DLIST
From its roots as an online platform to support a handful of community organisations on the north west coast of South Africa, DLIST has grown to become both a substantial community of practice with members across southern Africa, and to incorporate an approach to ‘bottom up’ stakeholder engagement where online media integrates with community radio, video, print and offline events. The DLIST Benguela platform now supports the sharing of ideas between coastal interest groups, different tiers of government and between a wide array of players that include local communities and the private sector.
DLIST Benguela
The founding DLIST online community has been active since 2002. Its members are spread throughout South Africa, Namibia and Angola – as well as in Europe and the US.
In 2005 a three year grant was awarded, through the GEF International Waters programme, to develop and extend DLIST’s online and offline activities. As project lead at EcoAfrica, I helped design an overall communication strategy and was responsible to re-develop the community portal and co-ordinate the programme activities overall.
The project involved both online and offline communication activities:
- The web platform was updated from an outdated, proprietary Cold Fusion system to the open source Joomla content management system. This made it possible for us to train a small team of non-technical people to manage and upload content.
- The online discussion engine was updated to a system similar to Google or Yahoo groups – users can participate via email or web based forum in the same discussion thread.
- Newsletter articles are contributed by the community and then compiled and sent by the project librarian using SendStudio. We produced the newsletter, which proved to be very successful, in two languages every quarter.
- The project included regular outreach activities to boost the network of members – workshops, training events, youth days. With a strong network, the project was able to for example run an environmental film festival in over 20 community locations with only little central co-ordination, and practically no funding. These events really helped to boost the sense of community.
- The platform supported four distance learning courses in partnership with three universities in the region. I was involved particularly in developing a short course on planning for stakeholder engagement and communication strategy.
- The project helped overcome barriers to access by setting up free internet in community public spaces.
DLIST is a pilot – we are all still learning as the community grows – but the project has shown that governance is not always a “top down” affair. The “bottom up approach” has phenomenal potential. We also surprised critics who said that there were not enough active internet users in the region to make the online community a success.
DLIST ASCLME
In 2009 the DLIST Benguela approach was replicated on the eastern coast of southern Africa, involving stakeholders from South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania (and Zanzibar), Mauritius, Rodrigues and Madagascar. Integrated with the GEF/UNDP funded ASCLME project, the DLIST team are now responsible for a large part of the project’s community stakeholder outreach.
We used the opportunity to migrate the community platform to Drupal – Joomla turned out to be a poor choice for this sort of member driven site, and updated the discussion engine to rely on Drupal Organic Groups, using a custom module we developed (MailForum) to allow contributions to the group forums using email.
New challenges – for one a much more diverse potential member population, and more languages to accommodate – means this is again a work in progress.
A nod to the traditional online homestead, this site is part loft to gather various bits of my research, part lounge to think through and share ideas on the social architecture of the web.