Peace and Collaborative Development Network (PCDN) is an online network, used to foster connections, share information and inspire the work of those in social change. [1] It was founded by Craig Zelizer, a professor at Georgetown University, in 2007. [2] The network currently has 35,000 members from over 180 countries and territories. [3]
Founded in 2007, PCDN originally started as a platform to connect people working in international development and peacebuilding. [4] In 2015, it launched PCDN 3.0 and expanded to cover the broader social changemaking fields which includes peacebuilding, international development, social entrepreneurship, social impact, gender mainstreaming and many other related areas. [1] The 3.0 platform provides additional ways for members to receive information, locate fellow members, search for job, find relevant opportunities and provide more space for engagement. [5]
PCDN is a membership driven platform. Membership can be individual or organizational. As a member, users can create a profile, contribute to discussions, create blog posts, chat with fellow members, or post information about jobs, research, questions, conferences and events. [6] [7] There are also a large number of guides available to members to help members be successful in their careers. [8] Guides include topics such as careers, funding, research, social media/tech, and practice. [9] [10]
PCDN has office space at Washington, DC’s 1776, a start-up incubator. [9] [11]
The network attracts more than 100,000 unique visitors each month and over 300,000 website hits a month. [12] [13]
Social software, also known as social apps or social platform includes communications and interactive tools that are often based on the Internet. Communication tools typically handle capturing, storing and presenting communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a pair or group of users. They focus on establishing and maintaining a connection among users, facilitating the mechanics of conversation and talk. Social software generally refers to software that makes collaborative behaviour, the organisation and moulding of communities, self-expression, social interaction and feedback possible for individuals. Another element of the existing definition of social software is that it allows for the structured mediation of opinion between people, in a centralized or self-regulating manner. The most improved area for social software is that Web 2.0 applications can all promote co-operation between people and the creation of online communities more than ever before. The opportunities offered by social software are instant connections and opportunities to learn. An additional defining feature of social software is that apart from interaction and collaboration, it aggregates the collective behaviour of its users, allowing not only crowds to learn from an individual but individuals to learn from the crowds as well. Hence, the interactions enabled by social software can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many.
An online community of practice (OCoP), also known as a virtual community of practice (VCoP), is a community of practice (CoP) that is developed and maintained on the Internet. OCoPs include active members who are practitioners, or "experts," in the specific domain of interest. Members participate in a process of collective learning within their domain. Community social structures are created to assist in knowledge creation and sharing, which is negotiated within an appropriate context. Community members learn through both instruction-based learning and group discourse. Finally, multiple dimensions facilitate the long-term management of support and the ability for synchronous interactions.
Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.
Peacebuilding is an activity that aims to resolve injustice in nonviolent ways and to transform the cultural and structural conditions that generate deadly or destructive conflict. It revolves around developing constructive personal, group, and political relationships across ethnic, religious, class, national, and racial boundaries. The process includes violence prevention; conflict management, resolution, or transformation; and post-conflict reconciliation or trauma healing before, during, and after any given case of violence.
The McCourt School of Public Policy is one of eleven constituent schools of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. The McCourt School offers master's degrees in public policy, international development policy, policy management, data science for public policy, and policy leadership as well as administers several professional certificate programs and houses fifteen affiliated research centers. The McCourt School has twenty-one full-time faculty members, ten visiting faculty members, more than one-hundred adjunct faculty members and approximately 450 enrolled students across the various degree and executive education programs.
Spiceworks News & Insights is an online community that enables peers to share professional knowledge about information technology. Since 1998, Toolbox has helped professionals make IT decisions and stay current in the rapidly changing technology market through peer collaboration.
The D-Word is an online community for professionals in the documentary film industry. Discussions include creative, business, technical, and social topics related to documentary filmmaking. The name "D-Word" is defined as "industry euphemism for documentary," as in: "We love your film but we don't know how to sell it. It's a d-word." As of 2019 it has over 17,000 members in 130 countries.
