True that @Alberto. Grassroot communities tend to be small and less formalised and for that matter collaboration with other partners take time and effort and skills in communication and negotiation which they might lack. If even many alternate leaders and grassroots communities would want to collaborate the challenge would be how not to obscure the visibility and identity of such organizations. Sharing one’s assets with others involves risk (human resource in this case) and vulnerability. Collaborating with a larger organization involves a power imbalance that can be dangerous, especially if the larger organization doesn’t fully respect the smaller one. So, may be devising ‘mutually rewarding benefits’ could be one of the way to build trust among the grassroot communities and other agencies and also to enhance partnership?
As you say, @meenabhatta, collaboration takes time. Collaboration with formal institutions takes a lot of it, because you are dealing with people who are paid to coordinate, so (1) can afford to take time and (2) have trouble appreciating the constraints of non-institutional actors in this sense. In a Western civic participation context, the typical situation is: let’s have an open meeting with citizens! It will be Wednesday at 10 am. Now, ordinary people are working on weekdays during business hours, and they simply cannot come. These decisions are rarely debated; they are simply made on the basis of the calendars of public decision makers. And yet, they cast a long shadow on the whole process, because essentially they mean: this process is only for professionals. This cannot but reduce diversity, which in some cases will be OK but in others will have very negative consequences.
One of my fights is for all civic engagement to be done outside business hours (though this does tax the civil servants) or, even better, with asynchronous methods. It is one of the reasons I like “online and open” so much; people decide when and if to participate, so they will typically engage when they have time, are feeling relaxed and creative and committed. The beauty is that nobody needs to keep track of who cares about what, or when people have time: individual decisions result in an optimal outcome.
Maybe we – Edgeryders – should be designing and manning a dialogue space that works for people who are not paid to take the time to this coordination work?
@meenabhatta I guess “The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster” by Jonathan M. Katz can be very interesting read considering this ongoing debate and questions.
@esteban, thanks for the offer to help with this. Unfortunately we can’t let you link the PDF here since it’s probably a copyrighted work and this is a public space … we would like to operate this website without interference with law enforcement for some time still Hope you understand. What you do outside of this public space is of course your own business. In many countries, copying any book for friends and family is legal, for example.
Quite a few of them are freely, and legally, available for download. Often they will make you see the original book in a new light as well. And if it is on research gate it is relatively easy to get in touch with the expert authors without disturbing them too much.
Alternatively just go to google books and let their lawyers deal with the copyright issues for the time being.
@barun_ghimire thank you for letting us know about this literature. will try to get my hand on it. You could share that with me , the PDF version.
@Alberto it might be cool to have engagements of people through online mediums, but apparently we here in Nepal still do not have a strong online population so that might be a challenging task. Maybe people need to have a separate orientation on the benefits of getting online. Yeah a challenging task as i said!!!
We now see how a global crisis can work out so differently depending on the local responses.
I am curious if over time we will see a net impact of community work and solidarity on the responses and especially recovery.
Hope you understand. What you do outside of this public space is of course your own business. In many countries, copying any book for friends and family is legal, for example.
