workshop

On 9 June about 40 representatives from government agencies, civil society organizations and academia gathered in Kista Science Tower to discuss the influence of ICT on democratic processes. Those who could not make it in person could follow the workshop online.

The inception of the workshop was the popular uprisings that have swept North Africa and the Middle East throughout the spring. Twitter and Facebook were widely recognized as key elements in enabling popular movements. Indeed, social media have become an important tool in the mobilization of crowds, by enabling people to share information with friends, friends of friends and so. The consequences have been unprecedented.

In conjunction with the eLearningAfrica conference, Spider held a one day workshop with a number of organizations in Tanzania, to explore possibilities for collaboration and partnership. Only half of the representatives present had heard of Spider before and no one had received funding. Spider emphasized collaboration between several organizations and underscored that Spider can only provide catalytic seed funding and that additional funding must come from other sources. The discussion was structured by Spider’s thematic areas: education, health, and democracy.

Recently, we have seen a number of projects, pilots and tools where ICT is used in various ways to promote democracy. Many of these initiatives have been launched in East Africa: crowd-sourcing platforms such as Ugandawatch2011, uReport and Ushahidi (and variations thereof such as Uchaguzi, Huduma and Map Kibera); innovative SMS applications such as Grid 6464, CU@SCHOOL, 3356 shortcode by City Council in Nairobi and Trac FM; and of course the widespread use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

On the 13-14 September SPIDER and Karolinska University Hospital organized an E-health Workshop in Stockholm. The workshop gathered a variety of e-health researchers and practitioners to share experiences and future partnerships.

The International Post Graduate Student Network (IPID), which is supported by SPIDER, arranged a serie of seminars on the topic "Blended technologies for development" this spring in order to introduce students to a variety of different technologies. Each of the three seminars, held at Ericsson and KTH, were attended by around 30 students from various Swedish universities.

A reasearch workshop was also recently held at Örebro University, organized by the PhD. students and IPID coordinators Annika Andersson and Mathias Hatakka.