We will meet in Room 307 for this class and not Room 304. We needed a slightly larger room as we are inviting students, faculty and others from the UNC-CH community. Dr. Lawrence will speak at 10:45 after our break. Until that time we will continue our conversations based on readings you have done for past classes or for this one.

Dr. Lawrence comes to us courtesy of Sambhavi Cheemalapati; his presentation is co-sponsored by ILSSA. You will shortly see a few fliers around the school with information about Dr. Lawrence and his presentation but I'll provide a little preview here. Dr. Lawrence is, by profession, a research psychologist specializing in human development and public policy. He has a strong interest in electronic networking for professional development. Dr. Lawrence has worked for more than ten years for the United Nations, much of that time as a senior officer and advisor with the United Nations Development Programme. He has also consulted for other UN agencies, the World Bank and regional banks. He is currently a principal with a consulting firm called Manage for Results. Prior to his work at the United Nations, he worked here in the Triangle for the Research Triangle Institute in its Center for Population and Policy Studies and served as a faculty research associate at North Carolina State University. Dr. Lawrence has published regularly and widely. I will provide some citations to some of his works for your reading preparation below.

His home page -- http://home.att.net/~jeslawrence/jeslawrencehomepage.htm -- provides a flavor of his outside enthiasiasms as well -- "familyman, accomplished fiddler, mountain clumber, explorer, sailboarder, and mountainbiker!" He writes that his talk will be in two parts. The first will provide an introduction to the United Nations system, specifically human development issues and the emerging role of UNDP as a knowledge broker with some of the ways it sets up its knowledge management process, focusing on electronic systems, such as SURFs (sub-regional resource facilities). The second part will focus on one key social issue in southern Africa (HIV/AIDS) and will illustrate how Dr. Lawrence's group helped countries use "electronic communication and virtual networking around key information sources in participatory dialogue to influence public policy." I believe this will be a informative and interesting session.

In preparation for this class, please visit the Eastern Africa SURF and the Sustainable Livelihoods (SL) approach to the UN Development Programme. The latter site provides links to work done toward poverty eradication based on the work of Paulo Freire, Robert Chambers and others (more possible reading), employment and sustainable livelihood, civil society and participation, gender, HIV/AIDS and health. Two of Dr. Lawwrence' papers on related topics might be of interest to you:

""Adult Education and Jobs, or Sustainable Livelihoods?" UNESCO Panel, Hamburg, Germany, July 12, 1997

"Basic Education for Sustainable Livelihoods: the Right questions?" Pearl River, NY conference, Nov. 19-21, 1997.

Additional documents by colleagues are also available at documents on sustainable livelihoods, UNDP. Another set of publications on HIV/AIDS issues is available at http://www.undp.org/hiv/publications/index.htm.

In addition, Dr. Lawrence contributed to a book I'm using in the online section of INLS 131 I'm teaching this semester. The book is Virtual Teams; Reaching Across Space, Time and Organizations with Technology by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps. Wiley, 1997. In this book (p.174) they refer to the UNDP as "perhaps the most electronically sophisticated group at the global organization." The authors go on to describe John Lawrence's work in preparing the 1995 Fourth World Congress on Women in Beijing. He is referred to in the book as a "cyber explorer" (p.238).

Another chapter by John Lawrence and Janice Brodman, entitled "Linking Communities to Global Policymaking: A New Electronic Window on the United Nations," appears in a recent book, Community Informatics; Enabling Comunities with Information and Communication Technologies editied by Michael Gurstein (Hershey, PA: Idea Group Pub., 2000). We have this book in the SILS Library collection. I will copy the chapter and put it in the 204 pam box and probably add the book to our reserve books (once I have had more of a chance to examine it).

The session with Maggie Hite on the World Library Partnership involving us in the game, PAMOJO, has been shifted to the following week -- more on that and some preparatory reading for it in the next Getting Ready.

Well, "Read, read, and then read some more!".

Revised 3/23/2001.