Sessions' briefer for participants
July 27th : Day Zero - Welcome/Introductions/Care
Welcome start / the Theme "Experience and Share"
[English - Spanish & English - Portuguese interpretation available for all sessions]
We will start the LocNet Convening 2021 with a welcome from the LocNet team and provide background to the experience and share theme for this year. Specifically, we will go through the broad agenda, we will also walk through the various spaces we are using as well as have a fun time to briefly welcome each of our 16 CN peer partners. We will also follow the brief introduction of the CNs with small groups where you get to know a few of your CN peers more in-depth. Finally, we will close the session around understanding 'care' and brainstorm and share what has helped individuals or teams bring care into their own context.
July 28th : Day One - Regional Day
Asia CN peer Meet-Up
[English available only]
We all have been anticipating better times since the past year…..but that time has not come yet. Another year and we are still not able to meet each other face to face. As part of APC’s LOCNET Convening 2021, the Asia meet up is going to reflect on the past, the challenges, the pain and the sadness that we all have witnessed. We will hold a moment of silence as a mark of respect to the lost souls and fold our hand to ask God for better times to come soon.
The Asia meet will comprise of 3 different sessions. We will be going from a very broad context and go deeper into specific topics. The sessions are designed for sharing and caring, enabling us all to hear the struggles, challenges and moments of triumph that we have had during the course of last year. The sessions are as follows:
- Session 1 : Pandemic challenges and our coping mechanisms,
- Session 2: Translating needs into action for the community, and
- Session 3: Identifying policy gaps
Africa CN peer meet-up
[English available only; possible French interpretation at the Virtual Summit]
The Africa community network meet up will consist of two parts. The first is that the meeting coincides with the 2021 Virtual Summit on Community Networks in Africa. This event is open to the public so all CN peers are more than welcome to join!
After the Summit, the CN Africa peers will host a de-brief session to go through the discussion and ways to advance the regional or country level work.
Latin America CN peer meet-up
[Spanish - English interpretation available for session at 14utc and 17utc]
We've had previous meetings among peers and participants of the Locnet initiative in Latin America where we've introduced ourselves and where we've shared about our work in the region. That's why the current session is to have a series of conversations that are open to the public (i.e. all CN peers are welcome to join!) so more people can participate in the exchange of information and so that the information is useful for groups or communities that are interested in building their networks.
The central question of the conversation is How do you start a community network? And in order to answer this question, we think there are three important aspects:
1. Why a community network?
2. Designing the infrastructure of the network
3. Sustainability - Regulatory framework and economic sustainability
July 29th : Day Two - Film and Tech Day
[English - Spanish & English - Portuguese interpretation available for all sessions]
Community networks stories: Behind the scenes
Join us to watch new films made by community members and to have a discussion about aspects only seen behind the scenes. How was the process of telling stories using audiovisuals? What were the challenges and achievements? What can we learn from this process, from the backstage?
On a continuation of the Film Festival and the "Content with an S" session held in the 2020 LocNet convening, this will be a space to look at the importance and multiple ways of sharing stories and exchanging knowledge and experiences.
Tech Talks
The “Community networks tech-talk” webinars are a series of online gatherings, aiming to build dialogues, information exchange and knowledge sharing between people engaged with community networks and local access initiatives in different realities and countries. We intend to hold monthly live encounters to discuss different topics related social and tech aspects of CNs and use this forum for asynchronous conversation around them. In this monthly tech-talk, we envision an opportunity to talk about the latest technological innovation or trends happening in the CN space and it will happen in the format of the 'lightning talk'.
Lightning talks are very short sessions (3-15 minutes, usually about 5 minutes) that are typically scheduled in a single track. This means that the entire audience of an event is in the room and explains why the talks have to be short. Even if some of the subjects aren’t interesting to everybody, the next one comes just a few minutes later.
These talks provide an opportunity for people to present what they work on and for the audience to find out what is going happening in the project. Perhaps more importantly, the audience can find out who to talk to—connecting names and faces to subjects. Due to their nature, lightning talks do not go very deep. This is as much a strength as it is a weakness, though, as presenters are forced to get rid of most of the content so they focus on what matters most. Overhead like lengthy personal introductions, many examples or the setup of demos falls to the wayside and a single point emerges.
July 30th : Day Three - Sustainability & Finance and Closing
Parallel Sessions
When CN peers were requested to share details on what they wanted to get out of the LocNet convening, the idea of sustainability, fundraising and finances came up as a theme. These are also concepts which fit well with the 2021 thematic learning work on institutional strengthening. As a result, sessions have been created to think through some specific topics around financial management within the current team project, exploratory understanding of fundraising and resource mobilisation and thinking about the idea of training within CN institutional strengthening work. We will be hosting three parallel sessions at the same time from 12:00-13:30UTC.
Session 1: Finance Management
[English - Portuguese interpretation available]
This session intends to provide CN peers and their respective finance personnel with tips on reports (i.e. what are we looking for, meeting the financial guidelines) as well as looking at aspects of budgets and cash flow projections.
Session 2: Resource Mobilisation
[English - Portuguese interpretation available]
What is resource mobilisation? CN peers have expressed interest to have a better understanding on particular aspects of fundraising and how to build relationships with donors as well as thinking through financial sustainability in the future.
Session 3: What about training?
[Spanish - English interpretation available]
In this session we will try to figure out what are the shared dreams related to capacity building in the community networks movement. For there will be some presentations of training experiences in the different regions, and then we will open the floor to discuss about the challenges and hopes in this matter.
After these three parallel sessions, we will host the final Closing Plenary. We will reflect on the learning from the past few days as well as discuss ways forward for the rest of 2021 and 2022. [English - Portuguese & English - Spanish interpretation available for final session]