One Geek

I am thinking now that next year is about working out how I can best use or be used to help people (including me).

My thesis has me traveling to Africa to evaluate how some poverty focussed NGO’s there are using Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in their organisations. As part of my evaluation I hope to work with the people in the organisations to improve their ICT usage in appropriate ways.

The real thing though this thesis is doing is helping me to work out what the needs are in at least one African country.

As far as I can see when I complete my degree next year I have a few options:

1. Work locally in the community sector and help people locally. This option would enable me to stay in my community and continue to develop my relationships to people locally. Whilst there is some chance of me using my ICT skills here in Sydney, I feel that there a many geeks available to service this need.
2. Create a not for loss company in Australia and work as a consulting and IT/Engineering support to both corporate and community based organisations. I could do some interesting projects and really help a lot of organisations. This would be a risky venture and would require a lot of long term commitment and energy.
3. Work for an organisation that works overseas in an ICT role, somewhere in a rich country. I think that I would not be able to get this role as I don’t have enough experience in developing countries or working in classic IT workplaces.
4. Make ungodly large sums of money working for profit companies, and give large amounts of it away. Sadly I think I’d just buy very nice things for myself and my friends…
5. Start a Dosa restaurant with a great selection of wines. Sadly I know nothing about restaurants and can only really cook a few dishes.
6. Work in the field in one of these roles:
   1. ICT Developer
      In this role I would develop new systems with local NGO’s to address their needs. Fun but I have big question marks around the sustainability of such systems.
   2. ICT Manager
      In this role I would manage and co-ordinate the ICT systems of an NGO.
   3. ICT Consultant
      In this role I would provide advice for people in organisations to politely listen too and then ignore.
   4. ICT and Disaster Management role
      In this role I’d work to find ways to use Information Systems to help in Disaster Management better.
   5. Mentor/Teacher of ICT.
      In this role I’d work in an organisation, and provide someone on the job support. I have found that in India this was the most ultimately rewarding, though sometimes incredibly draining thing I did. How much I did to help the development of those I worked with I don’t know, but those I trained seem to be taking on larger roles now.

So what do you think? Any other roles??

This entry was posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 3:34 pm and is filed under About stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.