Seva Foundation

Seva Foundation Global Staff Information Networking Project

Background: Seva Foundation works in Southeast Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the United States, Mexico and Central America on health and development projects designed to combat poverty and injustice.

Seva has program offices and local staff in Nepal, Cambodia, Tibet, Guatemala, Mexico and program partners in India, Tanzania, Egypt and other countries. A main focus at the Seva Foundation is to build local staff and partner capacity to address health and development problems. One method for building capacity is to democratize the information sharing across Seva's staff and partner network. For several years, Seva staff has expressed a desire to communicate more regularly and share information over the internet, including program information, reports, photographs, draft publications, budgets, newsletters, grant proposals, etc. They would like to learn from each other’s programs and projects, lessons learned and new approaches to solving problems. In addition staff would like to provide feedback to each other on a regular basis, and work on joint projects, where a similar action research question is being explored in very different programs in two regional offices.
Students would be asked to research the following questions:
A) What are the specific technology and communications needs in each office and across the network? Which needs are common?

B) What are other international organizations doing to share information globally? What has and has not worked for them to date?

C) What are the available technologies that could allow Seva staff to network over the internet given local internet and infrastructure conditions? How can they share documents, photographs and write/talk to each other regularly?

D) What resources would be necessary to implement this project? What will it cost? Where might we apply for funding?

Project Description: Needs Assessment and recommendations for Seva’s international peer-to-peer community learning network.

Timeline: September-December 2007

Final Product: A well-developed proposal for an internet-based e-learning system along with a well-researched list of possible funders

Methods:

1. Interviews with Seva Foundation Staff in Berkeley regarding general needs and ideas
2. Creation of a needs assessment survey to be filled out by all Seva staff
3. Interviews with Seva Foundation consultants who have worked on technology in Seva’s global offices in the past.
4. Interaction with 8-10 global staff who will be present at global networking meetings at Seva (Oct 27^th – November 5th). Working with Seva Berkeley staff, students will present preliminary findings to Global staff based on survey. They may also conduct follow up interviews with Global staff as time permits.

*Contact Information

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* Seva Foundation – www.seva.org - (510) 845-7382

Project Contacts – Julie Rinard (jrinard@seva.org) and Carrie Libeu (clibeu@seva.org)