June 22, 2012
The magnificent and brilliant Silvia Caicedo (who needs to start a blog already) sent me this based on a conversation we had where I was freaking out about helping civil society organizations use social media and cloud services. Let me explain: I am a geek. I love tech. I’m often the first one to start […]
June 21, 2012
In Digital Activism 101, Mary Joyce writes that activists can use digital technology to do only five things: shape public opinion, plan an action, protect activists, share a call to action, or take action. Then rinse and repeat. (Heh I love that phrase; stole it from Gunner’s awesome Another Cloud is Possible presentation.) Five seems to […]
June 15, 2012
My colleague Maria Garrido and her team finished a long investigation into the role that ICT hubs played in the wake of the Chilean earthquake. The earthquake was massive. Communities were cut off from each other and as people tried to secure assistance and contact loved ones, ICTs played an important role. While cybercafés, telecenters, […]
In civil society spaces, particularly for NGOs and funders who feel pressure to tout/justify their own impact, incentives to share content are often mixed. Organizations and individuals are often torn. Post to someone else’s site increases exposure to a particular post, but also imposes opportunity costs — eyeballs are not drawn to their site. Facebook […]
June 11, 2012
On May 11, 2012, the Ministry of Justice of Georgia launched the “Computer Knowledge Society Initiative” to promote digital literacy and e-skills, with a focus on economic development. Will they build on learning from other countries? How can the global library and telecentre communities help them succeed?
March 28, 2012
Maria Garrido presented an outstanding TASCHA Talk on Monday on the role of ICT in the revolution in Egypt. It’s easy to get hooked on the news narrative that made events in Iran and Egypt “Twitter Revolutions,” however Maria and her team were emphatic that such a narrative overemphasizes the role of technology. The technology […]
February 29, 2012
Mike Best and his team at Georgia Tech have designed a real-time election monitoring tool that aggregates social media content from about 20 different sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Ushahidi, blogs, and SMS messages.
December 1, 2011
Following Open Cambodia 2011, I spent a day touring libraries with Margaret Bywater, a 25 year veteran of Cambodian libraries and development work. Margaret is at the epicenter of the movement to train librarians and open libraries in Cambodia. It is an uphill struggle because the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970′s […]
November 21, 2011
This mind map lays out a framework for thinking about “innovation grounds” — spaces where people can come together and generate ideas, solutions, knowledge, culture, and relationships. It emerged from perceiving coworking spaces as next-generation telecentres; seeing connections between telecentres, coworking spaces, hackerspaces, and libraries; and being somewhat exasperated at how libraries are often overlooked as key actors in community development — despite the fact that they’ve always been places where people convene, learn, and create (especially information… and we’re in the information age, Hello!).
October 5, 2011
Seven NGOs share innovative technology programs at the “Learning from outside the library” session at the Gates Foundation Global Libraries annual grantee peer learning meeting. 
