What's Going on in Community Media

What's Going On in Community Media shines a spotlight on media practices that increase citizen participation in media production, governance, and policy. The report summarizes the findings of a nationwide scan of effective and emerging community media practices conducted by the Benton Foundation in collaboration with the Community Media and Technology Program of the University of Massachusetts, Boston. The scan includes an analysis of trends and emerging practices; comparative research; an online survey of community media practitioners; one-on-one interviews with practitioners, funders and policy makers; and the information gleaned from a series of roundtable discussions with community media practitioners in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis/St. Paul, and Portland, Oregon

Early Learning Innovation Fund Evaluation Final Report

This is a formative evaluation of the Hewlett Foundation's Early Learning Innovation Fund that began in 2011 as part of the Quality Education in Developing Countries (QEDC) initiative.  The Fund has four overarching objectives, which are to: promote promising approaches to improve children's learning; strengthen the capacity of organizations implementing those approaches; strengthen those organizations' networks and ownership; and grow 20 percent of implementing organizations into significant players in the education sector. The Fund's original design was to create a "pipeline" of innovative approaches to improve learning outcomes, with the assumption that donors and partners would adopt the most successful ones. A defining feature of the Fund was that it delivered assistance through two intermediary support organizations (ISOs), rather than providing funds directly to implementing organizations. Through an open solicitation process, the Hewlett Foundation selected Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica to manage the Fund. Firelight Foundation, based in California, was founded in 1999 with a mission to channel resources to community-based organizations (CBOs) working to improve the lives of vulnerable children and families in Africa. It supports 12 implementing organizations in Tanzania for the Fund. TrustAfrica, based in Dakar, Senegal, is a convener that seeks to strengthen African-led initiatives addressing some of the continent's most difficult challenges. The Fund was its first experience working specifically with early learning and childhood development organizations. Under the Fund, it supported 16 such organizations: one in Mali and five each in Senegal, Uganda and Kenya. At the end of 2014, the Hewlett Foundation commissioned Management Systems International (MSI) to conduct a mid-term evaluation assessing the implementation of the Fund exploring the extent to which it achieved intended outcomes and any factors that had limited or enabled its achievements. It analyzed the support that the ISOs provided to their implementing organizations, with specific focus on monitoring and evaluation (M&E). The evaluation included an audit of the implementing organizations' M&E systems and a review of the feasibility of compiling data collected to support an impact evaluation. Finally, the Foundation and the ISOs hoped that this evaluation would reveal the most promising innovations and inform planning for Phase II of the Fund. The evaluation findings sought to inform the Hewlett Foundation and other donors interested in supporting intermediary grant-makers, early learning innovations and the expansion of innovations. TrustAfrica and Firelight Foundation provided input to the evaluation's scope of work. Mid-term evaluation reports for each ISO provided findings about their management of the Fund's Phase I and recommendations for Phase II. This final evaluation report will inform donors, ISOs and other implementing organizations about the best approaches to support promising early learning innovations and their expansion. The full report outlines findings common across both ISOs' experience and includes recommendations in four key areas: adequate time; appropriate capacity building; advocacy and scaling up; and evaluating and documenting innovations. Overall, both Firelight Foundation and TrustAfrica supported a number of effective innovations working through committed and largely competent implementing organizations. The program's open-ended nature avoided being prescriptive in its approach, but based on the lessons learned in this evaluation and the broader literature, the Hewlett Foundation and other donors could have offered more guidance to ISOs to avoid the need to continually relearn some lessons. For example, over the evaluation period, it became increasingly evident that the current context demands more focused advance planning to measure impact on beneficiaries and other stakeholders and a more concrete approach to promoting and resourcing potential scale-up. The main findings from the evaluation and recommendations are summarized here

Governance Structure, Perception, and Innovation in Credence Food Transactions: The Role of Food Community Networks

