Oregon Direct Action

I have been officially delegated to be head of research for ODA by Daniel, the man who long ago officially delegated unto himself the officially delegate powers…

Anyway, in this position, I’ll be the go-to guy when we need to find out about something.  However, there’s a lot more to my job than that.  I also try to figure out what we should be researching, I work with others so we can help each other out when researching, I record the fruits of our research, and I blog about this whole process so that members of the ODA community can see what we’re up to, learn from us, and maybe chip in and help us with our research.

With that in mind, I’ll be blogging regular research posts that you can track if you want.  In this first post, I’ll talk about progress we’ve made in helping our partners, GE (Green Empowerment, not General Electric), find the following:

• papers or publications exist on reforestation and aquifer recharge/restoration initiatives that have been tied to meeting local human and agricultural demands for water
• papers on water projects (within the last 10 years) that have been paired with public health assessments in Latin America for communities with 20-100 households

I began to search first for papers that paired health assessments with water projects, utilizing Google Scholar.  An immediate problem I ran into was that most publishers want you to pay for their articles, offering only abstracts for free.  I kept track of promising abstracts, figuring that GE could look them over and see if any were worth paying for.  I was able to overcome this problem, however, because most articles gave links to similar articles, and so I was able to quickly look into a large number of good articles and find a few that were free.  I’m going to keep track of the pages that offer free articles and eventually create a page of good sources for research that all can look at and add to.

In addition to these articles, I also remembered that a friend of mine, DJ Strouse, is working on a similar water project in India and one of the things they’ll be doing is installing a software system that improves patient health by giving clinicians the ability to keep patient records electronically.  However, this system also collects data on health trends in areas where it’s installed.  Global Medical Brigades, one of DJ’s partners in this project, is the organization that provides this software, called the “GWB Data Informatics System.”

I then began to search, again using Google Scholar, for papers on reforestation/aquifer recharge initiatives, hoping to find some that also mentioned water needs, or rural areas in developing countries.  I wasn’t able to find anything promising that was free, and little at all, money or no.  I plan to continue searching tomorrow.

Before I end, I have a few requests for all of you:

• What are good sources of information?  I’m thinking especially of sites that offer free journals/scholarly articles, but also of environmental/humanitarian blogs/news sites, good blogs/news sits in general, or even other groups that might have information that could help us with this current task, or our overall task of improving the lives people around the world through the provision of water and energy.
• If you’d like, feel free to join me in the search for papers on the aforementioned subjects by linking to resources in the comments or tagging them with “for:oregondirectaction” with del.icio.us