Facilitating Change

Facilitating Change is written and edited by Christine Prefontaine. It’s a combo of the personal, the professional, and the delicious — with the occasional rant thrown in for good measure.

I’m a development communicator who is obsessed with community, collaboration, and technology. For the last 10 years I’ve worked for international development projects and helped out organizations with a social mission. I’ve worked on health, economic growth, democracy and governance, environment, and ICTD projects — helping them tell their story, improve collaboration, and build community.

My goal? To find solutions. To connect people. To make things work better. To make it possible for more people to create and speak for themselves.

Most of my work involves figuring out what to do (developing strategy), figuring out how to do it (putting together teams, establishing systems and practices), and doing it (implementing strategy). On any given day you may find me writing, editing, figuring out how to hack some online platform, thinking through the structure of a website or extranet, harassing designers and web developers, helping my colleagues with random issues, or serendipitously bopping through the internets — which on good days brings a wealth of new ideas and resources and keeps me hip to the latest technologies.

My latest love is the Technology & Social Change Group at the University of Washington. Before that, I was involved with with the International Development Research Centre, the University of Maryland, and Deloitte’s Emerging Markets Group.

I volunteer for Telling My Story, the Atwater Library & Computer Centre, and VisibleGovernment. I also run an open publishing experiment called Artefatica and am an avid fan of Station C, Montreal’s first coworking space.

On this site you’ll find…

Action — Content that involves me doing something. Or trying to convince you to do something ;)

Audio — Throw out your ambien. I’ve got a tip for you. The reason you can’t sleep? Your mind is too busy. Reviewing your day; obsessing over lots of worthy and not-so-worthy matters. So, after your glass of warm milk and evening meditation tune into one of these. Fascinating lectures, beautifully read stories. They will distract you. You’ll drift. They will take you by the hand and guide you into sleep. And they don’t poop and baaaah like those annoying sheep.

Consume This — Content of note: articles, blogs, books, websites, videos, photos, podcasts, whatever. Stuff only my friends used to get via email. Lucky you.

Essays & Opinion — My own writing. These postings evolve over time. They’re ideas that I’m working through. I’ve adapted the open source “release early, release often” approach, publishing them before they’re done with the idea that I can work on them later — and in the meantime readers can provide feedback. This is a strategy to combat my perfectionist streak: just get the idea out. It’s also a way to get over my fear of failure and stick it to my crippling and negative self-critic — the voice inside me that’s always so quick to tell me how much my writing sucks and how stupid my ideas are. (Hopefully you don’t have one of those.) So comments on these posts are appreciated.

Events — Announcements for upcoming events. Observations from events I’ve attended.

Food & Wine — I love to eat. I love to cook. Wine is good. Life is short. Dinner parties with friends and family are the very best way to spend an evening. Enjoy.

Resources — A collection of things that I’ve learned, that I’ve used to do my work, or that are more in the how-to/practical genre. This section includes guides, bibliographies, theory, hacks, add-ons, and more.

@@prefontaine

art bibliography books collaboration commons communication communications community coworking creative commons creativity Events fail forward governance human rights ICT4D impact of technology international development knowledge sharing liam microblogging montreal network analysis networks open open development open research policy politics publishing read/write culture remix research social change social reporting Station C TASCHA technology telecentre transparency urban development Video visualization wcmtl08 webcamp