LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

Greetings to the GIIP Community,

It’s been an especially active and productive year for all the GIIPers, in fact too many events, projects and successes to recount in this letter. We have strengthened our existing partnerships and developed new partnerships in Nigeria with the Centre for Information Technology and Development (www.citad.interconnection.org) and the International Institute of Education on reproductive health policy. Two GIIPers---Alejandra Bonilla and Dayana Stockdale---will be taking up GIIP-Riecken Fellowships this summer. Maira Sutton will be interning with Sisters in Islam in Kaula Lumpur for six months, and many others will be doing GIIP projects while on EAP in India, Brazil and France.

Under Adam Thompson’s steady hand, the GIIP-CMC Technology Leadership Institute is thriving with many GIIPers working on the August event. Former GIIP coordinator, Brandon Wright, and Adam have been building a new video-based data base for students to post their videos called “California Voices”. CMC has been a splendid partner, one that displays how the GIIP experience nurtures social entrepreneurship that supports students excluded from the University. As always, Adam has been tirelessly building networks, teaching technology and creating new partnerships. During the Spring Quarter, he teamed up with Elijah Saxon, a Sociology graduate student, to teach a new course on agile computing (Sociology 80V) using Ruby on Rails for supporting civil society and social justice groups.

For most of the year, my mission has been to move the GIIP-inspired minor in “Global Information and Social Enterprise Studies (GISES) through the academic shoals guarded by the faculty of the Sociology Department, the Dean of Social Sciences and, finally, the Academic Senate Committee on Education Policy (CEP). (Not possible to do of course unless I read passages from The Snow Leopard daily!) While the final approval has not yet come down from CEP, all signs are very positive so we expect to receive approval for the GISES minor and an intensive Sociology major in GISES by the end of the year. Keep your fingers crossed! Thanks to everyone who has contributed to making the
GISES minor/intensive major a reality. This no trivial feat!

I will close by thanking Mark and Christina Headley for their generous gift support. Mark is recovering from an illness and so we all want to beam him our warm regards as he recovers this summer.

Warm regards,

Paul Lubeck
Director, Global Information Internship Program