Laurence, I am confuse! You said my picture should be attached to my profile - that you can see displayed. And you raise concern on few other areas. I really don't want to miss this opportunity of being a member. What do you want me to do precisely?

How great is this picture I have not seen? Wow!

Dear Laurence,

Thank you for having me on the site. I am in the third row, 2nd from Right next to the Tall, Elegant, White haired lady - Ms.Ena Singh who happens to be our Assistant Representative at UNFPA India.

Thats our whole team from UNFPA India office.

I will update my profile picture very soon.

Looking forward to share shortly.

Regards

Vandana

prénom Louis , c'est mieux et c'est 'tu' ...Ceci dit je découvre le site .J'ai été en contact sur terrain avec JL Lamboray en 1978-1979 ,à Kisantu.Il était medecin cooperation belge et moi prof volontaire ATG au Congo ..Très bon souvenirs et surtout très bon joueur de tennis ... (moi ;nul)...

hello laurence, thank you for welcoming me and for reading my blog. It's my very first blog, you see, and I'm inspired by your comment. Thanks. Let's keep connected

Bonjour Laurence,
lol so we swapped. You get a guy from Amsterdam, I got a lady from Binche...
M.

Dear Laurence,
I wanna say thank's 4 ur comment and i'm so glad 2 b ur friend...
By The Way can u speak in bahasa...?

Best Regards from me 2 u and all there...
c u

Just looked at some of your photos. As we say here in the Caribbean - you wicked behind a camera, man! Nuff respect.

Bernice

I really missed being there, Laurence. I plan to be at this site more often too. I have uploaded my photo at last. You're right, a face makes the connection keener.

All the best!
Bernice.

Dear Laurence,
Thank you very much, first of all for accepting me on this big Team of AIDS Competence approach. As your advise of changing the name to individual, i will do it.
Iam sorry, my English is not so good so dont mention my writing error.

Kind regards,
Tereza.

Thanks Laurence...will do...actually searching for my photo!!!

Hi Laurence
Thanks for your comment. I had never heard of Ning or AIDS competence and chanced upon them while doing a bit of research on Wikipedia. Must say its a great effort, and it fits in completely with what I have felt about the money/medicine/technology response to AIDS.

Here in India I find a lot of money spent on AIDS awareness but I wonder how much of it impacts the target communities (there are some exceptions of course). Local community involvement in AIDS appears rather sporadic, more so because of the social barriers vis-a-vis those suffering from AIDS.

As for our hospital, we have purchased the land and the basic work such as the construction of the boundary, obtaining necessary permissions, etc is in progress. We are so grateful to one of our volunteers from Spain, Javier Pinto Sanz, an architect, who provided us with the plans and drawings for the hospital free of cost. I am in the process of creating a New Light Community on Ning, and hope to see you there.
Thanks
Sunil

Keep up the good work dear.
It's never i vain whatever you sow in life must come back to you in a magnified way.

Hi Laurence...
tnx for adding me,,but i need ur little help..
emmmh.. can you send me a press release from IKF by email..
its very urgent coz i need for make a report soon..
terimakasih banyak..
reply me asap..
muahhh...

Thanks Laurence, My picture dispeared would not with the stories. I will ask permission from the stories owner to it later. Again thanks for your giving opportunity for me to be a member.

best regards

Thank you Laurence,
I'm glad you are the first that said "Welcome" to me in Ning, hhe :)
Now, i'm in Pontianak, my home, and ready to continue what i learned in IKF last week, unforgettable moment!!
Yeah, i already saw the photos, nice photo when we are in Phayau, really family, big family of AIDS Competence, cheers!!

Fantastique Laurence ! Quelle energie ? Quelle chance de t'avoir toi et Gaston
qui nous gratifient de si merveilleux recits ! Bravo et surtout continuez à partager pour nous aider à apprendre et toujours apprendre davantage
A bientot
Antoine

hi Laurence
thanks for adding me.
hows ur work,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,!

Hi Laurence,

You asked me about self-measurement of change in communities. I've done some work around this with a company called Gaiasoft (www.gaiasoft.com), who have developed an online scorecard framework. I've used this both in our work around Millennium Development Goal #5 with the Dutch 'Meshwork for Mother Care' (20 NGO's, pharmaceutical companies, the government, professional midwives and gynaecologists associations and a number of other partners), and with some work I did with the Dutch Ministry for Spatial Planning and the Environment. At the ministry, we used it to develop a scorecard that helps (self-)measure and monitor cultural change in teams throughout the ministry. With the MDG5 Meshwork, we're looking at developing a scorecard that helps us (self-)measure and monitor the progress of the Meshwork's different projects (depending on whether we get financing for those, which we'll hear in about a week). We may also develop a scorecard to look at the actual impact around MDG5, but that's further down the line.

The way this works is, you sit down with the team, department, community, or whatever level of scale you're working on, and you answer a number of questions:

1) What is the purpose of our work? What's our goal?

