Gordon McKinlay has been thinking about how we are going to work with the ‘Glow Groups’, small online communities in the national intranet. Jimmy Wales, at this week’s Online Information Conference, also gets us thinking about building communities from his experience as Founder of Wikipedia, and maybe offers some ideas as to how these Glow Groups can become popular and ‘must-haves’ for learners and teachers alike.

There are 280m speakers of Hindi yet only around 14,000 articles written in the language on Wikipedia. On a trip to an Indian slum, where parents have to create their own schools in the absence of any government services, Jimmy had thought perhaps it would be useful for more articles to be published in the local language, Hindi. However, the parents, who pay handsomely and go through hardship to send their children there, are desperate for their children to learn English, as this is the way out of the slum.

On the other hand, the ‘father’ of the Swahili version of Wikipedia saw it as an opportunity to start documenting the oral history of his country and culture. Until that point stories were deemed not to “be true” unless they were written down. He was able to hand that power to the people by kicking off the home-language Wikipedia.

And although the net is exploding, it remains a huge challenge to get the most basic connections into areas like this, and the challenge of hardware, poverty and connectivity remain the basics if we are ever to achieve freedom of information to all.

This is why Jimmy has traveled to these places, trying to find nodes, or ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’, who can work day in and day out to create content, build community, take ownership of their pages. These five or ten people then go out, thinking about their own connections to find nodes, and help build expertise in editing and managing Wikipedia, and achieving something for the good of everyone in their communities.

Is there something in there for how we can build Glow together, and find ‘nodes’ within our current face-to-face communities who can connect and inspire others to create amazing things online?

Categories: Glow, Languages, Social Media
Tags: "onlineinformationconference07", onlineinformation07, onlineinformation2007