This trip is vaguely similar to the recent Haiti trip in that we will be covering similar topics: evaluations, watersheds, research. We will also be talking about participatory methods, which  if you've followed this blog at  all you will remember are a group of techniques designed to increase a community's ability to communicate, reflect on their situation and make decisions. When it works well, this approach gives people more say in what happens. We will  also be  talking some about PGIS --Participatory Geographic Information Systems--which is the nexus of participatory techniques, and modern spatial information ('mapping') technologies. You may have seen the battery commercial where inhabitants of the Amazon are using GPS to map their local resources. That's an example of PGIS. The idea is to bring together local knowledge and pair it with the ever increasing power of software that can process geographic information. Not an easy task, and in fact I saw an article asking if PGIS wasn't an oxymoron. There are in fact, numerous examples of where GIS is being successfully  integrated with local knowledge, so it is possible. For me personally, it brings together two of my current big interests, and our partner in Thailand has already worked in this area, so I'm excited about discussing more possibilities with them.

I'm looking at the ever growing line at Tim Horton's in terminal 3 and wondering if it's worth getting breakfast or not. T3 people, if you come across this post, you've really got to up your breakfast game.