PortalSIDA - Spanish and Portugeuse information on HIV and AIDS

The International HIV/AIDS Alliance and AIDSPortal have formed a partnership to develop PortalSIDA, a Spanish language knowledge sharing and networking website for the HIV community in Latin America.

PortalSIDA is the virtual component of a Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) Knowledge Management Centre. It offers Latin American and the Caribbean organisations a place to access and share information about their work on HIV and AIDS and network with each other.

Through PortalSIDA you can:

* Electronically share, organise and access Spanish language information, including policy, best practice, programme experiences, events, and jobs

* Connect people and organisations involved in national responses to HIV and AIDS across Latin America and the spanish speaking caribbean

* Consult and provide feedback on key policy or programmatic topics

PortalSIDA is linked to the AIDSPortal, a global initiative that aims to facilitate greater knowledge sharing and networking among organisations involved in the response to HIV and AIDS. The AIDSPortal initiative develops or adapts simple tools that can support country-led networking and knowledge sharing. This includes the English language tools on AIDSPortal (www.aidsportal.org) and the Spanish language tools ones in PortalSIDA (www.portalsida.org).

The AIDSPortal initiative also links PortalSIDA with other regional initiatives (currently in Southern and Eastern Africa) in order to promote global knowledge sharing, facilitate south-south linkages and enable HIV professionals to identify emerging trends across regions. PortalSIDA will be launched at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico in August 2008.

If your organisation has information in Spanish you wish to share through the PortalSIDA, please send it to info@portalsida.org or login and upload it after the launch.

What AIDSPortal users are looking for: results from our survey

In March 2008, AIDSPortal users from 26 countries completed a basic survey on how AIDSPortal can better meet users’ knowledge management needs. 19% respondents were from the UK, 19% from Kenya, 10% from South Africa and 6% from India.

Overall, AIDSPortal users are looking to AIDSPortal for the following key services:

• Knowing ‘who is doing what’ at a country level
• Training and professional development opportunities, particularly around online information sharing
• Opportunities to exchange information, especially content that can be used in the community

With this focus, it makes sense that users are looking for ways to make AIDSPortal easy to use and easily adaptable to their particular needs. This includes being able to personalise AIDSPortal, receive alerts and being able to add information from AIDSPortal to other websites.

While some users would find it useful to receive information by cell phone or fixed phone (25%), 75% of users find receiving an email with downloadable information very important or essential to their work.

Most users feel that services on AIDSPortal should be free (90%) but the services that users would pay for include skills training and being able to place advertisements. The majority of users felt that advertising and sponsored links to useful sites could appear on AIDSPortal (80%) and that AIDSPortal can run surveys and polls in order to fund itself (92%).

AIDSPortal will use these results to guide the technical development of the ‘Next Generation AIDSPortal.’ AIDSPortal is committed to exploring and combining innovative technologies to support people-driven knowledge exchange and strengthened responses to HIV and AIDS around the world.

New networking features

AIDSPortal is always trying to make it easier for people to use the Internet to more effectively connect with people and resources. A popular feature of the website is the global contacts directory, however anyone who has worked on a contact directory knows how hard it is to keep up to date.

As a member driven site, AIDSPortal has introduced a number of new features that let members not only update their own profiles, but also use other online applications to help others learn about their work.

Login to AIDSPortal and click on 'edit profile' in your toolkit to:

- Edit your contact information (including your user name)
- Change your password
- Write a bit about what you are currently working on or interested in
- Request a new password (if you've forgotten yours)

We've also added some new features to your profile that improve integration with some other popular services:

Skype - Add your skype name to your profile to let people see when you are online and easily call you. One click on the button opens up skype and places the call.


Flickr - If you use flickr to publish your photos, you can now add a flickr feed to your AIDSPortal profile. Just go to your photos on flickr and look for the option to 'subscribe to your photos' as in the image below. Click on 'latest' and then cut and paste the url into the flickr box on your AIDSPortal profile.You should now see some thumbnails of your latest photos displayed on your profile. They link back to your flickr page and offer a great way to let people know what you've been up to.

RSS feeds - Do you produce an RSS feed from your own website? Want to share it with other AIDSPortal members? Read on, now is your chance.

If you have no idea what an RSS feed is don't worry. We plan another posting soon to explain more about RSS, what it stands for and most importantly how you can create RSS feeds and use those created by others.

It's now easy to add an RSS feed to your AIDSPortal profile. Just edit your profile and drop in the URL for the feed. You will then see the feed displayed like this.




del.ici.us - Do you use this popular social bookmarking website? If you've saved some useful bookmarks on del.ici.us you can now share them with other AIDSPortal members. Simply enter your del.ici.us username on your profile and your 'tag cloud' will be displayed for others to see. This is a great way to share useful websites with other AIDSPortal members. We will feature some of the best bookmark collections in the future and also look at ways to group together people's bookmarks to see which websites are most popular.


Organisation profiles

Finally, a brief word on organisational profiles. As a member, you can now also become an organisation moderator. This allows you to directly edit and add to your organisation’s profile on AIDSPortal. You can update contact information, add a summary of your organisation’s work and your logo – helping you get the word out about who you are and what you are doing.

Contact us if you'd like to request this.

Changing the world one Facebook group at a time

Who has eagerly joined a ‘group’ on facebook devoted to whatever worthy cause only for it to remain completely inactive? It appears merely as a line on your list of other inactive facebook groups. Even though it’s “only Facebook”, it leaves me disillusioned about the influence of the web on building community and promoting social change. Nevertheless there is an increasingly strong case to be made for the potential centrality of the internet in connecting and mobilising individuals around common concerns, interests and goals.

