Interning at Context, Int'l Cooperation

To make the most of my time studying in the Netherlands, I've taken the liberty to contact local development organizations to volunteer, hoping to offer some contribution while gaining more experience regarding the field of region/international development.

Started out as a volunteer at Oxfam Novib since November 2013 after a TEDx event in Delft, I worked with other senior staff for E-motive project, a consortium of organizations with trajectories put forth by Oxfam Novib. The project puts strong emphasis on the collaboration between organizations from the Global North and those from the Global South. The main ideology is that development is no longer happening thanks to the paternalistic approach offered by only developed countries, but rather, development now is more possible with the conjoint cooperation and local knowledge available from the developing countries as well. 

http://youtu.be/CcKvnFmGac8

My time at Oxfam Novib, although very eye-opening, was not really packed with new learning experiences as I had expected. Perhaps partly it was because Oxfam Novib and E-motive are big organization and big project with a lot of levels, hierarchies and a huge army of developmental workers, leaving little space for an undergraduate student like me to contribute. Also, due to the beginning phase of numerous projects within E-motive being implemented, ambiguity regarding their directions is pretty at play, together with my lack of practical experience regarding international development, I could not offer much when it comes to practical and in-depth field-related tasks. Staff are busy with their work as well as family, it was difficult to find a mentor who would be willing to take my hand and walk me through my baby steps. 

However, volunteering at Oxfam Novib provides me with other practical skills such as networking, communicating and conducting meetings, also an opportunity to further penetrate the Dutch development community. 

One thing led to another, at one of the networking event of E-motive in late January, I had the opportunity to meet with Fons v.d. Velden, director of Context, Int'l Cooperation. At first, he appeared to be a seemingly humble old man yet respectably possessing ample knowledge of developmental work, theoretically yet practically. Through a brief conversation about social entrepreneurship, my attention was captured. He seemed to get what was going on in my mind, regarding my confusion being exposed to different ideologies. At that time I was utterly confused after a while associating with the libertarian ideologies even though I was gradually disconnected. Fons kindly encouraged my confusion as a good sign of an intellect being open-minded to different viewpoints and opinions. He briefly told me his stories back when he was still working at the university in Nijmegen. His stories took me by my heart. At that moment, I wished I could further meet with this respectful man and learn more from him. He gave me his business card and I made it a thing to connect with him after the event.

Although it took us a little less than 3 months, quite a few phone calls and meetings after, I finally started my internship at Context by the end of April and will carry on for the coming 4 months until the end of August. Fons agreed to be my primary mentor at the firm, pretty much to my delight at the prospect of having someone willing to providing some guidance as well as insights into the developmental field. It has been nearly a month ever since and I have taken gradual steps to learn more on and along the job.

Context, in a nutshell, is a small social enterprise with Monitor&Evaluation (M&E) as its main focus while also acts as a research and knowledge center offering advice and guidance for clients and fellow organizations in the community. It is fair to say that learning and cooperation is at the heart of the firm's main objectives. Even though the firm is small and close-knitted, it has respectable reputation within the Dutch development community and other organizations often come to Context to seek for advice and facilitation. 

At Context, I have the privilege to learn one of the advanced tools for assessing social impacts - the Social Returns on Investment (SROI) as a part of Context's main job regarding Evaluation. At this point, I am involved in the current evaluation project that Context takes up for the Fair, Green and Global - one of those numerous consortiums of collaboration in the Netherlands and elsewhere in the world.

This blog is thus taken up into a new direction, with the purpose of documenting my learnings and discoveries while at Context. I cannot hide my excitement and anticipation regarding my time at Context. The work is expected to be challenging, requiring a lot of reading, research and reflecting, but I am thrilled at the opportunity of gaining hands-on experiences, and what is better? - With Fons as my mentor. 

Let's see how the journey goes. 'Til next post! :)

Online Privacy: Who Cares?

In the study of Young & Quan-Haase, a research combined with qualitative and quantitative measure was conducted to examine the privacy concerns of university students - the ones who are the most active in using SNS. The reflected outcome is the desire to protect their social privacy rather than their institutional privacy. It means that they care more about what people in their different social circles know and make sense of their personal information than how other institutions and organizations would make use of their information for different purposes. Even though they are more likely to modify their privacy settings on a frequent basis, most of their personal information such as birth dates, sexual orientation, occupations, etc. are all asked to be listed online.

It is noteworthy that these social network sites along with other online services are accessible for the general population for free while they make a large amount of money through advertising and providing information of users for third party firms and corporations for profits. This is mentioned in Miller (2011)’s “Everyone’s Watching” chapter in his book, thus posing the question of an increasingly surveilled society where not only the government but other kinds of institutions and organizations are also gaining surprising information about the general population.


