bookmark

"After four years of steady growth, FrontlineSMS has witnessed a dizzying rise in activity over the past few months. One full-time position has increased to three with the hiring of Josh Nesbit as our FrontlineSMS Ambassador and Alex Anderson as our lead developer. And thanks to new funding from the Rockefeller Foundation last month, we’re now looking to build our team further and fill two more positions – in Software Development and Project Management."

Only in DC.

This guide "A Guide to Managing ICT in the Voluntary and Community Sector" provides all the information that need to successfully assess, plan, implement and maintain & nbsp;organisation's ICT

A poster depicting the ingredients in a "Hot Pocket"

"According to the lawyer for the family of the boy whose school spied on him at home through a covert webcam application on his laptop, the boy was disciplined for eating candies that bear a passing resemblance to pills.

The Lower Merion School District has admitted that the laptops it distributed to students were configured so that administrators could activate their webcams without alerting the user, but insists that the spying capability was only used to help find stolen laptops.

However, the lawyer for the Robbins family says that their son was called into the vice-principal's office and confronted with a photo secretly snapped by his laptop's webcam while he was eating Mike & Ike's candy, and he was accused of taking drugs. "

"To learn about the experiences in the processes of formulation of ICT policies, the institutions have undertaken a study of the formulation process of ICT policies in Bangladesh, Uganda and Bolivia aiming at two objectives: 1) To understand the importance of the participation of diverse actors as a success factor for effective ICT policy formulation; 2) To understand the relationship of the ICT policies investigated with poverty alleviation

Last week, it was announced that DynCorp – a major private security firm - had acquired Casals Associates, an international development company.

Connectivity challenges in post-quake Haiti

Yesterday I attended a World Bank discussion on "Chinese Investment in Africa's Industrial Zones: prospects, challenges, and opportunity for Africa". Such "one-stop shop" zones have captured the interest of a variety of Chinese businesses, in addition to the World Bank, which is in talks with Beijing to collaboratively set up low-cost factories in these zones.

. Achieving the health-related MDGs requires strengthening health systems, particularly in the following areas of (a) Expanding the primary health-care workforce and enriching the skill levels; (b) Upgrading and broadening medical infrastructure and logistics; (c) Providing affordable access to drugs and medical supplies; (d) Improving health decision-making and early warning by enhancing data collection and analysis of disease trends. This brief summarizes cost-effective information and communication technology (ICT) applications to support improvements in these areas in least developed, landlocked and small island countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Fascinating forensic photoshopping

Great, now we need to start cryptographically sign tweets and invoke 5th amendment rights to not reveal key passphrases

"But it was clear that at the conference, the primary news platform was Twitter, with real-time annotation of the panels on stage and critical updates about what was happening elsewhere at a very hectic convention. At 52, I succumbed, partly out of professional necessity. And now, nearly a year later, has Twitter turned my brain to mush? No, I’m in narrative on more things in a given moment than I ever thought possible, and instead of spending a half-hour surfing in search of illumination, I get a sense of the day’s news and how people are reacting to it in the time that it takes to wait for coffee at Starbucks. Yes, I worry about my ability to think long thoughts — where was I, anyway? — but the tradeoff has been worth it. Some time soon, the company won’t say when, the 100-millionth person will have signed on to Twitter to follow and be followed by friends and strangers. That may sound like a MySpace waiting to happen — remember MySpace? — but I’m convinced Twitter is here to stay. "

Mobile tech as a tool for social development is makling the front pages in 2009. They are hyped as panathea for global issues such as rural health in developing countries, poverty alleviation, making rural markets more efficient, and activism.
We have been working in this field since 2005 and have been leading industry analysist, with direct work in a number of areas such as elections and democratic participation. While we agree that mobile phones are revolutionizing the developing world, we think it is time to take a very honest and realistic look at the promises of mobile tech for development and social change, and where these promises are falling short -- and of, course, why, and what to do about that.

I don't think the FDIC understands the spirit of "freedom of infomation"

Organizations like the World Bank are being asked to help finance very expensive, large-scale purchases of printed educational material in many countries. (And because of the success of Education For All in many places, such purchases are bigger than ever before.)

Sector-wide the most under resourced aspect of communicating in emergencies is the communications with those affected by the emergency. All too often the onus is on getting communications materials out to the Head Office or to the international media -- overlooking those at the heart of the emergency.
Information is a right, and it is a deliverable. It bestows power -- power to take control of a situation that is by definition out of your control.

Comparative advantage or dead-end road? Innovation requires doing, not managing....

Opposable thumbs? Who needs em!

The concept that a color could be proprietary always bothered me...

In the New York Times article Nonprofit Laptops: A Dream Not Yet Over, we are teased with the suggestion that next month we'll have the OLPC 1.5 in production, with double the speed and four times more memory than the XO-1.

Before we get geek lust for OLPC hardware, I'd like to congratulate Sugar Labs on its software - the ever demure Walter Bender let it slip this week that his team has passed a very important psychological milestone:

1. I had been meaning to mention that already several weeks ago we exceeded one-million downloads from activities.sugarlabs.org. We are now over 1.1 million.

Mr. Roodman’s blog post said that lenders like Mr. Kristof were not making direct loans. Borrowers like Ms. Cruz already have loans from microfinance institutions by the time their pictures are posted on Kiva’s Web site.

Thus, the direct person-to-person connection Kiva offered was in fact an illusion. Kiva’s lenders were actually backstopping microfinance institutions, and since Kiva and other online giving and lending models pride themselves on their transparency, Mr. Roodman and others suggested it might better explain what its lenders’ money — about $100 million over four years — was really doing.

Yesterday, the new media team at the White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of the LAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine.

This move is obviously a big win for open source. As John Scott of Open Source for America (a group advocating open source adoption by government, to which I am an advisor) noted in an email to me: "This is great news not only for the use of open source software, but the validation of the open source development model. The White House's adoption of community-based software provides a great example for the rest of the government to follow."