Knowing what I now Know

Knowing what I now Know, this is what I would do differently

Negotiating Project

I will get in into more communities, speak to the grass roots rather than to the organization.
Speaking to the organization early in the beginning of the process is my attempt to seek security. To assume the organization knows more about the problems more. Adversely they have been successful in establishing a project but not necessary know the implication or if the real problems really solved, although it is assumed that they have given the answer. Tony Fry said, “Little has been learn in the course of 35 years.” It seemed we keep repeating the same mistakes. I see the potential of collecting the failures, rather than the one that works. There are tremendous amount of project established, it is also difficult to know which one really fails. A lot of them perhaps met the outcome. Perhaps it is not how to start the project or how to do the project, but what kind of project should really be started.

This seems that working with the community is the answer. Is that so? If I am able to open up their topic of their worry, their problems, I would be able to unpack the problems. This is about skill and trust; the skill to found out and the trust from the community. Skill can be learned, trust however is not obvious, and does not comes out right away. Using the scale of trust might be good only for long term intervention. We can use a standard intervention for short term activity, such as emergency help.

Negotiating Role

Then what is my role afterwards? Facilitator and inspirer. To what degree? Offering knowledge and possibility that are sustainable for the comm., suitable to their culture, by first knowing their capacity to cope with technology or knowledge offered. How to know their capacity to cope with the knowledge offered, i.e. photovoltaic panels? Know where they are in terms of their ability, test project on one of the community, if it works, we could train a batch of community trainer. The part that is difficult is to met them where there are, especially to know that I have lots of ideas in my head already. To not imposing ideas too grandiose is the kind of role that I think designer should be. Then it comes to the ideas that we could guide them to seek their knowledge and solve their own problem. I have remembered that I have very easy access to books and internet. Be careful.