In this light, the practice of maintain a somewhat shallow level of privacy seems to have more connection and overlap with the attempt of SNS users’ construction and protection of their social identities. This is coming from the suggestion or the real-life experience of certain Facebook users that privacy is only a concern once they or someone they know have experienced a negative consequence as a result of their disclosures and lax privacy setting, leading to their social identities being affected.

As members of a community, it is important for people to know that their online actions can have impact. Additionally, most people, especially young students, are pursuing future careers, and higher education is their launch pad. Social media posts can show up in search engine queries. Companies are no longer just looking at your resume. They want to know what you are doing (and saying) online too. Now, that’s more of the punitive side of things. Digital identity is about much more than just worrying about its effects on future employment or conduct violations. Students or people with a fluent grasp of social media can accelerate their learning, develop meaningful connections with peers, and grow their professional network. What we do online can affect our face-to-face interactions…and vice versa.

That is to say, institutional privacy seems to be a far-fetched concern to most of the people who are aware of its existence. Perhaps is not yet big enough of an immediate concern for people but it should not be neglected. Although the clear line between what information to be put online (and what not to) cannot be drawn, netizens should still be cautious and think twice about what they choose to disclose on the online realm.

Digital Equality: One Laptop Per Child Project

The article written by Lenhart and Horrigan (2008) was an analysis of social, demographic and psychological determinants of those on the spectrum of digital access. There is the detailed and well-drawn spectrum to demonstrate that the “digital divide” is not a dichotomy and as binary as conventionally perceived (some is either an Internet user or is not).

By conducting surveys and interviews, the spectrum of users and nonusers came out with the following actors in the order of increasing connectedness: the Truly Unconnected, the Net Evaders, the Net Dropouts, the Intermittent Users, the Home Broadband Users.

There are multiple reasons for those who are not actively participating and engaging in the Internet realm. They range from the immediate condition such as no one in the community or within the social network of the participants use the Internet to the more structural socio-economical reason that I’d like draw more attention to. It is the perceived structural unequal distribution of resources. as cited by Van Dijk (2005). This inequality causes unequal access to digital technologies, which causes unequal participation in society. This creates the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources.

As an enthusiastic advocate for action-oriented engagement of citizens to create positive social impacts, I was quite interested in the foundation “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) initiated in 2006 and maintained by Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media Lab. With all the ups and downs, initial success and challenging bumps along the way, the project has quietly come down to a rest. That said, it is worth a look into this noble and ground-breaking attempt to bridge the digital access gap.


The idea behind OLPC is the noble aim to build inexpensive laptops, $100 per laptop at that, which would be sold to governments in developing countries to be distribute to the children to assist them in their education. As education is one of the most effective ways to break out of the vicious circle of unequal distribution of resources, for ones would get more informed and better equipped with knowledge to utilize and acquire resources available. However, after 8 years of running the project, the final products came out with their own designed hardwares and softwares but would be sold at the cost of $200 per laptop.

During that time, much of the developing world has undergone their own mobile computing revolution. Every year, more and more low-cost manufactured devices are introduced in the market.

“There's the Intel Classmates PC, for example (with similar hardware, but more expensive software than its OLPC cousin); there's the Worldreader project (it delivers villages a library full of e-books via Kindles); and there's the now-infamous Aakash tablet (which was sold in India for $35 but with its reliability and functionality very much in question).

Arguably more significant than the competition OLPC faces from these low-cost tablets and netbooks: 95% of the world's population now owns a cellphone, by some estimates (See Wikipedia's list of mobile phone penetration, broken down by country). Of course, a clamshell phone is hardly the same as a laptop. One has SMS; the other, a command line. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of the cellphone makes it clear that the value proposition of the OLPC device needs to be more than just "access" and "connectivity."

Although the digital divides happening on a local and global level are very much happening, the effects and extends of their impacts are very much far-fetched, requiring thorough measurement the existence of these projects and attempts to bridge the gap is worth honoring.

Couchsurfing: Virtual Community and Community Development

The assigned article for this week by Carter (2005) focuses on Cybercity as a social platform where a whole of virtual community was developed online, people are free to come and interact within this online social space. The author observes how members interact with one another and what are the underlying values that allow and enable members to become so engaged with the community.

The notion of virtual community includes a group of people who tend to build relationships with one another via computer-mediated communication, regardless of geographical distances (Rheingold, 1991)

In brief, a virtual community is perceived as a cyberspace system in which people with shared goals and needs are engaged regardless of where people are located.

As a traveler and an individual who has a significantly offline and present life, the only virtual and online community that I actually am a part of is Couchsurfing. By definition, it is an online platform for travelers all over the world to get in contact with another, it also encourages communications between prospective travellers and potential hosts at destinations. The primary purpose is travelers finding free accommodation offered by the hosts while exchanging culture, language, stories and experiences. That has entailed with many other by-products such as friendships, meeting with local people, a new genuine way of traveling, etc.

