KM4Dev 09 Gender Huddle

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Comment by Hannah Beardon on July 15, 2010 at 4:57am

The Journal of Community Informatics
Community Informatics & Gender (Special Double Issue)
Table of Contents http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/issue/view/26

Editorial
--------
Editorial: Community Informatics and Gender
Michael Gurstein

Gender in Community Informatics : Guest Editorial for the special issue on
Gender and Community Informatics
Anita Gurumurthy


Articles
--------
89.1 FM: The Place for Development: Power shifts and participatory spaces in
ICTD
Revi Sterling, Sophia Huyer

Gender digital equality in ICT interventions in health: Evidence from IDRC
supported projects in developing countries
Kathleen Flynn-Dapaah, Ahmed Tareq Rashid

Women Forge Ahead in India: Internet and the Public Forum
Kavita Karan, Dr. Rohit Raj Mathur

Technicians, Tacticians and Tattlers: Women as Innovators and Change Agents
in Community Technology Projects
Helen McQuillan

Economic and Social Empowerment of Women Through ICT: A Case Study of
Palestine
Khalid Said Rabayah

Women at Work and Home: New Technologies and Labor among Minority Women in
Seelampur
Sreela Sarkar

Gender and GIS: Mapping the Links between Spatial Exclusion, Transport
Access, and the Millennium Development Goals in Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Ghana
Wendy M Walker, Shalini P Vajjhala

Village Phone Program, Commodification Of Mobile Phone Set And Empowerment
Of Women
Quamrul Alam, Mohammad Abu Yusuf, Ken Coghill

The Digital Divide and Gender: A Survey of Environmental Community
Organizations in Perth, Western Australia
Subas Prasad Dhakal


Case Studies
--------
Cultivating the Women on Farms Gathering Community: A Digital Approach
Natalie Lee-San Pang

Internet, power and politics: gender & ICTs in the movement against CAFTA
Margarita Salas

Rural e-governance: Exploring the gender gaps and its impact on women(A case
study of e-gram suraj scheme of Chhattisgarh State of India)
Anupama Saxena


Notes from the field
--------
Creating Community, Rejecting Community: Migrant Women in Beijing
Elisa Oreglia


Notes and cases from the field (practitioners)
--------
Gender Experiences in IT@School, an ICT enabled education project of Kerala,
India
P R Raji, Arun M


Reports
--------
Engendering ICTs: Scope for Empowering women, with special reference to
India
Dilip Dumar Ghosh,

Comment by Claudia Michel on June 4, 2010 at 6:03am

Hi Hannah, Rosien and Tarit
Many thanks for your comments! I looked at the Dimitra project and I also found the story about the gender-sensitive bridge convincing and funny. Please accept my apologies for my long silence. I was busy preparing the course for SDC which took place last week and I would like to share that experience now with you.

The course was structured along the daily activities of the different teams of the knowledge and learning division of SDC: 1) learning and networking, 2) information management, 3) intraweb applications, 4) culture & development.
I started the course asking people to go into pairs to talk about their personal experience with gender (equality) in the past, as well as about their expectations for the course. The personal reflection was appreciated very much because it gave the course a personal touch from the beginning. But I think a trustful atmosphere in the team is a precondition for such an exercise.
The next steps were four inputs of about 10 minutes followed by discussions on key issues of the division: 1) gender-sensitive facilitation; 2) non-sexist language; 3) usability and accessibility of the internet from a gender perspective; 4) uneven access of female and male artists to scholarships. I tried to always give good examples on how other institutions solved the problems raised, but this was not always possible. There was a lively discussion after each input which is a good sign. However, I had the impression that the participants had the feeling that some aspects were already known and not really new. I also found it difficult to facilitate a balanced discussion about the complexities and the simplicities of differences between men and women.
The most important part was the work on small “gender-projects” in working groups i.e. projects which help to include a gender perspective in one the daily activities of each team. It was appreciated to have time for being productive although this means more work load at the end of the day. There will be another half-day in August, where we can see how these small projects advanced. I am already very curious to see whether the plans can be realized.

Comment by Hannah Beardon on May 18, 2010 at 4:40am

Good point, and nice example! And it reminds me, I have developed some tools for participatory analysis/assessment of access to information which oculd be appropriate. In face I just had a conversation yesterday with an ICT4D colleague in Uganda who has used the tools in training and he said they were very well received, and are already being used, as people said they helped to make gender practical to them. They know that there are differences in people's access to and potential for use of information resources in communities, and in many cases these differences have to do with wealth, power and privilege, including education/ literacy, time and control of spending decisions. The differences effect the impact of the work they do, so asking men, women, young, old, rich, poor, literate and not etc to rank information sources for accessibility, usefulness, availability etc should really help them to plan better. I guess that applies in all communities, ie teams and organisations, not just villages and CBOs!

Happy to share the tools we have developed so far if you want to adapt them.

Comment by Rosien Herweijer on May 17, 2010 at 1:42pm

Hi Claudia,

One of my favorite stories is one that explains to an engineer what a gender sensitive bridge is. The thing about gender sensitivity in knowledge management is trying to find out whether participants in events, users of libraries or platforms experience different barriers and incentives to participate. These could relate to:

- content (is the content gender neutral or male biased, does it address the concerns of women)
- technical and practicalities (access to library, computers, skill levels time constraints etc.)

