Information School News

On 3rd July 2019, the Information School, University of Sheffield, hosted a one-day workshop that started a conversation between Global North and Global South practitioners, researchers and academics about open scholarship in a global context, with Africa as a focus for that discussion. We were also lucky enough to be hosting (courtesy University of Sheffield GCRF QR funding) participants in this debate from Rwanda, a country in the East and Central African region, which has an interesting socio-political context deriving from a checkered colonial past, internal conflict and genocide and language policies implemented to craft a modern political identity. In introducing the debate, the two convenors of the workshop, Pamela Abbott and Andrew Cox, both senior lecturers in the Information school, set out some markers as to why they were interested in this topic. For Pamela, her background as an ICT4D researcher working in African contexts with librarian communities of practice, and her own...

In April this year, I attended the 10 th World Summit of the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva, Switzerland. as part of the Faculty of Social Sciences' Global Leadership Initiative (GLI). I represented the Information School as a Policy Analyst in a team of eight students led by Dr. Suay Ozkula (Sociological Studies) and Dr. Paul Reilly (Information School). WSIS is a United Nations (UN) multi-stakeholder global forum that promotes the implementation of the WSIS Action Lines for advancing UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). With a focus on “ICTs for development”, the Summit identified global trends and new partnerships to help achieve the SDGs. In addition to attending various sessions during the week-long Summit, we worked on blogs and policy briefs on our topics of interest, which were later published on Global Policy Opinion . The team also had an opportunity to deliver our own panel during the event. ICTs in the University Environment – 7 Case Studies saw ea...