No subject

the "developing countries. A limited for sure, though not so common gesture.
It is true that our, like most international scholarly circles, is dominated by
"the North".
Bringing "the South" in them is not necessarily the best solution to its
isolation. This more often than not result in an alignment upon agendas and
practices which are only remotely relevant, to be polite. Patterns of
communication are also not the same within the respective communities and result
in another form of domination by those who consider self-assertiveness as a
positive asset.
It is far better for colleagues in the South to orgniaze themselves and bbuild
their communities. What AoIR should do is try and network with them and keep its
door open for them to participate if and when they wish.
Examples of such "Southern" efforts are http://www.osiris.sn  in Senegal or
http://funredes.org/mistica for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since the
French language domain was subject of another question one may also mention
http://www.africanti.org.
BTW I don't know of any group, real or virtual, in France with a web presence,
though there are of course a number of individual Departments and research
center focusing on ICTS and Internet.
Another issue is language. Within Mistica for instance, there has been a
domination of Spanish which deterred Portugues, English and French speakers in
the region from active participation.
The above is NOT to say that Internet researchers in the North should not
themselves pay more attention to issues in the South and the North-South
inbalance. On the contrary!

Michel


Saturday, February 09, 2002, 6:01:02 PM, Lachlan Brown wrote:
alrao> Message: 3
alrao> From: "Lachlan Brown" <lachlan at london.com>
alrao> To: air-l at aoir.org
alrao> Date: Fri, 08 Feb 2002 16:38:45 -0500
alrao> Subject: [Air-l] Of Burnished Gold

snip
alrao> Instead of alienating West Africa, and 
alrao> those who share an affinity with West 
alrao> Africa, or otherwise share an interest 
alrao> in breaking stereotypes wherever they 
alrao> occur and however they are articulated, 
alrao> perhaps you could address the issue of 
alrao> social inclusion seriously. A way to do 
alrao> this is to be reflexive and open about 
alrao> membership. 

snip

alrao> What social literacies are represented 
alrao> by the Association of Internet Researchers?