Pri's blog

To start off, here is something I wrote for IFRTD manual on networked research, that IFRTD is publishing with support from SDC. For more information check out their website http://www.ifrtd.org/ or contact Kate Czuczman, kate.czuczman@ifrtd.org The inspiration for initiating ‘networked research’ as we have thought fit to ‘brand’ the practice, came from a philosophy that is inclusive and democratic and seeks to breakdown existing hierarchies of knowledge production. Networked research recognises the value of the knowledge and experience of people with real life experiences and combines that knowledge with the skills of formally trained researchers. In this way it is able to bring fresh perspectives, practically relevant knowledge from different locations and the rigour of analysis into the research process, enriching both researchers and practitioners. Doing ‘networked research’ is not easy: it requires leaps of faith from all those involved and can easily be hijacked by individuals an...

Welcome to Pri's foray into the 21st century blogging community. This is a serious venture. It's not a blog about my personal life. It's a blog about my ideas about my work and the state of the world. Ideas that have been informed through a 30 year period of working in development; I've realised, possibly too late, that when you spend much of your career 'doing things' and also 'facilitating' so that things get done, you have little time to write - and it seems like writing and publishing is the key to ownership and attribution of ideas. So if you don't write, your ideas reach the public domain via other peoples' writings (the lazy option) or that they don't reach there at all (or like Chinese whispers reach there in a rather distorted form). It's the latter situation that this blog will try to mitigate. Maybe when I get to that stage where I am no longer doing or facilitating, then I could collate the thoughts in this blog into some ...