Different from Cybercity, Couchsurfing's online platform is only the initial stage of social interactions whereas most of the main interactions are moved offline and take place there. However, in order for members to actually meet offline, a significant part of identity, self-presentation and trust has to be involved. Members who wish to meet with fellow Couchsurfers have to carefully go through their profiles with pictures, details of preferences, personal philosophies and a system of validation through references left by those who have interacted with them before. Thus Couchsurfing is said to have both a virtual and real element of community, we must look at how virtual and real communities are defined.

Relating to one of the main findings in Carter (2005)’s articles, participants of the Cybercity virtual community find it valuable and important that: You get to know each other from the inner person and out [online] – in real life you know people from outside and later inside. So in that way the two are composite. And knowing the inner person first – you see that looks aren’t that important.

This is also especially true for the community of Couchsurfing, it has evolved to be more than just free accommodation, in order for the surfers and hosts to have a pleasant experience, both parties have the initiative to look for and carefully scan the profiles of one another to ensure that the other parties are compatible and have at least some potential of connection when interacting. Thus, looks and appearances don’t play a big factor in connecting people

And while interacting, topics such as knowledge, traveling experiences, cultural and language exchange often come up. It also takes a certain level of trust, kindness and openness for most of people to actually join the Couchsurfing community (opting out those who treat the site as a dating platform or any other different purposes). Thus it can be an opportunity to empower individuals and groups of people by providing them with the social skills, life experiences that they can harness to effectively change their own community (in this specific regards, the hospitality and kindness towards others), fitting in with the concept of “community development”.

Specifically, empirical evidence based on a virtual community (CouchSurfing.com) demonstrates that the opportunity to de-velop relationships between potential travellers and locals has gradually increased.

Community development should be understood as being more than economic empowerment: it is the recognition of the solidarity of communities to act in order to better their circumstances, whether the communities are real or virtual, and whether their circumstances find them in the global north or the global south. A CSer perhaps put it best: "Couchsurfing helps to eliminate the "us" vs "them" in the world. It creates a world of "we"." An overwhelming majority of respondents said that couchsurfing.org had “changed their lives.” It is no small coincidence that these are the words used to describe this virtual travel community. Couchsurfing.org is an intriguing project that could have important implications for the future of travel and cross-cultural exchange.

Social Media and Revolution: A Theoretical Framework in application

Through the examples of the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement, Skinner (2011) has drawn out the theoretical frameworks to explain the increasingly significant role of the Internet and social media facilitating revolutionary social movements. Specifically, three Information Studies paradigms - the physical metaphor, cognitive metaphor and social informatics - were introduced as alternative and complementary perspectives in assisting future researchers with their topics.

While physical paradigm considers information as a physical object which can be recorded in texts. This metaphor assumes that information exists independently of human consciousness in an objective reality and that information exists separately in this realm. Whereas the cognitive paradigm is known to come out of criticism of the physical paradigm, arguing that information is situational and depending on humans. Information does not play any role of informing people without being interpreted. Then comes along the social informatics in which it tries to response and fill up the missing parts in the earlier paradigms where it goes a step further to draw the connection between humans to see how they we interact with one another, not just seeing how we interact with information.

In this week's blog post, basing on the theoretical frameworks and its critics mentioned above, I attempt to put them into practice by examining more examples of other kinds of social movement.

The first example is the Invisible Children's "KONY 2012" campaign. The strongly provocative images and messages in the 30-minute documentary supported and spread through the social media platforms. It is noteworthy that our social networking profiles or the information that we choose to post or share is rarely neutral even if we are reporting a live events. It is almost always a subjective reflection or interpretation of our personalities. Thus what we share or post depends on this "identity management" and what makes "KONY 2012" an initial viral social movement is the fact that it is aimed at "culture makers" - prominent philanthropists, celebrities and policy makers. KONY 2012 received the virtual world's support by being tweeted and mentioned worldwide via Twitter and Facebook, by the followers of those big figures. Such seemingly positive feedback turned into a cyclical social media flood, allowing KONY 2012 to go viral. Ellen DeGeneres, Oprah Winfrey or Ryan Seacrest and other celebrities received over 36000 tweets on the topic of KONY 2012 and Invisible Children.

Following this example, we can see the importance of the news source and how it targets big names to spread the words, just relying on the credibility rather than the content itself alone - thus fits in with the social informatics paradigm and cognitive paradigm. The fact that the campaign only existed only in the virtual world and died down after receiving no concrete or tangible action support and received a lot of criticisms afterwards proves that its content does play a factor in allowing a movement to flourish or not. And this means that no matter how big and dazzling the campaigners want their campaign to be, information and content do independently exist for the audience to choose - though it might take a longer time for the case of KONY 2012.

