Frustrated, Angry, and Very Much In Love; I'm Hitting the Road...

I’m frustrated with university life (I’ve had only a total of 21 months away from uni in the past ten years), I’m angry and disappointed with what’s being done to our planet, and I’m in love – so I’m about to put my money where my mouth is and my heart where my sleeve is and hit the wide open road with my true love to work with and study sustainable communities within Australia (and possibly New Zealand). Molly has been studying such communities for the past two-to-two-and-a-half years and is approaching her study of them from an anthropological perspective. More on her travels and research can be found on her blog.

Whereas I will only be joining Molly on the tail-end of her journey – covering only two states and possibly NZ – I also hope to approach this as a researcher (i.e. methodically, and with a hypothesis and/or academic objective in mind) hoping to gain some valuable insight and knowledge from the experiences and activities of sustainable communities and community members.

With my field of Information Systems (IS) being multi-disciplinary in nature, and utilising elements of more traditional disciplines such as (inter alia) psychology, sociology, management, law, operations research, and science and technology to understand sociotechnical phenomena, there is clearly going to be overlap in Molly’s and my research interests. And this I believe will be a good thing, both for the research and for us personally as we will be able to use each other as sounding-boards to share and workshop our observations, insights, opinions and ideas, or to just brain-dump and/or vent if necessary.

But my research interests will differ from hers with its stronger focus on the technical aspects of the socitechnical. My research has to date focused on:

• Corporate Governance
• Decision-Making
• e-Communities
• Knowledge Management
• Strategic Use of IS by SMEs, NGOs and NFPs

My research has always been qualitative in nature, though sometimes employing a more mixed-methodology approach. Of late I have been applying an Action Research approach and methodology to my studies, and using tools/techniques such as cognitive mapping and business process modelling.

Outside of academia my activities and interests has included activism in the following areas:

• Education
• Environmentalism
• Politics (as a former student union president and NUS delegate)
• Social Justice

Where as my academic interests have at times flirted with those of my activism – e.g. studies on (inter alia) how corporate resource companies engage in greenwashing, how environmental NGOs and NFPs can better-use strategic IS to achieve mission objectives, and how and if IS can help facilitate improved corporate accountability and stakeholder contribution to corporate governance – I am hoping that my time travelling with Molly and working with and for sustainable communities will finally wholly merge these interests. My objective will, at this early stage, be:

to observe and understand how and what technologies are being used to facilitate sustainable practices and communities, both at a micro (within particular communities) and macro level (how they all communicate with and disseminate information to other communities and interested stakeholders), and, if possible and if opportunities present themselves, also how environmental activists do the same.

I am then hoping that when I return to my PhD, this will be the new direction that it takes. The research I think will not only be very interesting, but also very timely. At it’s conclusion I would hope that Molly and I will have some very good ideas on what people and communities are and can do to live sustainably, both from socio and technical perspectives, and how this may impact on micro and macro cultures, community building and management, decision-making, policy-making etc., and the means to share this information with the general public for broader environmental and civic benefit.

More on my plans, travels, and love, later...