Snippet from the Opening Session of the Workshop

We started our 10-4:30 session Day 1 of the workshop by listening to each participant describe their library, its computing facilities, access to the Internet, and other assorted details.

It was fascinating as a pattern emerged early on.

“We have x computers [where x = anywhere from 2-90] and y% of x [where y = 5-50] are connected to the Internet.”

It was only the exceptional library, such as the one serving the ‘young university’ educating oil industry workers and managers, where y = 100. Many of the librarians explained the fees for Internet access were simply beyond their means. One library did have Soros money; a rarity for these libraries, it also had wireless.

Once we had gone all around and talked as a group about my observations and questions, we were ready for a break. The group was large, but very attentive, forthcoming and patient. After the break for coffee and tea, I took a shot at fully introducing myself and the goals for the workshop. Before I knew it we, we had a great teaching moment or two once they had their first look at the wiki we created for the consortium. The questions were flying and they were really good ones! We laughed and joked, though this picture doesn’t actually capture that sequence. This must have been when I was droning on.

The Web 2.0 introduction went really well. They knew little or nothing about much of what we discussed before today. Tomorrow they will be designing and editing pages on their new wiki in a computer lab. Olga asked if this would replace her existing web page. I said, by no means, mistakenly assuming the new wiki might be seen as an impostion and a presumptuous one at that. She was, however, disappointed with my answer. Maintaing the consortium web site alone was too much for her; she wanted to give it up and move to a bottom-up managed wiki for the entire consortium. This is when we turned to the issues of wiki governance, and all the related concerns they so aptly and energetically raised.

Early on, I learned that my translator Amir was extremely talented at relating my intonation and inflections. He really cared about conveying the message in an effective way; you could tell it was more than just work. Exhausted, at the 4:30 close, he commented to me that his parents, grandparents and beyond were all teachers, so he know how tiring it was. I had to aree, I was wiped out. It took me about 15 second to fall asleep in a chair in the Director’s office at 4:31.

Early on, Amir very carefully whispered translations as we listened to the opening introductions.