austraLasia #2042

A quiet revolution is taking place - be aware!

ROME: 29th January 2008 --  With this edition of austraLasia there is a double offer - one is very practical, the other points to something that perhaps Salesians are not fully aware of but could well take into account, because it can profoundly affect the way we deal with young people.

First the practical:
- Regardless of the computer operating system you are using (for most it will be Windows, for some Mac or Linux), there is a Free and Open Source Software item which could make a significant difference to one aspect of your work - organising things.  For a year now, you have been aware of the existence of SDL (Salesian Digital Library).  What you may be less aware of is that the software behind it is free, uncomplicated, powerful, and revolutionary in the way it manages digital objects.  It is called Greenstone and it works equally well on Windows, Mac or Linux.  It introduces a quiet revolution - which is in keeping with a much wider revolution - in the way people keep track of digital things.  Today's libraries (or offices, or computer hard disks,  or...) are less likely to function on hierarchical classification systems and far more likely to function on the basis of 'tagging', or 'keywords' (think of social tagging such as in del.icio.us, or technorati key words or Google search). It all depends on the descriptions of a digital object (metadata) you give an item, and in fact the system forces you to think in these terms, which is a great gift! The point is this - a province archive, a community or personal library, or notes or anything whatsoever, so long as it is digital or represented digitally, could be organised for personal use, and could be shared on an intranet if so desired, or internet as is SDL, with very little effort.  SDL proves that it can be done at the macro level.  I am now suggesting that individuals or provinces or communities could well benefit from this approach on a micro level.  If you are interested, download Greenstone at http://www.greenstone.org/download and try it out.  If you want any help at all on its use, then you also know who to contact!

Now the theoretical:
    austraLasia is in direct and regular contact with one of the prominent names in today's digital world. Michel Bauwens an early internet 'founder' in Belgium. A former entrepreneur now turned non-profit, he lives with his family in Chiang Mai in Thailand, deeply involved in the philosophical implications of the peer-to-peer shift in society today (not so much the p2p technology itself, but its meaning for us, for education, for life...). He is the founder of the P2P Foundation (Go to http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Main_Page ).
    I find it interesting that Michel says that one of his objectives for exploring the P2P approach is that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of ‘cognitive capitalism’; P2P is a language which every ‘digital youngster’ can understand. However, ‘peer to peer theory’ addresses itself not just to the network-enabled and to knowledge workers, but to the whole of civil society, and to whoever agrees that the core of decision-making should be located in civil society, and not in the market or in the state.
    Michel has been invited by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences to present his thinking and its implications for the Church and world in May this year.  And in view of the Rector Major's 2008 Strenna on the Preventive System, on insertion of its insights into the discourse of today's world, especially the discourse on human rights, I suspect that that the kind of thinking we find in P2P is going to make a difference. Read up, for example, http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Education on education.
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 AustraLasia is an email service for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific.  It also functions as an agency for ANS based in Rome.  For queries please contact admin@bosconet.aust.com . Use Bosconet-wiki to be interactive. RSS feeds - just go to Bosconet, click on austraLasia 2008 in the sidebar. You will see the RSS orange icon in your browser address bar - add it from there.  Avail yourself of the Salesian Digital Library at at http://sdl.sdb.org

Title: australasia 2042
Subject and key words: SDB General Preventive system, P2P thinking
Date (year): 2008
ID: 2000-2099|2042