Mail send March 18th 2007 to a small number of people that Reinder expected to be willing to contribute to assist in "Organizing ourselves"

Dear friends and supporters of Demotech, hello and wake up to a suggestion from Bram in Guatemala!

Bram wrote: ''When I am back in the Netherlands from our field work in Guatemala, we should organize an infallible communication protocol. About this I have some ideas. There is plenty possible with Wiki, but we need some help with the programming of it. I hope people in the Demotech network can help. This idea is based on a rather simple program, called MaxQDA. (30 days free trial). It is made for coding interviews in social research. You can attach labels to fragments of text that are stored in a pile of notes and interviews. This labeling (or coding) has to be done with care and is time consuming. But once done it is very helpful. If you want to know something about a certain issue, then one click sorts it all for you. It should be possible to program this somehow.''

Below you'll find the link to this program with a not too bad description of it in English.

http://www.scienceplus.nl/scienceplus/main/softwareshop/maxqda.jsp

What we at Demotech need is a program like this that is integrated in the Wiki part of our website. Adding text and coding of text fragments should be possible for users that have been authorized. This similar as it is done in some Wiki-like content management systems.

Best would be if such a program or plug-in in Wiki would work in the Wiki of WikiPedia. I find that this Wiki is being used by more and more organizations in our field of social activism and action research. It could well be that we have to adopt this Wiki in our website to make integrated action and research possible.

Also it seems possible to do this coding text fragments in a forum. Without such coding, valuable contributions that have been posted are hard to retrieve and categorize.

Action research as we do at Demotech would also be enhanced if it was supported by a management system that keeps track of tasks and deadlines. At Internet I find many of such systems, but not Open Source and not integrated in a Wiki-format. The need for such a management system will not only be felt by us, thus it probably already exits. But the right balance between functional discipline and bureaucratic waste of time has to be found.

Of course we at Demotech would welcome it if such plug-ins would work in the general setup of the Demotech website with its database of design initiatives, publications and social research items. However we may have to consider a different set up of our database as well as its presentation in our website to make best use of existing of yet to be made tools that answer above demands.

I will appreciate it you will be so kind as to give your comments to this mail in the Wiki section of Demotech's website at: http://www.demotech.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php?n=OrganizeOurselves.PersonalComments

In case you know people, organizations or web-based sources of info relating to the above, please add them in the link section of this special page.

Best regards, Reinder