John

Please could you remind me what the purpose of this group is - does it have
a mission statement? I have been receiving BCS-DEVEL emails for some time
now, and I am finding it difficult to see how the work of this group is not
simply confined to conference halls and academic forums.

Regarding your email below, I don't know if you've ever been to Africa, but
I have spent some time doing charity work in a number of sub-Saharan
countries, and I am struggling to see the relationship between theoretical
discussions of abstract concepts in committees and the immediate IT
requirements of communities in developing countries such as Mozambique or
Zambia. How, for example, is this group involved in the Computer Aid 2004
campaign to ship 25,000 reconditioned PCs to Africa by the end of the year?
How is it involved in supporting organisations such as VSO to recruit
unfulfilled IT professionals to ambitious projects in developing countries?

I appreciate that lobbying decision-makers and discussing high-level policy
in the global arena is important, but surely what these countries really
need is direct, practical action as demonstrated by the CAI campaign, not
endless reports, rhetoric and pontification.

Regards

Simon Brown
BA(Hons) MSc MBCS

-----Original Message-----
From: British Computer Society Developing Countries Specialist Group.
[mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of John Lindsay
Sent: 26 May 2004 10:02
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: metadata:: materia - SCOLMA


here is an approximation of the speech I gave at the SCOLMA conference
yesterday


Metadata and Africa - the obligations of the information professional.
A paper for the SCOLMA conference, 2004.

John Lindsay
Reader in Information Systems Design
Kingston University

The Declaration and action plan of the World Summit on the Information
Society are now available and there are less than two years to the
second summit in Tunis in 2005.  What will be delivered?

Background

We need to remember the White Paper on Globalisation and Development
which suggested that Britain's contribution to international
development is in knowledge and research, which argued for pro poor
policies and international public goods.

We need to remember the development of the concept of civil society
and its participation in international development, the meetings
leading up to the Geneva summit, particularly those organised by
UNESCO, and the UK National Commission for UNESCO, in which were
developed the idea of information literacy, the meeting organised last
year and its report, and the concept of metadata and its
interoperability as an international public good.

Foreground

The declaration and action plan place emphasis on sustainable
development, on the digital divide, and on actions which can make a
difference.

The UK National Commission on UNESCO has now been reconstituted which
provides us with a channel into which to report on activities and
attempt harmony.

UNESCO is about to declare the decade on education for sustainable
development.

It is not at all clear what the British government intends to do about
the information society or even which departments have which
responsibilities.  In a meeting with David Sainsbury, the Minister for
Science, he indicated at least four responsibilities without
mentioning modernising government, the cabinet office, information age
champions, education or health.

If our contribution to international development though is through
knowledge and research then work on the electronic governance
interoperability framework, the government metadata framework,
category lists, the United Kingdom Archive Thesaurus, and similar
activities then comparing and contrasting with work in and on Africa
must form a real and present contribution to international
development, and this conference provides a benchmark opportunity to
capture the current state of knowledge and practice.

We might point to the three pages of the contents of Hans Zell's
contribution to organising knowledge on Africa and wonder how much of
this really leads to sustainable development?

Indeed we might suggest that the contribution to international
sustainable development of information professionals is suggesting the
integrated indicators and associations which are necessary and backing
them with the resources for evidence based reasoning which are
necessary.  Yet after twenty years work one would still be hard
pressed to point to the PhD theses which might make a contribution?

In order to establish our current state of practice on metadata we
organised a meeting within the pattern of the information literacy
meeting, the report of which will be soon available.  The work of
SCOLMA could be a useful contribution to that work and in turn this
work could be used by SCOLMA to develop its action plan.

Foresight

It seems to me we have basically the same problem as we did when the
Information for Development Forum was launched twenty one years ago,
how to build the matrix of health or education or employment or
housing, or and, and Africa or Tekweni, or Harare or Mozambique.  In
other words, how to build a facetted approach using subject
descriptors, taxonomies, and controlled vocabularies.

