Open Access Week Day 5: dg-Communities - Open Educational Resources

This is Day 5 of Open Access Week. This blog is about a really valuable source of open educational material and associted resources - DG Communties. It isn't new. I've been a member for a couple of years. But it has had a name change to "Zunia" and the website has had a face-lift.

dgCommunities is a place to find knowledge resources focused on development issues and also an interactive space where you can share your own work, participate in discussions, find people with similar interests and more. They have more than 40,000 members worldwide - and over half are in developing countries.



The revamped site comprises, amongst other things, a knowledge exchange, country guides and also several overlapping interest groups, e.g., open educational resources, eLearning.

dgCommunities is a collaborative space for professionals working in more than 200 countries to share knowledge resources, tools, contact information, and more. Each online community is centered on specific themes and guided by experts in the field. Their role is to coordinate topic highlights, prepare community newsletters and monitor content submissions for relevance and value to the topic at hand. All guides, volunteer advisors and community coordinators are committed to ensuring an open forum where all ideas are welcome.

International collaboration is at the heart of dgCommunities. More than 500 individuals and organizations working as volunteer guides and advisors, or cooperating with the Development Gateway Foundation team in other ways. If you or your organization want to get involved, please read our Get Involved page and then contact us. We want to hear from you.

Use of dgCommunities is open to all and has a global membership. They are committed to the values of tolerance and respect for all views, with no preference or bias as to the source of any content submitted by a community member or partner organization. The dominant language of most individual communities and their content is English. Navigation is also available in Arabic, French, and Spanish. They encourage members to submit content in French and Spanish. Currently, only the Arab reform community accepts content in Arabic. Most guides, advisors, and other participants speak more than one language, in some cases, many languages. Feel free to contact them.

dgCommunities is provided by Development Gateway Foundation (DGF) as part of its mission to reduce poverty and enable change in developing nations through information technology.