When I began blogging for Governance Village in July 2008, I was barely a month back in Canada following the better part of a year in Uganda working as a media trainer.

I came home with a head full of thoughts about the media's role in development, governance and conversely the merits of different approaches to strengthening media in emerging countries. Beginning with a first post about the power of radio, this site quickly became a forum for those thoughts, and a sounding board to discuss and point to different strategies, approaches and ideas.

Media-related development is so much more than looking at ways to, say, strengthen how a newspaper covers local politics or other issues. Rather, the increased media options and access to technology provide an unprecedented opportunity to connect people around the world, to establish a two-way knowledge sharing system that allows people the world over to learn from one another.

In other words, this is so much more than looking at journalism. Rather, it's about communicating, about knocking down silos so that communities have access to knowledge and experience that has been learned elsewhere.

As Andrew Revkin wrote recently in a farewell piece before leaving the New York Times:

I'm convinced that there is vast untapped potential to use the Web and other means to build global awareness and meaningful relationships. Here's some evidence. While giving  a talk at Linfield College in Oregon in September, I learned of a professor of U.S.-Russian relations at another school who, on his own and with no extra budget or bureaucracy, recently linked his course through Web video with another course in U.S.-Russian relations in St. Petersburg, Russia. The same could be done for courses in climate policy, linking North and South, and even within schools. Imagine parallel deconstructions of climate legislation by, say, political science students and climate science students, using an online document dissector - essentially a more sophisticated, layered variant of  the speech and document annotations done here on Dot Earth

He mentions the power of radio and suggests that we may be unknowingly creating a massive network of informed and equipped people who simply need to be connected to share their experience and their story.

I want to help build networks of journalists and communicators in rich and poor places so that good ideas can be efficiently shared and flawed ones modified. The Earth Journalism Network is one example.  Developing Radio Partners is another. When writing my  book on the Amazon, I learned about the power of radio (which was an organizing tool for the rubber tappers seeking to gain land rights). But this potential goes way beyond radio. What happens to all those " one laptop per child" machines? Are they simply dropped off, or are the recipients cultivated as a network?

It is a powerful thought, and one that's becoming all the more possible when you see things like in Rwanda where the government is trying to establish the country as a technological hub for East Africa and beyond.

In a recent piece to commemorate five years of Global Voices Online, David Sasaki wrote about the motive behind the initiative to bring together bloggers from around the world to share insights about life in their corner. "Bridge-builders", he called them.

As he points out in the post, the hope was to study "The role that bloggers play in filling voids of information from 'under-covered parts of the world' and 2) the role that 'bridge-builders' play in amplifying their voices across cultural, national and linguistic divides."

To be honest, I didn't grasp this while I was in Uganda. I was focused on the state of journalism in the country. When I left I felt there was much connecting-of-dots to be done, and when the opportunity to write this blog came up I jumped at it as a way to explore how to do that.

I can't say all those dots are connected. But I feel as though I, and many others, are beginning to see the ways that communication can have a drastic impact on development and governance that goes far beyond strengthening media. That, mixed with the explosion of tools that make it possible, is a powerful tool.

Timing is a funny thing. I began this blog about a month after returning to Canada, and now, over 200 posts later, I end it about a month before I move to Liberia to take up a media training position in Monrovia.

I will leave in February with all these ideas, and the hope that more dots can be connected in the effort to seize the opportunity to connect people and in doing so change the way development is done and thought about.

At the many conferences I attended (many on behalf of Governance Village as part of GV's weekly coverage of Canadian development and governance issues), I met fascinating people full of incredible experience and ideas. But still, even with the Internet and so many other communication tools, those ideas and experience have an all-too-limited scope within the development community.

With any luck the term "development community" will be obsolete in a few years, replaced instead by simply "community". So that these ideas can be better shared between organizations, between countries and between populations who may not today think much about "development"-- and all this without having to attend conferences or write papers (both of which will remain important). Rather there will be means in place that connect classrooms in Kampala with classrooms in Kansas, and populations in Haiti with populations in Holland.

Journalists can help to facilitate this by ensuring important stories see the light of day, through newspapers and radio stations, news sites and blogs.

I'll miss this site, and the insightful comments from many readers. For a while I won't be sure what to do with the interesting tabs I keep open on my computer that I want to write about (how about two recent Reuters Alertnet articles about how the economic crisis has affected aid groups? Fits in with previous GV coverage here, and here).

I will be setting up a new site soon. When it goes online, in the next month or so, a link will be available at www.christophermason.ca. I hope to continues the dialogue with many of you, and thanks for taking some of your time to visit this site over the past year and a half.