But we now have a new problem: the political economy of scholarly
publication has changed as a result of the internet.  The consequence
is a much greater flow of what is called information with out any
evidence that any information is happening.  Indeed the issues of here
there, now then, this that is only exacerbated.  If a resource is
constructed for cancer specialists in Britain, under what circumstances
and with what circumspections might it be made available in Africa,
what do the specialists practicing in Africa need to know, and what do
the information professionals need to know?

More seriously, when it comes to education, what now do educators need
to know about electronic learning and the availability of scholarly
publication, how do learners and teachers in higher education build a
framework for sustainable development? And is higher education part of
the problem rather than part of the solution?

It seems to me we might build a little representation of how to proceed.

ooooooooo

    O O

========

    O O

ooooooooo

Let us start at the top.  These are communities in Africa who are
trying to build their capabilities which means clean water, basic
health, education, income generating capacity, social capital,
sustainable livelihoods, call it what you will.  Then below them are
the institutions of knowledge and research.  These might be
universities and higher education, they might be NGOs, they might be a
variety of different forms.  My experience tells me that universities
in developing countries are more interested in copying first world
ideas of universities, and these have little interest in sustainable
development or community participation.  My experience tells me that
NGOs are more interested in satisfying the needs of their funders than
in contributing to sustainable development, but one cannot paint
everything into the shadows.  As Clare Short said, the enemy of
international development is negativism and cynicism.

The line in the middle is government both at the local and
international level.  This seems to be both a barrier and an
opportunity for we have to ask government by whom, for whom?  If we
are to have pro poor policies and sustainable development then the
methods and the matters need cases and tools which can turn experience
into learning.

Then the larger and smaller objects below are the mirror of those
above, but they are those in the north.  Putting the south on top is
an exercise in whose reality counts though it also by putting the
north on the bottom stretches the geomorphology.  In the north the
issues for sustainable development are those of excessive consumption,
waste disposal, obesity, armaments industries, pollution, motorism,
giganticism. Here too we attempt to learn and teach sustainable
development and gather methods and matters for cases and evidence.

To use again Clare Short's words. we need to gather people of moral
worth who are committed to learning and practicing but in our context
it is information professionals with our relations with our users,
customers, clients, consumers, citizens, comrades, victims who have to
build the material using metadata and it is our architectures of
metadata which will make the difference which makes the difference.
So at the most basic level, is country an attribute of university?

Let us build another simple model.  Construct this as a matrix with
the first four along the vertical axis and the second four along the
top.  Now the relation for each pair has to be filled in, in your
context.  Our contexts might be those of competition for that is the
dominant ideology, but they might be those of co-operation or
collaboration for we are going to have to decide which information
objects are going to play which roles in our information society but
we also have to be sustainable.  They might also be relations of
conviviality for part of the reason we come to a meeting like this is
not only that we are paid to be here, and someone is paying, for the
room, for the projector, for the network connection, for the version
of power point, even for the lunch, but because we think we are going
to get something out of it, and we are going to contribute something.
That out of that relation comes conviviality.

Our core concepts which we need to organise, are people, projects,
places and papers.  Each of these is a high level entity about which
generically we can build a reusable object, indeed many have done so
many times, and Dublin Core and the UNESCO thesaurus might provide a
starting point.  Then along the top put pay, price, profit and
purpose.  You might in turn use a logical framework, which suggests an
objective, an intervention logic and a source of verification.

But whether it is telecommunications policy, competition, standards,
liberalisation of markets, universal access, or it is health policy,
or education policy, or private sector investment opportunity,
information professionals are going to have to decide what entities
and permitted what relations with what entities.

The open access initiative might quite profoundly and quite quickly
change the model of scholarly publishing and this core concept of
information is the matter for SCOLMA rather than all the other
meanings of information.  Each of us in our own institutions has a
role to play in this matter and it might turn out to be the most
important one in the near present.  But whichever, it is only an entry
in a field.  All we have to decide is which the entry and which the field.







ends

This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs Email
Security System.