In the beginning...

... there was reflection. Reflection on events leading to the start of this blog. As a tech-oriented person also qualified as a librarian, I've felt the pull, the duty to utilize Web 2.0 technologies. But as a practical person who only speaks when there is something worth saying, I've resisted blogging simply because I haven't had anything to say. So it is primarily reflection and its subsequent influence on what I hope will happen in the future that has fueled my need to create this blog.

I've been working in health policy and research for what seems like forever, and more recently in community-based research. On a personal interest level, I've been drawn to nutrition, exercise and food issues for a long, long time. I had a unique opportunity to combine all of these professional and personal interests about a year and a half ago. While attending a small educational conference in the virtual world, Second Life, I met a farmer. I was in Montreal, he was in Northern California. He'd started a nonprofit organization aimed at setting up farmers' markets in disadvantaged neighbourhoods with the purpose of not only providing access to local produce, but also to provide access to social services and nutrition and exercise information. In my opinion and using my professional language, I felt he was brilliantly setting up temporary, but recurring, "learning commons". I'll post on "learning commons" another time. He was also interested in catching the attention of academics interested in conducting research in these environments.

He had my attention.

Long story short, and I'm sure I'll post on this in more detail another time, I found my way down to California and devoted 8 months of volunteer time to the development of the nonprofit, the markets and their relationships and projects. Always a farmers' market afficionado, I'm hooked in a completely different way now. While I've had to return to Canada, my hopes for the future are, non-professionally, to blog on this phenomenon and synthesize existing and ongoing research, and professionally, to pursue my own research on markets. Good luck to me!