Information sharing, scheduling, and awareness in community gardening collaboration

Community gardens are places where people, as a collaborative group, grow food for themselves and for others. There is a lack of studies in HCI regarding collaboration in community gardens and considering technologies to support such collaborations. This paper reports on a detailed study of collaboration in community gardens in Greater Vancouver, Canada. The goal of our study is to uncover the unique nature of such collaborative acts. As one might expect, we found considerable differences between community gardening collaboration and workplace collaboration. The contribution is the articulation of key considerations for designing technologies for community gardening collaboration. These include design considerations like volunteerism, competences and inclusion, synchronicity, and telepresence as unique aspects of community collaboration in community garden. We also articulate the complexities of community gardening collaboration, which raise ibues like control, shared language, and collective ownership that exist more as conditions within which to design than "problems" to solve through technologies

The Art of Community: Creativity at the Crossroads of Immigrant Cultures and Social Services

These are case studies that give credance to the belief that respect for one's own artistic traditions is critical to the acculturation process. The essays contained here offer clear and shining examples of how paying attention to culture and creativity can build self-confidence, nurture a productive and valuable citizenry, and even save a life. Through these stories, we begin to see that encouraging the practice of cultural traditions and participation in arts activities will help newcomers spread their wings and fly

Sociality and Skill Sharing in the Garden

Gardening is an activity that involves a number of dimensions of increasing interest to HCI and CSCW researchers, including recreation, sustainability, and engagement with nature. This paper considers the garden setting in order to understand the role that collaborative and social computing technologies might play for practitioners engaging in outdoor skilled activities. We conducted participant observations with nine experienced gardeners aged 22-71 years. Through this process, we find that gardeners continuously configure their environments to accommodate their preferences for sociality. They share embodied skills and help others attune to sensory information in person, but also influence learning through the features in their garden that are observed by others. This paper provides an understanding of sociality in the garden, highlights skill sharing as a key domain for design in this space, and contributes design considerations for collaborative technologies in outdoor settings.Comment: 13 page

Innovating for skills enhancement in agricultural sciences in Africa: The centrality of field attachment programs

Africa remains an intensely agrarian continent, with two-thirds of its people directly or indirectly deriving their livelihood from agriculture. Higher agricultural education has thus emphasised production of graduates with the requisite skills to drive agricultural development. Despite these efforts, too few graduates in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) have the employable skills necessary to transition to the labour market. A similar situation is observable among agricultural science graduates, who are vital to serving rural smallholder farmers. Most Colleges of Agriculture in Africa offer field attachment internships in agriculture and related fields but they are largely designed to cater for undergraduate students and are not part of the training programs at graduate level. To ameliorate this gap, the Regional Universities Forum for Capacity Building in Agriculture (RUFORUM), a network of 55 member universities in SSA, designed and rolled out an innovative field attachment program award (FAPA), launched in 2010, to serve graduate students. The FAPA is competitively based and designed to encourage students to follow through with the dissemination of their research and to enable them to link more closely with the communities and agencies working in the geographical area where the research was undertaken.During the period 2010–2015, five grant cycles were successfully implemented and 114 graduate students from 17 countries in SSA awarded. This article discusses the lessons learned during this period by examining two key areas: (1) the application process and implementation of the awards; and (2) the reported outcomes and challenges for grantees. Establishing the award has generated key technical and implementation lessons that the network and individual universities have been able to use to improve and institutionalise processes. Grantees have reported gaining a range of cross-cutting skills in personal mastery, initiative leadership and innovativeness, proactivity, flexibility, communication, analytical capacity, teamwork, networking and advocacy, and technical capacity, particularly in engaging with smallholder farmers. They have also noted significant challenges, in particular around establishing productive and sustainable engagement with smallholder farmers. These outcomes have influenced curricular reviews by member universities, with particular emphasis on these skills sets. Keywords: graduate employability, internships, sub-Saharan Africa, university

Greening Libraries for a Sustainable Future: A Comparative Analysis of Green and Traditional Library Practices

This paper explores the future of libraries by comparing traditional library practices with emerging green library practices. With an increasing emphasis on environmental sustainability, libraries are evolving to incorporate more eco-friendly practices to reduce their ecological footprint. This paper examines the definition of green libraries and highlights their significance in promoting sustainability and environmental awareness within communities. The paper reviews the differences between traditional libraries and green libraries, including the adoption of renewable energy sources, integration of natural features, use of smart building technologies, workshops and education programs, collaborations with community organizations, and advocacy for sustainable policies and initiatives. By analyzing these differences, the paper provides a comparative analysis of green libraries and traditional libraries. The paper presents case studies of successful green libraries in Indian contexts to showcase their achievements and impact. It also discusses the potential benefits of green libraries, such as improved energy efficiency, reduced waste, increased community engagement, and enhanced reputation. This paper highlights the growing trend towards green libraries and their potential to transform the future of libraries. By comparing traditional and green library practices, it offers insights and implications for library professionals, policymakers, and researchers, emphasizing the need for further research and innovation in this evolving field

Europeana communication bug: which intervention strategy for a better cooperation with creative industry?

