Jon's blog

CropScience.org has a great paper on the potential use of social media and Internet access for rural farmers. What sets it apart from most Social Media for Development writings is that is takes a serious look at what must be in place for a project of this scope to work.

It compares farmers in Uganda and Australia, which is less ridiculous than it sounds. The Australian farmers - with training and a significantly higher support network (from government regulations all the way to average numbers of computers/100 people;

This is pure brilliance, courtesy BoingBoing:

This giant billboard, posing hard questions for Sarah Palin, was lit up across the road from her LA rally site on Saturday: you could send your own Palin questions to it via SMS. Nice technology use from the California Dems.

The Chavez likes Intel -- but not Windows? (BBC)The BBC is reporting that Venezuela has ordered a million laptops "based on the Intel Classmate" in partnership with Portugal:

Venezuela is buying the portable computers as part of a $3bn (£1.66bn) bilateral trade deal with Portugal that also covers housing and utilities. Portugal is manufacturing the blue and white laptops under licence from Intel and are broadly based on the chip maker's design of its Classmate computer. [...]

The deal with Venezuela follows an agreement between Intel and Portugal, signed in August for Classmate machines.

Under that deal Portugal agreed to buy 500,000 machines to enable every six-to-10-year-old in the country to get one.

It sounds like this is an extension of Portugal's original tender for 500,000 laptops, but whether the hardware changed discussed are merely the same ones already mentioned or not is uncertain, but the article does hint that it will be further hardware-customized for Venezuela. The BBC article describes the modified Classmate as:

This week's Technology Salon was on information sharing and ways to use social media and peer-generated content in international development. Less of a lecture and more of a roundtable discussion, lots of interesting ideas were floated, from using Peace Corps volunteers as on-the-ground information resources to running contests for ways to use technology in development scenarios.

The conference opened with presentations by three hard hitting visionaries -- Counsellor Lisa Chiles, the senior most career officer at USAID; Michael Rawding from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential, and Ambassador David Gross, the U.S. Coordinator for information technology and foreign policy. Chiles provided an overview of the promises of technology, focusing on finding low-hanging fruits in education where a modest, well-directed investment can dramatically help an underfunded education system. Rawding spoke on the Microsoft roadmap for developing countries; a mix of market expansion and market creation (I mean, philanthropic work). Gross reminded us that the world is changing in unpredictable ways due to technology, and creating a global, mobile workforce where people are no longer (I'd argue, slightly less) bound to grow up to do the same work their parents do.

The rest of the day was largely panels - on ICT for disaster preparedness and relief, mobile banking, PPPs (Public-Private Partnerships) eHealth.

ICT and disaster response was mainly a show-and-tell of various tools and websites (all leveraging Microsoft technology). Absent was any discussion or mention of Sahana (an open source, quick-deployment disaster information management system) or the amazing work done using ning.com (Web 2.0 and quasi-open-source) to provide coordinated responses and information about the hurricanes this season.