2) What's the envisoned result? What needs to happen or come into being for this to be seen as successful (by us and potentially other stakeholders)? Specify this as much as possible. Really ask yourself: when are we 'done'? What will have changed? You can even imagine yourself in the future and describe the situation from the present, which can be easier sometimes.

3) What are the enabling conditions that allow for this success to be realized? What needs to be in place? You can try looking back from the imagined future situation of the previous question and see what have been the most important factors, variables and conditions that have enabled the community to be successful. It can be very useful to use Ken Wilber's four quadrants to specify these enabling conditions in a more integral way (individual/collective and interior/exterior; find more info here: http://www.realize.nl/en/integral). Look at what is needed in each of these four quadrants for the community to be successful and to achieve the purpose. Contact me for more details on how to use these four quadrants in this way.

4) Cluster the enabling conditions and prioritize them so you end up with just a few (I would say max. 10 or so) key enablers toward success. Then ask yourself for each of them: What would it mean to really excel at this, to really do this very well, and how could you make this visible? For example, if 'trust between community members' is a key enabler for success (may be abstract, but serves the purpose of this example), you ask yourself: What would it mean to truly trust each other in this community? What would that look like? How would things be different? How could we make this visible? How could we measure trust? This is where you start defining indicators. Make them as simple as possible. You won't necessarily have to be able to measure these in a quantitative way. You can easily use maturity models to do it, which would mean you'd take define 3 or 5 levels of maturity for the indicator, with level 1 describing the situation in which for example trust is almost non-existent, and with level 5 describing the 'excellent' situation that you know will enable the community to be successful. In between you define a number of situations and states that range from little trust to high trust. Make sure the descriptions of each of these maturity levels are (as much as possible) specific, relevant to the local context, positively formulated (don't say what is NOT there, say what IS there), objective (in the sense that you can come to some level of agreement of where on the scale you're at), acceptable (by the stakeholders) and practical. Theoretically this could be as simple as saying 1) low, 2) medium and 3) high, but the more specific and descriptive you can define these levels of maturity, the more powerful it is and the easier it is to come to some level of agreement on where you're at.

Using these indicators (e.g. trust) and the 3 or 5 defined levels of maturity (which are generally different for each indicator), you construct the scorecard. You could do this in Excel, on a flipchart, or in some other way. We’ve used the online scorecard provided by Gaiasoft, which I can tell you a little more about if you’re interested. Although Gaiasoft is a commercial party, I know the CEO well and he’s extremely committed to social change and community development, particularly in Africa.

Once you’ve got the scorecard, the real works begins. The self-measurement process consists of a regular ‘heartbeat’ of conversations. In an organization, this is often integrated into existing weekly, two-weekly or monthly meetings. On a regular basis, you take the scorecard and one or more or all of the indicators, and ask yourself: how are we doing on this/these indicator(s)? When the maturity levels of the different indicators have been defined well (what does ‘level 2 trust’ look like?), this really supports and speeds up the conversation. It can be powerful to have this conversation be facilitated by someone, so space is created for deep listening and real dialogue. The point of the whole thing, in the end, is not so much to all agree that we’re at level 4 on the indicator of trust, but the conversation itself, which raises the consciousness of those involved and helps them see (the importance of) trust (or whatever other indicators you define).

The power of this approach is:
- The more you define the envisioned situation, the more you create ‘pull’ toward that situation.
- In defining the situation, you ask the stakeholders themselves what is important to them, what is needed to get there, and what the process of getting there looks like (in the steps defined as maturity levels). You don’t impose a generic measurement framework top-down, but develop a custom scorecard bottom-up.
- Regular, deep conversation about the indicators is in and of itself a transformational process, because it has an emancipatory, awareness-raising effect. Also, using the scorecard, you’ll always have a visual reminder of where you’re at.

As a final remark, I talked to Gaston about an online social platform which we’re working with. This platform is called Gaiaspace. The reason I’m bringing it up, is that this platform, called Gaiaspace, was also developed by Gaiasoft and as such is integrated with the scorecard. In addition to the many of the functions of the Ning you’re currently using, it therefore has the measurement and monitoring functionality built in, as well as something you could call ‘deep profiles’, which are individual profiles that dig a little deeper that just ‘where do you live’ or ‘how old are you’, but get at underlying values and motivations. On the basis of these profiles, the platform is able to link and connect people with other people, initiatives and conversations in an emergent way (which means you don’t have to actively search for people you may want to get in touch with - the platform will bring them to you). This might be interesting for you as well. It’s still in the relatively early stages of development, but we’re also using this for our MDG5 project. While it’s not free, you may still be interested in checking it out? If so, let me know and I can connect you to someone who can give you a demo of Gaiaspace (using Skype and Gotomeeting).

That was quite a long comment. Let me know what questions you have, or what you want to know more about. And I hope you have a beautiful day!