Although Europeana as well as many GLAMs are very engaged - beside the main mission, i.e. spreading cultural heritage knowledge- in developing new strategies in order to make digital contents reusable for creative industry, these efforts have been successful just only in sporadic cases. A significant know how deficits in communication often compromises expected outcomes and impact. Indeed, what prevails is an idea of communication like an enhancement “instrument” intended on the one hand in purely economic (development) sense, on the other hand as a way for increasing and spreading knowledge. The main reference model is more or less as follows: digital objects are to be captured and/or transformed by digital technologies into sellable goods to put into circulation. Nevertheless, this approach risks neglecting the real nature of communication, and more in detail the one of digital heritage where it is strategic not so much producing objects and goods as taking part into sharing environments creation (media) by engaged communities, small or large they may be. The environments act as meeting and interchange point, and consequently as driving force of enhancing. Only in a complex context of network interaction on line accessible digital heritage contents become a strategic resource for creating environments in which their re/mediation can occur – provided that credible strategies exist, shared by stakeholders and users. This paper particularly describes a case study including proposals for an effective connection among Europeana, GLAMs and Creative Industry in the framework of Food and Drink digital heritage enhancement and promotion. Experimental experiences as the one described in this paper anyway confirm the relevance of up-to-date policies based on an adequate communication concept, on solid partnerships with enterprise and association networks, on collaborative on line environments, on effective availability at least for most of contents by increasing free licensing, and finally on grassroots content implementation involving prosumers audience, even if filtered by GLAMs

Grow your own attachment: gardening as a co-occupation to optimize the health and well-being of parents and their children with physical disabilities

Grow Your Own Attachment: Gardening as a Co-Occupation to Optimize the Health and Well-Being of Parents and their Children with Physical Disabilities is a program created by an occupational therapist to address the problem of a disrupted parent-child attachment. It is a theory-guided and evidence-based program specifically designed for implementation at Claremont Medical Therapy Unit (MTU), a subunit of Los Angeles County, California Children’s Services (CCS). The Attachment Theory informs a child’s development, growth, and maturity as a result of a secure or insecure attachment with a parent; while the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) informs the relationship between health behaviors and an individual’s beliefs, values, and perspectives of such (Bretherton, 2014; Rimer et al., 2005). After a thorough literature review, the health and wellness of parents and their children with physical disabilities were further explored; as well as the meaningful time spent between the parent and child, known as co-occupations. Gardening was found to facilitate physical and psychological health-promoting behaviors. It served as a means to foster stress management and coping skills through the engagement and appreciation of occupations (Eriksson et al., 2011; Greenleaf et al., 2014; Joyce & Warren, 2016, Swank & Shin, 2015a). It also improved children’s exposure, education, recognition, and trailing of fruits and vegetables (Hutchinson et al., 2015; Morgan et al., 2010; Parmer et al., 2009; Spears-Lanoix et al., 2015). Grow Your Own Attachment uses gardening as a means to repair the relationship between parents and their children with physical disabilities by addressing: 1) the child’s nutritional health, self-esteem, and self-efficacy through active participation and engagement in the occupation of gardening, 2) the parent’s coping skills and stress management through the restorative and health-promoting occupation of gardening, and 3) the quality of the time spent between the parent and child through shared experiences in the meaningful co-occupation of gardening. The program evaluation is a one-group quasi-experimental fixed effects research design with the use of qualitative and quantitative data (Newcomer, Hatry, & Wholey, 2015). Open-ended survey questions, semi-structured interviews, child’s weight and body mass index, Likert scales, and parent and child reports of time spent during co-occupations will be tracked pre-, during, and one-month, three-months, six-months, and one-year post-intervention. For the specific site, program and dissemination costs are minimal as the budget is embedded into the pre-existing program. The outcomes will be used to reflect upon current service delivery to enhance family-centered care, utilization of resources, and advocacy and promotion of occupational therapy and CCS

Organic Outreach for Academic Libraries: Collaborating with Student Affairs Units to Reach College Students

The college campus is a complex ecosystem of services and resources. Academic library outreach efforts offered in partnership with Student Affairs units can support the whole student as they navigate this ecosystem. This presentation offers one librarian\u27s experience collaborating with Student Affairs units such as health, counseling, and recreation centers. A mental model for this work that draws on the metaphor of organic gardening helps frame the remarks and reflections

A study of experience sharing in community engagement

Community engagement is crucial in building positive relationships within the members of a community.Community gardening can be a means of community engagement through providing opportunities for social interaction and greater community cohesions.Community engagement will take place when the community gardeners contribute something which is beneficial and visible to the communities. In creating successful community engagement, there is a need of experience sharing among community gardeners.Community gardening can be a means of providing opportunities for social interaction, greater community cohesion and community engagement.This paper aims to look into the real practices of experience sharing for community engagement in the context of community gardening in Malaysia.A comparative study was conducted by looking into two types of community. The finding shows the experience sharing helps the community to be engaged.In fact, community engaged more with the advancement of information technology