The three paradigms each has its own attributes and setbacks, however, in order to have a holistic picture of any given phenomenon, it helps to employ all of them complementarily for reference and better understanding.
However, it helps to understand that this piece also attempts to apply the theoretical framework to make sense of the real life events. But the notion of social media facilitating social movements and revolutions is still in in the progress of development and there is whether or not, a certain event is a revolution in its true meaning is still up to question, depending on the examining standpoint - its purpose, its characteristics and its outcome, to name a few.

Social Media and Political Communication: A Perfect Revolution?

Social media platforms have been expanding rapidly over the past decade, gaining a significant part of people's every day lives in different aspects. From business to education, social media has transformed the way industries target the public.

In an article written by Jackson and Lilleker (2011), the change in the political domain was examined with the exampleof Twitter as a social media platform in political communication. The main focus falls on British MPs and their use for self-promotion and constituency service.

Elected representatives now have new platforms and ways to communicate with their constituents on a wider scale with timely manners, allowing quick feedbacks and more interactions from both sides. There has been an increase in the use of social media platform such as Twitter by political representatives.

However, there are some downsides to social media. Apart from the misuse or ineffective use of social media by politicians in their attempts to reach and appeal to their constituents as mentioned in the article, the elected representatives can also be harassed by citizens through these very platforms, due to the their open and democratic characteristics. Last year, Connecticut State Senator Beth Dye was reported to take down her Twitter account because of the negative comments bombarding her way after introducing a debatable piece of gun legislation. And this is not uncommon among elected representatives with their experiment of employing social media as a new form of communication.

Thus, despite and fast growth of social media in the political domain as a means of communication and the results that it brings about, there should always be caution and strategies that politicians need to pay attention to when employing them. Not only this is to show the respect to the constituents, but this is also to protect themselves.

Through the micro-scope: Globalization and new media technology as empowering tools for Vietnamese civil society

Vietnam, among other developing nations, is trying to find its stance and stability in economic and political development. As the wave of democratization is spreading around the world, Vietnam is one of those few countries left with a highly authoritarian regime where the state and government hold great power and have virtually complete impact on decision-making process. In other word, since the regain of its independence in 1945, the civil society has been having a less than a say and a influential position in the political participation. However, it is the case of globalization and new media technology that the table is turning.

The impact of globalization on the social structure has been briefly pointed out by Castells (2008) in his article The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance:


"Globalization is the process that constitutes a social system with the capacity to work as a unit on a planetary scale in real or chosen time. Capacity refers to technological capacity, institutional capacity, and organizational capacity. New information and communication technologies, including rapid long-distance transportation and computer networks, allow global networks to selectively connect anyone and anything throughout the world. Institutional capacity refers to deregulation, liberalization, and privatization of the rules and procedures used by a nation-state to keep control over the activities within its territory."

More attention is to be drawn to the notion of technological capacity and institutional capacity. As the worldwide wave of globalization hits Vietnam, the civil society finds themselves with a powerful tool that open them to an ever connected and open knowledge resources. It is due to the fact that, right at citizens' fingertips, information can be easily searched and looked up. Even with the state's control, the fact that it is getting more accessible for citizens to travel and go abroad, getting more access to an increasing globalized pool of information puts the state's power in checks and balances, whether the state wants it or not. Thus, together with the advent of new information and communication technologies, Vietnamese civil society finds themselves a more liberating new public sphere where they have more negotiating power and exercise their abilities right up to what is described as:


“[...] a network for communicating information and points of view” (Habermas 1996, 360). The public sphere is an essential component of sociopolitical organization because it is the space where people come together as citizens and articulate their autonomous views to influence the political institutions of society. "

Despite the control and surveillance of the state with the internet censoring or the imprisonment of several bloggers, Vietnamese civil society has been struggling at its best capability to exercise its basic rights and utilize the powerful weapon at hand to express themselves. This can be seen to belong to the fourth type of expression of global civil society: "the movement of public opinion, made up of turbulences of information in a diversified media system, and of the emergence of spontaneous, ad hoc mobilizations using horizontal, autonomous networks of communication." There have been more non-state actors providing information from different perspectives through online platform and uncensored news stations, and followed is an increasing population of followers. Even with the more integrated force of global civil society, this has been seen as an empowerment and significant shift for Vietnamese civil society to gain a better negotiating tool for their own rights and with regard to the state, bringing more political and social change, especially the democratization process. Even though the transformation is not as rapid and intense as that which has been happening in Egypt, there is definitely a gradual process taking place . However, due to the the lack of space and content limit, this aspect will not be explored further.


This is all attributed to the new public sphere given by the force of globalization and the advancement of the new information and communication technology. Information are getting more fluid, transparent and decentralized.


More information can be found here:  http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2013/10/11/vietnamese-civil-society-bringing-political-change/