different setting: a radio station in Tanzania.  Sikeku’s project uses an interesting mix of technologies: 5,000 Watt FADECO radio station Small blue “sensor” or integrated circuit audio recorder […]

Tags: km4dev, video

Last May’s CHIFOO presentation was a great talk about reading by Cathy Marshall. Here are Marshall’s slides from which I’ve borrowed some images to talk about her work in this post. Marshall read (out loud, from the slide on the screen) that: “Nothing is more commonplace than the experience of reading, and yet nothing is […]

Tags: CHIFOO, ethnography

Here’s an 8-minute interview with Nancy White, where I ask her several questions about what’s important about Digital Habitats, how the book came to be, and what’s left out. You can tell that I’ve edited out about 10 minutes of discussion. This could have been a very long conversation since we both feel the topic […]

Tags: interview

After more than 5 years working on it, Digital Habitats (the book I wrote with Etienne Wenger and Nancy White) is here.  (At least a couple proof copies have arrived in the mail.  Copies for sale are on their way.) It has been really fun.  What’s next? Stay tuned.

For a couple of years it wasn’t “a book” but just “an update”.  After our ideas started getting more interesting and more useful, I took to taunting my co-conspirators Etienne Wenger and Nancy White that what is now Digital Habitats “is actually a book.” Later, when we all admitted that it was indeed a book, […]

Finally, Nancy White, Etienne Wenger and I agreed on a simple definition of the term “technology steward”: Technology stewards are people with enough experience of the workings of a community to understand its technology needs, and enough experience with technology to take leadership in addressing those needs. Stewardship typically includes selecting and configuring technology, as […]