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CIVICUS and MDGs Campaigning Toolkit
for Civil Society Organisations engaged in the
Millenium Development Goals

CIVICUS has produced a Campaigning Toolkit for Civil Society
Organisations engaged in the Millenium Development Goals.

The manual aims to build upon material that already exists from other sources. It provides a framework and a starting point for those interested in linking their efforts with the MDG Campaign at all levels.

You can find the toolkit at www.civicus.org/mdg/title.htm

Some interviewing suggestions
Submitted by Dan Gillmor on Tue, 08/02/2005 - 4:50pm.

Interviewing

There is no single way to prepare for and conduct an interview. There are all kinds of techniques. (See this list of articles on interviewing at the excellent Journalism.org site for lots of ideas.)

Here are some tips based on my own experiences.

First: Prepare for your interview. Keep in mind that the people we are interviewing don't have unlimited time. If you have not done some basic homework, you will be wasting their time, and they won't appreciate it. Good reporters learn quickly that there are no stupid questions -- except the ones we could easily have answered with a bit of prior research.

Start with Google and other search engines. You may be surprised how much you can learn about people (sometimes a scary amount). If you have time, the public library is a great place to visit, too, because libraries have subscriptions to commercial databases, such as collections of articles from publications that are not free on the Web. If the interview is in connection with someone's business, check the company's website.

Second: Look around. You can learn a lot about someone based on the surroundings, especially if you're in a home or office. For example, a wall covered with photos of your interview subject shaking hands with prominent people tells you something about his or her ego. A neat or messy desk may tell you something, too.

If you can get permission, take a photo of the person in that context. Sometimes I like to take a short video clip of the surroundings. Today's digital cameras can shoot excellent-quality videos. Take advantage of that capability. A photo or video serves several purposes. You don't have to spend time writing down details of what you're seeing (except ones that you won't be able to distinguish from the digital images), so you can focus on the person.

Third: Don't go in with an attitude. Most interviews are not the kind of

Social Machines
By Wade Roush August 2005



(Editor note: While writing this feature for the magazine, senior editor Wade Roush added footnotes to the story. But, he also solicited reader feedback which was then incorporated here. Throughout the text, readers can mouse over the bold text in the article to see what others helped contribute. If you are unable to click on the link in the contribution, simply click on the bolded word in the article, which will take you to the appropriate page.)

My boss, Jason Pontin, caused a minor ruckus in May while attending D3, the Wall Street Journal's third annual "All Things Digital" conference outside San Diego. The editor in chief of Technology Review, like many executives, entrepreneurs, engineers, and students these days, doesn't go anywhere without his wireless gear--meaning, at a minimum, a Wi-Fi-enabled laptop and a cell phone. At D3, Jason was using his laptop to file blog (or Web log) posts "live" from the conference floor, summarizing talks by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, and other computer-industry celebrities. But on the third day, he couldn't find a signal. The Wi-Fi network he'd been accessing was on by mistake, a conference staffer told him. She explained that the hosts of the conference--Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, two of the Journal's technology writers--had decided that no one should have Internet access from the main ballroom.

Jason, naturally, wrote a new blog post

Blog post: See pontin.trblogs.com/archives/ 2005/05/d3_suppressing.html.

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about the incident (from the hallway this time). Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, "seems a very retrograde move." Mossberg responded hours later. "It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else," he explained. "We merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences--near univ

"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred."
-- George Bernard Shaw

If Shaw is right, what can we do about it? We spend over half of our working life, and a considerable portion of all our waking hours, engaged in some form or another of communication, yet for all our practice most of us seem to be very poor at it. The problem, I think, is that it's hard to learn from your mistakes when you don't know you're making them.

I've often watched and listened to someone try valiantly to make some critical point about which they are both passionate and informed, and then when I talk with their audience immediately afterwards I've discovered that almost no one got it. I've been equally astonished at some of the comments and e-mails my weblog articles have provoked that indicate the reader has not understood in the least the point I was trying to make.

But I'm less stressed and self-critical about that than I used to be, because I've learned that the miscommunication often wasn't my (or anyone's) fault. I've come to appreciate that there are five major hurdles to effective communication, and you have to vault them all or your communication will fail. Here they are:

1. Your point must be explainable using language. This might seem obvious, but most of our important life learnings are not taught through language. We learn for the most part by doing (and by making mistakes), not by listening to someone tell us something. Try to explain to someone (or write a manual to explain) how to ride a bicycle. Try to describe the difference in taste (or smell!) between a Merlot and a Shiraz. Much of our knowledge is instinctive, and much of what we learn is subconscious or unconscious. The comprehension 'bandwidth' of oral and written language is surprisingly narrow, and language is much better at conveying some things than others. Language itself is an artificial construct, a feeble model to try to depict reality abstractly. What's worse,