This is an inspiring example of self-regulation in action, via a Dave Snowden paper(PDF) found through AOK.

“(The) Grameen Bank which was created in Bangladesh to provide small loans to poor people. The name Grameen comes from the Bangla word for village. This is a market which the conventional banking system finds unattractive. Most commercial and private loans are based on credit scoring, an ordered concept in which the characteristics of good and bad debtors are identified and used as predictors and therefore controls for future lending. This increases the cost of lending as the various processes have to be administered, and small loans this become uneconomic. In the Grameen Bank everyone who took out a loan was required to be a part of a self regulating borrowers’ group in which each member of the group had to take responsibility for the debts of the others. This simple rule which costs little to administer produced a 97 percentage repayment rate comparable with best achievements of the large banks; there are now over two million clients of the Grameen bank and the approach has proved both scalable and portable.”

More info on Grameen can be found either on the link above or in this article:

Yunas, Muhammad (1999) “The Grameen Bank” Scientific American 281 November 1999 114-119

This came up in conversation yesterday. Maybe time to pop down to the video store so I can rewatch Tron, and reminisce about ZX81s, BBC Micro’s … erm…

Kevin Flynn: It’s time I level with you. I’m what you guys call a “user.”

Yori: You’re a user?

Kevin Flynn: I took a wrong turn somewhere.

Tron: If you ARE a user, then everything you’ve done has been according to a plan, right?

Kevin Flynn: Ha, ha, ha, you WISH! Well, you guys know what it’s like. You just keep doing what it looks like you’re supposed to be doing no matter how crazy it seems.

Tron: That’s the way it is for programs, yes.

Kevin Flynn: I hate to disappoint you, pal, but that’s the way it is for users, too.

Tron: Stranger and stranger…

Interesting paper here I thought, from some folks in Strathclyde using Tikiwiki.

The abstract is :

As product development teams become global in scale, more of this process is carried out in the digital domain. This paper examines the impact of basing a student design project in this environment, and in particular how the increased documentation and reflection afforded by this impacts upon student learning. The mechanisms for achieving this included templates, information repositories and video presentations. It was found that a shared information resource had an impact on concept direction and that although students found critical reflection on their design process difficult, that the increased documentation of a digital repository encouraged more transparent working practices.

March 04th 2005 | Comments(1) | Notes on models, research wiki