John Gittings is a British journalist and author who is mainly known for his works on modern China and the Cold War. From 1983 to 2003, he worked at The Guardian (UK) as assistant foreign editor and chief foreign leader-writer. He has also been a fellow of the Transnational Institute.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a women's non-violent peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Her efforts to end the war, along with her collaborator Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, helped usher in a period of peace and enabled a free election in 2005 that Sirleaf won. Gbowee and Sirleaf, along with Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
The CUNY Academic Commons is an online, academic social network for community members of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Designed to foster conversation, collaboration, and connections among the 24 individual colleges that make up the university system, the site, founded in 2009, has quickly grown as a hub for the CUNY community, serving in the process to strengthen a growing group of digital scholars, teachers, and open-source projects at the university.
S. Craig Watkins is an American professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a media professional involved primarily with interactions between youth culture and the digital age. His research explores connections between race, culture, and education, as well as how certain aspects of media are affecting young adults. He has spoken at many American universities, and has been a guest on National Public Radio as well as a speaker at media conferences across the country.
TechChange is a US social enterprise which provides courses on the use of technology in addressing social and global challenges. Their e-learning platform "has been used by more than 600 students from more than 70 countries." It is a registered benefit corporation based in Washington, DC and was founded in the summer of 2010. The Economist dubbed TechChange as ”the Geeks for Good”.
Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, MBE is a British-Iranian author and Founder and Executive Director of the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN). She has been a peace strategist working on conflicts, crises and violent extremism and as a consultant to the United Nations on the subject of women and conflict. Naraghi Anderlini joined LSE as Director of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security in December 2019.
The International Peace and Security Institute or IPSI is a division of Creative Learning an international nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) status headquartered in Washington, D.C. Founded in 2009, IPSI was acquired by Creative Learning in November 2016. The Institute's objective is to train young peacebuilding and International Justice leaders in the skills needed to effectively intervene in violent conflict scenarios in pursuit of sustainable peace.
Global Peace System is a concept of global conflict resolution dependent on nonviolent processes to eradicate war. It relies upon a multi-strand approach to conflict resolution, incorporating broad social and political solutions. In contemporary peace and conflict studies, the concept of a global peace system has been evolving since the 1940s around the theory that there is a global infrastructure of peacebuilding and that there is a need for systems thinking in peacebuilding. The term "global peace system" was coined from the work of Robert Johansen, who explored the concept in 1978's Toward a Dependable Place.
Samuel Gbaydee Doe is a conflict, peace, and development professional from Liberia. Doe was a cofounder, with Emmanuel Bombande, of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP), based in Accra, Ghana. This organization focuses on collaborative approaches to conflict prevention and was founded in 1998 in response to the civil wars taking place in West Africa. The organization is known for their work with several regional partners such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union’s Economic, Social, and Cultural Council (ECOSOCC).
The West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) is a leading Regional Peacebuilding organisation founded in 1998 in response to civil wars that plagued West Africa in the 1990s. Over the years, WANEP has succeeded in establishing strong national networks in every Member State of ECOWAS with over 550 member organisations across West Africa. WANEP places special focus on collaborative approaches to conflict prevention, and peacebuilding, working with diverse actors from civil society, governments, intergovernmental bodies, women groups and other partners in a bid to establish a platform for dialogue, experience sharing and learning, thereby complementing efforts at ensuring sustainable peace and development in West Africa and beyond.
Kimberly Bryant is an American electrical engineer who worked in the biotechnology field at Genentech, Novartis Vaccines, Diagnostics, and Merck. In 2011, Bryant founded Black Girls Code, a nonprofit organization that focuses on providing technology and computer programming education to African-American girls. After founding Black Girls Code, Bryant was listed as one of the "25 Most Influential African-Americans In Technology" by Business Insider.
Corinna "Cori" Zarek is an American lawyer, public interest technologist and adjunct professor of media law.
Thelma Arimiebi Ekiyor is a Nigerian lawyer, social entrepreneur and impact investor who has served in authoritative positions within many organizations. Ekiyor has focused primarily on investing in women entrepreneurs. She started her career supporting women in peacebuilding and empowering women and youth through financial independence and educational access. She has experience with projects in more than 22 African countries. Ekiyor worked in post-conflict countries such as Liberia with the peace activist Leymah Gbowee.