May 2012
5 posts
Knight News Challenge: Announcing the next Knight... →
newschallenge:
Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken
The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the pace of innovation. Winners of Round 1, which focused on networks, will be announced June 18. Here, Journalism and Media Innovation…
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“As Tech In Asia reveals – citing a Chinese language report from Sina Tech — the...”
– China Confirms it Now Has More Than 1 Billion Mobile Phone Users (via thenextweb)
NationBuilder is awesome but... →
I think it’s too heavy for most advocates to take advantage of. It’s like if you gave me a manual transmission car and I’d never even driven an automatic.
Want Data to Have Impact? Build More Bridges... →
Why we need more bridges between technologists and advocates (who know messaging, strategy and policy):
…delivering public data is like building a house: there are future “tenants” (policymakers and end-users) who will “live in” the house but have a vague idea of what an ideal design might look like, and then there are “contractors” executing the design (data experts and programmers)....
Technology and development: The limits of... →
OLPC is an example of a holdover from the salad days of ICT4D, where smart people thought that technology was maybe more than 10% of the solution.
April 2012
5 posts
Notes From Peter Thiel's Lectures on Startups →
“Progress comes in two flavors: horizontal/extensive and vertical/intensive. Horizontal or extensive progress basically means copying things that work. In one word, it means simply “globalization.” Consider what China will be like in 50 years. The safe bet is it will be a lot like the United States is now. Cities will be copied, cars will be copied, and rail systems will be copied. Maybe...
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User Stories Are Important
If you’re trying to get people to adopt anything new - from a blog to a social network to a new phone - and that’s why I went through a few for the engine room’s directory of tech support resources for advocacy - with a particular focus on our board of advisors.
Read it at our site.
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Mapping Violent Incidents Where There Are Many
What’s the point? To start - building awareness, visualizing patterns, providing data for different kinds of advocacy, and possibly even deterrence (although that’s a stretch). I’m working on a project to do this in a data sensitive environment (there’s lots of surveillance). Have a relevant experience? Get in touch.
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February 2012
2 posts
1 tag
November 2011
1 post
6 tags
Liberationtech: How the Next Generation Diaspora*... →
After leaving Diaspora*, Liberation Technology’s Yosem Companys discusses what would be necessary to create an alternative social network for human rights defenders, issue advocates and other who must be concerned with security. The huge challenge that any new online space has to overcome, of course, is competing with Facebook’s network effect. Here’s liberationtech:
An online...
September 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Too Many Messages and Only One Facebook Page:...
This post draws from over 30 in-depth, semi structured interviews conducted with coordinators of and participants in the Egyptian revolution between March and August 2011 that I did in collaboration with the engine room. It was originally published on Technosociology.org
By late July, Egyptian protesters in Cairo had been camped out in Tahrir Square for nearly 3 weeks. Though the mood was jovial,...
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Training South Asia's Youngest Civil Society...
I just got back from doing a new media advocacy week long workshop in Sri Lanka with youth leaders from throughout South Asia. Posted this at The Huffington Post
This summer, frustration towards pervasive corruption in India reached a tipping point when hunger striker Anna Hazare mobilized thousands. While an awakening of the world’s largest pluralistic democracy should perhaps not come as a huge...
July 2011
1 post
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Technology and Human Rights
Here’s a good write-up of my panel at the Personal Democracy Forum this June, written by The Reboot’s Emma Gardner, who was in the audience (thanks for joining Emma, although why anyone went to our panel over Cory Doctorow’s is a mystery ;). She writes:
In a globalized world, technology originally designed to solve a particular problem for a subset of people in the US (say,...
May 2011
1 post
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Sustain a Social Movement After Initial Successes
At Mashable, I just posted some tips for keeping supporters engaged around a campaign or cause, in the context of recent and ongoing pro-democracy campaigns in the Middle East and North Africa. Here’s an excerpt:
Egyptians’ effective use of Facebook has given life to a slew of hopeful pages and groups throughout the region. This makes sense: Facebook, if combined with the right message,...
April 2011
1 post
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How Can Tech-Enhanced Social Movements Keep Going?
As someone who looks closely at the role of new technologies in movement building, it’s been interesting, and often disheartening, to see how youth movements that are harnessing technology more than ever also face challenges in reconstituting themselves after initial big successes. The characteristics of a networked social movement are as advantageous for mobilization as they are hurdles for...
March 2011
1 post
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Lessons Learned from the Arab Spring
At the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX last week, I spoke about lessons learned for activists from the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa. Here’s an excerpt from my write up of the talk, posted at Movements.org:
SXSW Interactive is over, and I’m happy to report that while the topic of technology’s role in social movements was was a popular one, I never...