The most important part of my job is relationships. Because it's intercultural work, I have to begin as soon as possible to establish a rapport with everybody I possibly can. That may be true with any consultancy, but intercultural work makes it all the more critical.
A couple of weeks into the job, I was talking with Jens, the German technical volunteer. I was suggesting that he had the expertise to do some work on the web site after I left. "I don't give a damn about the web site," he said. "But you've spent so much time helping me," I said.
"The web site isn't my affair," he said. "This is relationships." Jens has this kind of quick insight into what's important in life that I warmed to immediately.
I was having dinner at the French Cultural Center when this very French-looking guy came in. As soon as he ordered a soda, I knew he wasn't French at all, but Kiwi. I made some comment, invited him to sit with me and we started talking. He does conservation work, but his job is people, working with villages to work with the fast-disappearing forests. He was interested in the computing that can be done these days without electricity or even a telephone line. He wanted me to send him the links and info I have about that, but the next day, he was "slammed at work and leaving for the forest..." and while I've made myself a note, I'm much more likely to jump through hoops for Jens or Javier than I am for someone who didn't see an opportunity to create a relationship.
Vutha, the site coordinator, is the Main Man when it comes to the job I had to do and I needed to get past the reservations he might have had about how my work could change his life. It COULD change his life...so I needed to show him that working together, we might actually address his concerns rather than having some kind of tornado of change descend on him from outside.
I am a naturally curious person, and I've found that mostly people enjoy telling me about their work, especially if all the powers that be approve of the time "wasted" just jawing. So Vutha and I walked through his typical day with the system, starting with a tour of the web site itself, which is in Khmer so it's totally Greek to me. To my ignorant eyes, Khmer doesn't even look like it has distinct letters. They're all just squiggles that look nearly identical to me. I took fast and furious notes on everything.
Other relationship building activities: Bring in my small photo album with photos of my house, family, vehicles and pets and pass it around the office. Take photos of all the people I work with, at the same time learning their names with the faces in pictures. I like posting the office photos on my blog, too. They get a kick out of seeing themselves on the internet and my supporters back in the West get a glimpse into my work here.
Vutha showed me the laborious and frustrating glitch that has him hand-formatting, cutting and pasting and then RE-cutting and pasting every story he uses on the site. He agreed to make me a list of ALL the problems he had with the system, and then delivered the report to my email box while I was in Angkor Wat, soaking up the awesome beauty of the ancient Hindu temples there. When I got that message, I knew Vutha and I were working on the same team.
I've got a lot to learn about computer systems, though, which is one reason I'm not a high-priced consultant, yet. I sent word out to all my email lists that I had this knotty little problem. I described it as best I could, and hoped that someone would have time to let me pick his or her brain. I did get some responses, and a couple of them were helpful, in a limited way.
There's no substitute, though, for internet research, pure and simple. I was searching one forum, where lots of novices ask extremely elemental questions, and one of the veterans replied simply, "Google knows."
It really is incredible how very much Google DOES know. Is it my English major background that gives me that magic keyword touch when it comes to Google searches? Maybe the "totally useless degree" comes in handy now and then.Wherever the talent came from, I'm tickled pink to use it all day long. Point me at a problem that needs to be researched around the WORLD, and I'm ON it.
The Community Information Web Portal had some delicious complexities. On the internet, I found a report on migrations from Microsoft-land to Open Source Utopia in general, a kind of primer of how to think about the problem. I found very specific advice both at Microsoft and MySQL, the open source database that runs behind a lot of web pages.
When you are thinking of moving house, you are immediately thrown into comparing...room sizes, will the furniture you've got all fit into their counterpart rooms? Ceiling heights. Door widths--will the stuff even get through the doors? Will we have to go in through the upper story windows? Do we need rugs or is the new place carpeted? Do we need a new vacuum cleaner or will the old broom do the job?
Moving database systems is the same kind of deal, only we're looking at datatypes and field sizes, we're looking at php and asp. Still, the question is fundamental: How do we get there from here?
Both jobs require a scenario, and the more complex the move, the more detailed the scenario. One scenario might be: Call U-Hall. Throw stuff in truck. Drive. But the CIC Web Portal, as it were, lived in a high rise downtown and we were proposing to move it to a hexagonal dome in a suburb, and switch vehicles to an electric car at the same time.
Then I had a major breakthrough. I found a report--no, a whole file folder-- written by a previous consultant on the same project. He'd had six months and a contract with USAID and The Asia Foundation. And bless him, a serious case of too-many-word-itits. Every jot and tittle was documented, right down to his micro-management of the priority of the topics to be covered on the site. He'd done some good work, and left me lots of evidence for why and how things got to where they are now.
What we're dealing with is a really cool idea that has had its day in the fickle world of international funding, and hasn't had the seemingly unrelated skill to get more funding. "Community-based" is one of those fundable buzzwords, and this idea was putting computer centers in the hinterlands so that the population could get information and become more adept at public debate, civil society and... ultimately...democracy. The web site was the link between the sources of information--the news media, but also government agencies and nongovernmental organizations--and the folks in the field.
The funding provided an air-conditioned office (where, let me tell you, more gets done), a contract with a web designer, a web master, money for promotion, training for the staff, typists and an editor. They've still got some of the typists and the editor, but the webmaster is on a low-budget retainer to solve critical maintenance problems only, and the air-conditioning has given way to floor fans. Some of the centers in the provinces had to close. Others limp along with the old computers, but with little in the way of technical support.
When I suggested that to solve the fonts problem between finicky old Microsoft typefaces and the new, international standards Unicode, we could simply install Linux on all the computers in the 22 districts, people just looked at me and guffawed. The Linux operating system would support the new Unicode. Installing it is not that hard. But there's no money to do it, even if it would make everyone's system faster, more stable, less susceptible to viruses and open source.
The final part of my job was investigating Drupal, one of many content management systems out there. Waiting for the perfect system to emerge from the crowd was not going to work. I'd been hearing about Drupal for some time on my discussion boards. It's open source and modular, so you can take the central core and plug things into it.
"I'll have one of those, one of these, and oh, give me three in different flavors of THAT!"
Jens, who's already built one of Open Forum's web sites in Drupal, spent a long afternoon walking me through the basic concepts of Drupal. Then I went to their web site and read most of their documentation. Then Jens and I installed a version on the home computer so I could play with it, and I took a whole day to fool around, making things, using the ideas from the CIC Portal and seeing if it would be possible to re-create the site in Drupal without losing some of its finest features...and without losing its coordinator, Vutha, in the process. That was one of the most pleasurable days on this job, just goofing around and...hey, it's my job!
Relationship building, research and play--that's what I do, and that's what the Community Information Web Portal got for the exhorbitant fees I charged. Getting paid to hang out with people and learn. It's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it!
