ARTICLE

myNetWorks - how the work will continue

By Andreas Schoenborn-Schaller, Switzerland

myNetWorks: Looking back to its goals

Community processes and courses will fertilize and complement each other. New courses will be generated from within the community. Courses in turn will generate resources which will be made available to the whole community after the course. Institutions in developed as well as developing countries will work out course modules and moderate the courses.

"myNetWorks" is guided by an "open access" spirit and will be made available to all interested organizations. Users will be able to rate contributions to "myNetWorks" which will help to assess their value for target groups. In the long run, a small fee will be raised for the membership - for courses a tuition will be have to be paid. Both membership fee and tuition will depend on the world region.

What has happened so far

The web environment in its current prototype state is freely available for testing or for simply browsing through at http://www.mynetworks.org . First time visitors have to register as members and need to give some basic personal data - a selection of these data will later on be available to all other members of the myNetWorks environment. With this policy we want to facilitate the development of personal relationships between members and maintain a spirit of trustworthyness.

In principle myNetWorks can be used as it is now for ad hoc chats or group discussions by all registered members. However, the web environment has only about 30% of the functionalities we envision for the future. Also, we estimate that it takes 500 to 1000 members in order to make the environment work in a self perpetuating manner. This critical number of members has not been reached yet.

Phase 1 was also important for building up a working project partnership between IEES and various partners from all over the world. For example, the development of the web environment will be done mainly by the Amsterdam based Network University (TNU). Future eWorkshops will be developed by numerous partner organizations, e.g by the Kalyani University (India), by SKAT (Switzerland), by Christchurch University (New Zealand) and by WASTE (The Netherlands), just to name a few.

What's up next (2003-2005)

The most important aspect for myNetWorks which will decide about success or failure of the project is community development. In phase 2 we will try to build up and nurture the "learning community" by a variety of measures, e.g. more courses on topics of interest to the community, monthly chats with interesting people from within the community etc.

We also want to fully develop the functionalities of myNetWorks. A few examples:

• the "Personal Space" is supposed to become a fully functional web organizer for all links, contacts, courses and resources found within myNetWorks, which it isn't in its current state.
• in the "Exchange Space" everyone should be able to open new discussion strings and groups, make them private or public and invite people of their own choice to it. This space should become something like a working room for Ecological Engineers. There one crucial need that you - our readers - have expressed in a survey last summer, the "quick and easy access to information", should find its home
• in the "Resources Space" a rating and search facilities will support myNetWorks members to find their way through the plenty of documents and links
• in the "Courses Space" the functionality to easily create and administer new courses still has to be implemented
• last but not least, all four spaces will have to be integrated with each other carefully

We are planning to conduct 12 more courses and workshops between now and 2005, three of which will take place in 2003. The courses will be announced on this website in due time. The following topics are foreseen:

• Strategic and integrated Water-Management
• Sustainable Wastewater Management
• Eco-Sanitation
• Sustainable Aquaculture Systems
• Soil and Water Conservation
• Sustainable building practices
• Solid Waste Management
• Gender in Sustainable Land (Water) Management
• Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) in Rural Projects.
• Autodidactic Learning for Sustainability
• Direct incentives in Sustainable Land Management Projects
• Impact Monitoring and Assessment

About a business model

The basic idea of providing open access to as many as possible (with a threshold as low as possible) will continue to be very important to us. HYet, myNetWorks will need to generate some financial return in order to become financially sustainable itself.

This return will probably be generated in the following ways:

• course fees
• paid services (e.g. if myNetWorks is used as knowledge management tool of partner organizations)
• membership fees
• sponsoring

Details about the financing issue haven't been decided upon. It is clear that this issue has to be dealt with in a way that it doesn't impair the growth of the community.