We leave Monday for Thailand and Cambodia to work on our Mekong Collaboration Program.
In preparation for this trip, I dug up a methodology that served me well in the social work field: the asset mapping approach. This model is not about tracking strategic assets. It is about communities focusing on their own strength and capacity. This approach often starts with a community developing a health scorecard of positive community activities, such as kids spending time with grandparents, that can then become a focus for community energy and activism.
This methodology works great when approaching general social issues, but how well does it work in the technology realm internationally? InSTEDD was hired to work in Southeast Asia because of our technology expertise. How can we share technology in a way that is relevant and empowering to communities? The obvious model is the transfer and train model, a model which many technology organizations currently use. An asset approach would take technology sharing much further than that. In the article Closing the Digital Divide: An Asset-Based Approach to Community Building and Community Technology , Nicol Turner at Northwestern and Randal Pinkett at MIT suggest that the technology itself and how it is shared should facilitate the strengthening of assets in a community. They wrote that "while e-mail and listservs are useful and value tools, we are advocating a new class of community technology, that is specifically designed to support asset-based community development" (p. 5). Technology is used to reinforce cultural identity, broaden community communciation and improve resource exchange.
Can we find ways to track infectious disease in ways that strengthen the community identity? It's tough, because infectious disease may not be the top priority of villagers in Laos or Cambodia, many of whom do not have access to clean water or adequate food. Can we serve the broader public health needs and serve community interests as well?
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