About

Gatnet.Net: Mission Statement

Here in summary are the reasons why The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative is supporting this project:

Our firm conviction that the goals of this outstanding international collaborative effort -- as first initiated in World Bank's research programme on "Mainstreaming gender into the transport sector"; and then in 2005 supported by the joint Gatnet Dialogue project instituted as a joint project in collaboration with the IFRTD, the US Dept of Transportation, the Transportation Research Board's Committee on Women's Issues in Transportation and with the active participation of an informal group of participants numbering about seventy in all over 2005 and to this date - is worthy of continuation and extension over at least the next several years, and most probably well beyond beyond.
Moreover, it is our view that these goals are deeply shared by out own long term attempts to contribute to sustainable development and social justice through the continuing efforts of The Commons: Open Society Sustainability Initiative, and particular our long term commitment to supporting the increased role of women in the discussion and decision process.
Our conclusion through our working experience with the original Gatnet dialogues over 2005, and in particular what we observed and learned as leaders of the ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) dialogue component, that there is
- Significant potential for better using and extending the use of these technologies by and for women in the field (despite the technical limitations that many field personnel experience as a result of low speed and occasionally high cost internet access); and
- The useful role that it can also play in improving the internal networking within the collaborating group that in our view is going to be most important if the reach of this program - measured both in terms of the number of participants world-wide and the effectiveness of their interactions.
Our belief that in a world in which the goals of sustainable development and social justice are even today getting far more rhetorical posturing than solid finance and policy support where it counts, we are, if we are to succeed, impelled to use every tool and trick that we can possibly command if we are to get this important agenda on the move in more places and with greater intensity. It is thus our view that the project needs to be organized from this point on along a broader set of principals than "simple sponsorship".
After long experience both directly with and as close observers of projects and programs aimed to social and economic development, we firmly believe that robust organizational approaches are called for. This may need a few words of explanation since it is, surprisingly, not a very well understood concept. If you look at the tens of thousands of development initiatives that have been launched over the last decades, you will observe a certain fragility, by which we mean that even the best of these programs often become, without wishing to, hostages of a small number of people and supporting groups. Thus, when they have the backing and the funds, things may roll along pretty well. But then sooner or later in almost all cases this funding support runs dry - and the project or program skids to an end. This is what we mean by fragility. (Indeed we think it is fair to note that at present the Gatnet program, once backed actively by the World Bank, is threatened by the fact that the original champions have apparently moved on to other things.)
There is, it must be noted, a certain robustness already in this structure. Thus, we have the IFRTD continuing its commitment, the support being given by the US TRB, and above all as a result of the personal involvement and active support of a number of the network members who are volunteering their time and skills to backing and facilitating the continuation of the program. It is further fair to count The Commons among these informal but hopefully not ineffectual supporting groups.
What this suggests to us is that what is needed to ensure the longer term solidity and continuation of the program is by no means to give up on the idea of funding as many parts of this effort as possible, but to use some of the 21st century tools that are shaping up as well. In particular we would support the idea of developing the future support and execution efforts through a variety of linking and coordination devices which break the old models of a given sponsor, place, executive team, defined mandate, etc. As we have seen this model is not a very good one given the depth and long term nature of the challenges which sustainability and social justice present.
Our proposed alternative model - which are this point is presented here only in broad conceptual terms - is to organize the next stages of the Gender, Equality and Transport program as a Self-Organizing Collaborative Network. This removes this important public interest project from under the wing of a single organization or sponsor and puts it into a wide open, collaborative/group work model in which different people and groups come in and participate and use in a variety of different ways. In conceptual terms, what it does is move up the scale from the idea of a "bound project" to something closer to a "movement".
The disadvantage of this approach are basically two: First it is unfamiliar to many people, who may not at first be comfortable in such a, to them, seemingly amorphous and uncertain open situation. Second: it requires new thinking and new tools - broadly along the lines of open source software development or, to point to a historic example of excellence, the Human Genome project.
That said the Gatnet project has some key advantages. First that it has managed already to develop a broader base of support than most development projects in the pipeline. But above all because it is addressing a problem area which a growing number of people and institutions are starting to understand requires more resources and more visible results. Finally the open group approach provides a way out of the institutional turf problems that often get in the way of good work, since it moves away from the concept of institutional "ownership" to that of open collaboration in which many different approaches are both needed and welcome.

Proposed next steps (For comment)

Against this background, here is our work proposal from The Commons for this collaborative venture for the first half of 2006:

To encourage the widest possible base of activity in this area as well as the search for sponsorship for all parts of this effort.
To recommend that the Dgroups Listserve be continued at the core of the email discussions component
To be further enhanced by an independent website and toolset that offers new competences and networking and communications capabilities (or perhaps even better more than one such site).
For our part we specifically set this working draft of our support site before you for critical inspection and comment (with the caveat as of 7 January that it is still in rough draft form and that further work is clearly needed.)
In addition we have developed a outline for a Gender, Equality and Transport Forum for further outreach, which you can now inspect at http://gatnet.blogspot.com/.
And we finally propose for now, further experimentation with using Skype's free phone and voice networking capabilities (bearing in mind the importance that they be able to serve well given the field constraints in many cases).

There you have the work plan for the coming months. We now invite you to have a look and to let us know what you think.