Book Review: Community-Driven Projects: Reflections on a Success Story A Case Study of Science Education and Information Technology in South Africa.

Reviewer: Michael Gurstein PhD, Editor in Chief: The Journal of Community Informatics, Vancouver, Canada

J. Phahlamohlaka (ed.). (2008). Community-Driven Projects: Reflections on a Success Story A Case Study of Science Education and Information Technology in South Africa. Pretoria: Van Schaik Publishers.

I first encountered this book while working in South Africa a year or so after it was published in 2008. I was introduced by mutual friends to the primary editor (and author) Jackie Phahlamohlaka who was then, as he is now, working as a senior researcher with South Africa's prime research agency, The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

When I finally got around to reading it, some months after I had received it, I was as the expression goes "gob smacked"... the book was the best case study and guide book to the practicalities — limitations, opportunities, risks and rewards — of Community Informatics (CI) that I had encountered. Of course, neither the terminology nor the conceptual apparatus of CI was used, and much of the activity described in the book took place at a time (1992—98) and in locations far away from where CI was being formulated (i.e. in a relatively remote former (Apartheid era) Township — Siyabuswa — in north central South Africa, some 90 minutes from Pretoria in the centre of Mpumalanga and the Ndebele Kingdom). The results of this program — The Siyabuswa Educational Improvement and Development Trust (SEIDET)— are presented in this book.

The story at its simplest is that of Jackie and friends from his community, having had the quite remarkable opportunity for those pre-Democracy times to get a higher education (including for Jackie, an IDRC sponsored scholarship at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia) spending a considerable amount of their free time and personal resources in launching a community-based after hours (Saturday) education process for young people in their community. These young people, because of the villainy of Apartheid, had been denied an effective (in most cases any) education in the sciences and thus were denied access for all purposes to almost the entire range of contemporary sector employment opportunities.

That they were able to launch this program, essentially on their own with almost no resources except some small material and moral support from their alma mater, the University of Pretoria and particularly the community and community institutions of Siyabuswa, is a truly remarkable story and it is one that pushes its way forward throughout the various parts of this book in narrative and almost short story form. Idealistic young people go out into the world and then returning to their home communities to share the benefits of what they have learned, is the ideal expressed in many contexts but not always one that is realized in practice.

The simplest parts of the story are the basics. The school that was launched provided instruction using local teachers as volunteers to teach local young people. That the school was remarkably successful in its primary objective of helping young people from the community gain sufficient instruction to enter into post-secondary education is well-documented in the book through the listing of the graduates from the program and their later accomplishments (evidently achieving a success rate double that of the norm from similar schools around South Africa).

But the book is more than simply this "success story". It goes into very significant detail on the actual processes — including mistakes and failures — through which the school was developed and run, first in its initial struggling days and then as it sought ways of solidifying itself and ultimately expanding and diversifying (developing satellite programs, developing a for-profit-arm, extending its partnership with the community and the University of Pretoria, and so on).

The book on one level is a "community development story" but at another level it is a "community informatics story", recounting how the Siyabuswa community was activated and became, to a degree, self-empowered through its interactions with and support for the new technologies involved in the educational processes and most important in the processes of innovation themselves, as precipitated by the educational activities and their technology tools and supports.

But the Siyabuswa/SEIDET story is even richer than that in that it provides exceptional detail on the role of the university as a support to the education initiatives in a variety of ways, initially as providers of small sums to support travel and other out-of-pocket expenses; but eventually in much more complex and mutually beneficial areas including training of teachers, curriculum development, providing a venue for student (and faculty) research and so on.

The story of an old and deeply conservative Afrikaans language university finding a way of supporting a community-based initiative in a former Township area is not specifically presented (it most certainly should be in a follow-on document) but it can be seen between the cracks in the failure of well-intentioned but top-down initiatives driven from Pretoria, and in the evidently somewhat lengthy development of processes of collaboration between individuals and groups coming out of two very separate realities and finding methods for working together based on mutual respect and a recognition of the necessary contribution of each.

The on-going story of how those who succeed in the larger world are able (not without difficulty) to maintain their rootedness in their smaller community world (and the intervention of the Ndebele King in support of this) is a fascinating account in itself.

And as well there is the basic structure of the book which is as a collection of papers, many of which are looking to situate the experience and the university-based research in the larger (although to my mind not always necessarily relevant) worlds of academic and discipline-based theory. In this regard, of particular interest for Community Informatics researchers is the account given of the development of the research partnership between the University of Pretoria and the Siyabuswa community — a great deal of learning can be derived from this particular segment(s) of the book.

The book does not currently appear to be in press or available via Amazon or other on-line services but perhaps the author(s) and publisher could be persuaded to republish it (or even better make it available as an open access on-line source). I know if it was available in this way I would use it as a primary text for my Introduction to Community Informatics course.