 Promoting transactions of more sustainable-oriented foods can be (socially and privately) complex and costly. New institutional economics (NIE) explains these dynamics by analyzing the choice of the "most cost-economizing" governance structure to carry out a transaction where credence attributes are involved. The way different governance structures can influence the change of consumers and producers perceptions and preferences for credence foods is completely neglected. On the other hand behavioral economics underlines the role of status quo bias and framing in this type of decision making process. We use new institutional and behavioural economics arguments to conceptualize the emerging of a new governance structure in the domain of credence food transactions which we defined as food community network (FCN)

Managing strategic change at the regional level: Regional networks of economic development and industry clusters

Regional Development Networks of private and public organisations is a contemporary phenomenon that is reshaping strategies of local development by introducing new agents and more dynamism and flexibility in the decision making process. This approach reflects new trends in corporate and business development, balancing the tensions produced by competition and collaboration. Regions as networks incubators are regions with specific characteristics enhancing an emergent and evolving movement of networking between organisations working for the regional development. The purpose of this paper is to present the network scenario of two regions from Spain and Australia that exemplify the emergence and evolution of networks' incubator and the relevance to their regional development. Both regions are facing economic restructuring as a result of regional spatial competition on the global market. These regions could be characterised as learning regions and a definition of the network incubator will be provided. The paper will argue that regional networks are a development tool, which could act as a catalyst in stimulating economic revitalisation. It is possible to engineer this tool, stimulating the conditions of the region as a network incubator. Key Words: regions of networks' incubators, learning regions, local development

Web-Based Training Program for New Custom Decoration Apparel Franchisees

Effective franchise training is essential in the expansion of a franchised business. With advances in internet connections, web applications and multimedia capabilities, training for new and existing franchisees can now take place online in the form of web-based e-learning. In addition to potentially increasing the overall effectiveness of the franchisee training, web-based training also eliminates some of the challenges of traditional, face-to-face franchise training like travel expenses, time, and the availability of human resources. The purpose of this project was to develop an asynchronous web-based training program for new or potential franchisees in the custom decorated apparel industry. The ADDIE model was used to guide the development of the training program and curriculum, which was then evaluated and critiqued by a panel of subject matter experts

The Future of Social Justice in Britain: A New Mission for the Community Legal Service

This paper explores the disjuncture in the New Labour Government between the largest reform in fifty years of the nation's Legal Aid system and the concurrent pursuit of progressive anti-poverty, social inclusion, community regeneration, and human rights social policies. The failure of the newly created Community Legal Service (CLS) to incorporate these policies reveals the contradictions in the Third Way's effort to reconcile private market, managerial efficiencies with the goals of advancing social justice. This failure to adopt a social justice mission for the reformed legal aid and advice system, it is argued, shows the limited vision of these reforms and defines an unfinished agenda for a second term Labour Government. The paper suggests what would constitute a social justice mission for the CLS.legal aid, social justice, Community Legal Services

How do entrepreneurs learn and engage in an online community-of-practice? A case study approach

This paper investigates the ways in which entrepreneurs use communities of practice (CoPs) to express themselves, using narrative theory and rhetorical analysis, to gain insight into an electronic social network medium, namely, YoungEntrepreneur.com. In particular, the study focuses on CoPs themes, including why entrepreneurs engage in CoPs, what role the moderators and resident entrepreneurs can play in managing online CoPs, on communication rituals of the knowledge sharing through interactivity, and on ‘how to develop an intervention’ to maintain and stimulate entrepreneurs for engaging in an online community. Findings reveal that the topic title plays a major role in attracting people. Successful topics with successful conclusions (in terms of the original query that was answered) will not necessarily get high responses and vice versa. It is observed that the domain expert does not play a big role in keeping the discussion going. Finally, the study also discovered that entrepreneurs like to communicate in a story telling genre. A comprehensive set of engagement measurement tools are introduced to effectively measure the engagement in a virtual CoP, along with a classification to define and categorise discourse of messages in terms of content and context, which allow practitioners to understand the effectiveness of a social networking site

Enhanced broadband access as a solution to the social and economic problems of the rural digital divide

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