Gatnet: Gearing up for 2016

Dear Gatnet Friends and Colleagues,
When Priyanthi Fernando decided to invite us to an month-long peer dialogue on Gender Mainstreaming in Rural Transport, I was fascinated by . . .  First, the topic itself and was very curious to see what the 150 or so people from various corners of the world signed into Gatnet would have share and create together on this subject. And second I was intrigued to see how our somewhat sagging original Dgroups website package was going to be able to support these exchanges. So I decided to jump in with both feet and as the exchanges moved along, I was struck by two things in turn.

First, how much we have to learn from each other. And second, what a barely adequate platform we had to work with dear old Dgroups.  So at the same time following what Pri, Hans, Salma, Gina, Prakash, Batel, Jun, Randy, Protasio, Andrea, Serge, Robert, Paul, Gifty, Nite, Peter, Maria, Lucy, Vero, Holy, Barney, Solomon, Tim, Jeff, and I am sure I have forgotten one or two of us — I quickly came to the conclusion that we were not all that well served by the original decade old Dgroups technology. Yes, it functions decently as a listserv, but it is basically a closed system, difficult to sort through and for quite some time the Search function has not worked at all.  And it is media poor.  Your work deserves more and better.