In mid-March I attended a conference aimed at exploring new forms of social organisation, practices that lead to change and ideas about the use of online tools to influence and democratise society. The Web 2.0 ethos framed the two days; that is changing order of information around the centrality of the user. Caroline Basset from the University of Sussex described the Web 2.0 phenonmenon well, “the fuller realization of the web platform” implying more than use but “active participation, agency and/or active networks”. Caroline challenged participants at the outset by asking, What is agency? What do we mean by participation? Does the 2.0 model imply social responsibility? And Is it naturally ethical?

I will leave these questions open-ended and unanswered; however, presentations throughout the 2 day event acted as case studies demonstrating how the internet can be used to increase individual agency and influence and mobilize social networks. Presentation highlights included an online global awareness and citizenship community for children called Panwapa and a proposal for a “collaborative aid marketplace” which sought to transform the architecture of humanitarian aid. This concept proposed to change the power dynamic of aid so civil society and the private sector work together transparently through an online collaborative network of shareholders on a virtual stockmarket.

My humblest apologies to presenters for reducing their contributions to two sentences, but they have reaffirmed how web tools have the potential to reach a broad spectrum of individuals around a common purpose. It is heartening to know AIDSPortal is part of a broader movement where participation and change are at the core. The conference gave me hope about building community focused on social change, be it not necessarily on facebook. It left me with questions for AIDSPortal. How far do we see AIDSPortal’s reach? And how can we ensure it is a community driven by active participation of its users?

For more on this PRADsa conference go to http://www.technologyandsocialaction.org/

Help AIDSPortal to better meet your needs - survey

AIDSPortal would like to invite you to participate in a short survey that will help us to better meet your knowledge management needs related to HIV and AIDS. The survey is open until March 28th 2008 and should take no more than 10 minutes of your time. Click here to take the survey now.

Why are you asking me for feedback on AIDSPortal?

AIDSPortal is a global initiative that aims to facilitate greater knowledge sharing and networking among organisations involved in the response to HIV and AIDS. It focuses on developing or adapting simple tools that can support country led networking and knowledge sharing. AIDSPortal primarily works in partnership with networks and seeks to strengthen their ability to support the response to the AIDS epidemic.

The tools that make up the AIDSPortal knowledge management platform are focused on three key areas:

• Electronically share and organise information, including policy, best practice, programme experiences, events, and jobs
• Connect people and organisations involved in a national response to HIV and AIDS
• Consult and provide feedback on key policy or programmatic topics

These tools are currently internet based (see www.aidsportal.org) but we are exploring how we could also use other technologies, such as cell phone and fax, in order to expand access to HIV and AIDS knowledge. This survey is the first part of a process to improve these tools, taking advantage of new needs and technical developments.

How can I learn about the survey results?

Survey results will be available on this blog as well as highlighted in the AIDSPortal monthly newsletters.

What will the results be used for?

We will use the results from the survey to better understand your needs and inform our future plans. We will make an anonymous version of the findings available to anyone interested. This will not include any comments that you make or your name, should you choose to provide it.

Thank you in advance for your participation.

Supporting country-led knowledge management in South Africa

On February 18th AIDSPortal, in partnership with HEARD and SAfAIDS, held a day long information sharing workshop in Johannesburg, South Africa. The workshop aimed to promote discussion about how a South African AIDSPortal project could support the national response to HIV & AIDS and create a space for government, civil society and the private sector to share experiences and lessons learnt relating to the four priority areas of the NSP.

We have been engaging with South African organisations since February 2006 and are continually reminded of the unique HIV and AIDS as well as knowledge management environment in South Africa. Unlike many other countries, where internet usage is limited and most HIV and AIDS resources are housed in physical resource centres, South Africa has a diverse range of strong information management initiatives focused on HIV and AIDS and based on new information and communication technology. This includes websites, portals and cell phone initiatives. In general, these have been designed to meet the needs of specific target groups, in line with urgent needs, and use effective and creative channels to disseminate information and meet these needs.

What we have found is that, in this rich information management environment, the gap lies in knowing who is doing what between sectors, particularly around shared priority areas.

As we form partnerships in South Africa and take the project forward, we hope that AIDSPortal can provide two areas of added value to the HIV and AIDS response in South Africa:

1. Simple ways to identify, connect and share information across sectors
2. A platform to link South African expertise and experience across sectors with cross-country learning and regional collaboration

Crucial in this process is listening carefully to the expertise of ‘infomediaries’ in South Africa, and ensuring that new knowledge management initiatives in South Africa support, connect and extend existing work.

If you would like to learn more about the workshop, the report is available here:
http://www.aidsportal.org/Article_Details.aspx?id=7111

Welcome to the AIDSPortal blog

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first post of the new AIDSPortal blog. We've been thinking about doing this for a while and are excited to finally get started.

Many of you are no doubt already familiar with the AIDSPortal and perhaps also receive our monthly email newsletters. While we will continue to provide these, we wanted a way to update you on ongoing developments with the AIDSPortal and to share some of the things we have learned from the work that we do.

Over the coming months we will use this blog to describe our plans for the AIDSPortal over these coming months. There are a lot of new developments in the pipeline and we would appreciate your feedback on them. Please do post any comments you have after this post.

The AIDSPortal team