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Welcome to the Technology and Social Action Web Site

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Welcome to the Technology and Social Action Website

 

This site was established as part of the Technology and Social Action project to foster dialogue and collaboration between activists in social movements, voluntary and community organisations and technology designers. It was funded under the Designing for the 21st Century initiative of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council.

A follow-on 2-year project Practical Design for Social Action (PRADSA) has been funded under the second round of the Designing for the 21st Century call for proposals, and began in March 2007.

The first event
for 2007 was a workshop at Leeds Metropolitan University on the 21st / 22nd of
March. It was intended to open a dialogue between academics and
practitioners, to identify key themes for Technology and Social Action.

The following was the call to participate in this workshop;

Are you shaping the tools or techniques that help other people shape their world?

There is no job description for what you do. You mix dedication to
social change, confidence with people and organisations, and technical
knowledge or skills. You are part of a growing number of committed
people using innovation and ICT to help others work on social and
political issues.

PRADSA (Practical Design for Social Action) is running a series of
workshops around the UK to share best practice amongst people with your
hybrid interests and skills. These workshops will offer the opportunity:
. To meet and work with other people engaged in the same pursuit
as you;
. To reflect on what you do, share your insights and package them
for wider circulation;
. To consider future directions and explore the social and
technical challenges these might raise;
. To contribute to the store of knowledge and tools that exist
about how to support people trying to improve their corner of the world;
. To choose the topics that the series of workshops will address,
in consultation with other initial workshop attendees.

The first workshop takes as its theme '' Designing the Techniques and
Tools that Shape the Future - Social and Technical Challenges '', and will
focus upon the main issues with working to support communities or
organisations concerned to effect change, either in the voluntary,
political or not-for-profit arena. As mentioned, subsequent workshops
will take their cue from the outcome of this initial meeting and we will
also be building an online project space and multi-media resource
repository together, so that we develop an online community of practice,
and make available the best of our knowledge, skills and tools.

We have money to pay expenses and a limited budget to cover your absence
from work if you wish to attend this series and contribute.

The first event will be scheduled for May 15/16th 2007, with further
workshops following every two-three months till the end of 2008. There
will be six in all, and each will be held over two days (starting late
and finishing early to permit travel). It is hoped that most people will
be able to attend several of the series - further dates will be provided
in May, for September onwards.

If you are working, however informally, in this area (what we have
called 'technology and social action'), if you can bring some experience
to share and if you find the sound of these events interesting, we would
like to hear from you. Please contact Catherine, by email at:
C.M.Parkinson@lboro.ac.uk.

About PRADSA

The "Practical Design for Social Action" project's goal is to develop
and extend the capability of social action organisations to creatively
design new practices by appropriating and adapting ICTs?. There are three
strands to the project, of which the workshop series is one. The other
two are:
. To develop a new understanding of designing in social action
settings, grounded in detailed contextual studies of design in practice.
. To create a collection of practical resources to support the
work of practitioners (and others) including workshop materials and
easy-to-use (open-source) on-line community communications systems.

 

PRADSA is a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC) and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
(EPSRC) as part of its Designing for the 21st Century programme.

 

 

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The second event took place at Sheffield Hallam University on 20th and 21st June. It took forward three themes to galvanise the efforts of those involved in the cluster. These themes are

 

Following on from the work at Leeds and Sheffield, we held a further, 1-day, workshop on the theme of Evaluation & Organisational Learning Workshop at Loughborough University on Sept. 28th. 2005 Further details are in the full Call for Participation.

 

We held a workshop at the Paricipatory Design Conference, Trento, Italy, 1st August 2006, bringing together campaigners, practitioners and academics to examine the use of technology to promote emancipatory social change.

 

 

The project will promote further events and activities in future years to create a sustainable network of practice.

 

Mailing Lists

If you would like to join the project mailing list, you can join at:
https://www.email-lists.org/mailman/listinfo/esocialaction

 

We also have a list devoted to discussions around Free, libre, open-source software at:
https://www.email-lists.org/mailman/listinfo/ourfloss

 

 

This Wiki is very much under construction. Please help us construct it.

 

We want to use it to gather together experience relevant to the Technology and Social Action Research Cluster.

 

 

 

Here are some useful default pages installed along with the PmWiki software:

 

More information about PmWiki can be found at http://www.pmwiki.org/.