You could look at what has been done in the field of KM, who has participated, if there were any distinct gender patterns etc.

P.S. if you want to know about the bridge...... http://herweijer.wordpress.com/services-2/inspiration/

Comment by Hannah Beardon on May 7, 2010 at 4:45am

Hi Claudia,
I am working on exactly the interface between gender mainstreaming awareness and capacity, and knowledge management, for IFAD and FAO at the moment. It is difficult on many fronts...
Gender issues and aspects can be quite hidden in projects especially where that is not the main focus, so a lot of really useful on the job learning about why and how to consider gender issues in planning, implementation, monitoring etc is just not captured. I think Dimitra (an FAO project for Africa) has been developing some training on Communicating Gender, which tries to address this in practical ways, uninvisibilising the gender components of problems, as well as the interventions trying to solve them...
Another issue is that even where you have a lot of really useful information, the people who should be using it, learning from it and applying that learning - ie those with responsibility for project design and management - are often not willing audiences. So there is the problem of finding ways to share which are useful to them, making the case for gender and providing very practical resources. Of course, this depends on the organisational culture and commitment to gender mainstreaming, but only for the severity of the problem, not the problem itself. One thing that IFAD and FAO are doing is to increase networking among regional staff and partners who share different thematic focus, for example rural finance, to share learning and approaches around gender, women's participation etc.

I would be really keen to hear if you gather any good learning on how to reach different but necessary audiences within organisations so that learning can be shared and improve practice... and would be happy to be involved in any group thinking about that!

Comment by Claudia Michel on May 7, 2010 at 4:07am

Dear all. I am very happy that this gender huddle exists! I recently got a mandate by an SDC division to organise a 1,5-day course on information management, knowledge sharing & learning/networking from a gender perspective. The mandate connects the two pillars of my career: I completed my PhD in gender studies three years ago, since then I am working as a coordinator for knowledge sharing in a Swiss research programme in development studies. I am very enthusiastic about the course but it is the first time that I assume the responsibility for such a mandate; therefore, I am a bit nervous and would be very grateful for sharing my experience with you in the gender huddle.
The first part of the course takes place on 25 May, the second on 12 August. SDC staff told me to be interested in the very practical aspects of gender. To give an example: The information management receives all incoming questions and answers them. How could they do their job from a gender sensitive perspective? I am planning to give examples from other organizations for each of 4 topics of the division (information management, knowledge sharing, intraweb, projects) in order to show how similar institutions deal with the issue. Therefore, I am looking after such examples. I am grateful for any hint on gender sensitive information/knowledge sharing practices or for any other comment related to experts, literature, toolkits, etc. And I would certainly share the material as it accumulates! Many thanks in advance.

Claudia Michel
Coordinator, Knowledge Sharing
NCCR North-South
Switzerland

Comment by Riff Fullan on October 14, 2009 at 9:33am

Thinking this is becoming a broader discussion, I just tried to summarize our recent exchange and posted it to the main km4dev dgroup. Maybe we could pick it up there...

Comment by Hannah Beardon on October 14, 2009 at 6:00am

hmmm, it 'sounds easy' to generate material to some extent... then have you any idea what you would do with it? How would you get it 'out there'? Or does it depend totally on the context and purpose?

In the ag huddle Louise developed an interesting graphic of a see saw - with one side (mostly international organisation staff really) info heavy and incentive (for info sharing/ learning) light, and the other side info light and incentive heavy. The weakest arrow in the discussions we had about info flow was always the one from the ground to the international decision makers and researchers.So on the one hand there is the production side - especially capturing of info from the grassroots... on the other the dissemination .. any ideas on that?

Comment by Riff Fullan on October 14, 2009 at 5:20am

On your video musings Hannah, what was mostly in my mind was reporting using interview style, but I would also want to explore the others. In any case, I think a viral approach is most likely to work. Some people like playing around with cameras, others don't. Some like to experiment, others don't. I think if there is senior management support for experimenting, then it is a matter of trying to set things up so that people can easily do it (which I guess means support for the difficult issues like file conversion, editing, guidelines around shooting, interviewing, or whatever). Then it would be good to include a light exercise of reflection on the experience, iteratively building practice within the institution or network.....it sounds easy to me like that, but of course it is not at all easy in practice.

Comment by Hannah Beardon on October 14, 2009 at 5:07am

Thanks Riff, your prize is in the post.

I agree, but then again what came out of our conversation with Rose is that where good practice exists on the ground, but is not labelled gender, this does not get shared as good practice to others... and in fact donors are asking them to 'do' gender, when they are already doing it, and they themselves don't even know they are already doing it. SO... in a way I thought tagging was quite a nice way of showing how gender analysis, and adapting plans with a mind to gender equity, is part of good quality development processes. A bit like indicators?

I would like to know more about video - are you thinking of participatory video processes whereby people decide the story they want to tell, the image they want to portray? Or a means of reporting perhaps interview style? Do you think that could work in large organisations? Would it influence decision making? Learning around techniques and good practices? Or would it work better in communities of practice?

So many questions... and no more prizes I'm afraid.

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