I (Still) Believe in the Internet
This is the first in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet
Posts by Category
- ict4d 224
- olpc 101
- web 2.0 and f/loss 72
- hactivismo 65
- development theory 58
- human rights 50
- mobile4dev 38
- ict policy 29
- tinkering 25
- citizen journalism 14
- ipr 13
- crypto 4
- comedy 3
- networks 2
- socent 2
- copyright 2
- privacy 2
- ict4edu 1
- 1984 1
- freespeech 1
- digisec 1
- floss 1
- tor 1
- security 1
- decentralization 1
ict4d
Time to Ideate!
Pivot-Twist-Dev takes the classic “pivot-twist” approach for idea pitches of taking a familiar concept and twisting it in a new way to the international deve...
Stop doing Technology for Good So Badly.
I’ve been reflecting on some of the challenges I’ve faced across multiple organizations trying to leverage the power of technology to create positive social ...
On Pragmatism and the OLPC
The XO-4 is the XO-1, and that’s… ok?
Maddening Development Madlibs
There is a set of tropes, if you will, in startup social-enterprise projects.
Technology, Cost, Outcomes: The Open Source debate does matter in ICT4D
The ICT_Works blog has come out swinging: Linux vs. Microsoft is the most useless debate in ICT4D
July 14: Citizen Media Day?
If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today’s events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.
Reminder: ICT4D@SXSW Happy Hour: Monday 5pm @ The Ginger Man
When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of tec...
ICT4D Happy Hour during SXSW
Register now at https://ict4dev.eventbrite.com/ - only 20 RSVPs available until we nail down a venue!
Nevermind: OLPC shouldn’t sell the XO laptop
OLPC News recently ran a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek article on How to buy an XO Laptop, which mainly pointed people to eBay. Which is sad, but eBay has long ...
SXSW 2010
I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media ...
ICT4D Meetup in Austin during SXSW
In Austin for South By SouthWest? Join folks interested in ICT for development at the Gingerman (3rd and Lavaca) from 4-7pm on Sunday! I’ll bring my OLPC f...
Collaboration and the XO Mesh
Time to mesh XOs Unless you're lucky enough to live within mesh range of many other XO users (or are part of an XO deployment or an innovative classroom pro...
Of Engineers and Kings: The Humanitarian Technology Challenge
"The time has come," the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax-- Of cabbages--and kings-- And why the sea is boiling hot...
Micro Telcos - Business Models for Rural Access?
Can Urban Connectivity Go Rural? This month’s Technology Salon approached last-mile connectivity problems from an entrepreneurship standpoint. What are the ...
IP4D
Intellectual Property is an oddball in international development
Let’s get together and mesh alright (One Laptop in Jamaica)
Jamaican ICT4D practitioners and teachers see the XO in action</div> OLPC and F/LOSS enthusiast Dr
What’s Really Hampering Development?
I’ve been pondering what I /really/ care about in terms of international development
Missing the point?
https://ictfordevelopment.wordpress.com/ provides a podcast on ICT issues in development
Defeating Ego in Development
I commented on NextBillion’s ongoing series responding to Michael Edwards’ new book, Just Another Emperor;<blockquote>I see the majority of this discus...
$10 laptop in India?
I’ll believe it when I see it, but the Times of India is reporting that the promised $10 laptop is closer to a reality, but right now it’s as real as the cra...
Small is bigger than big for OLPC deployment
Via Morgan Collett we learn that OLPC is discontinuing it’s “small” deployment support of 100-1000 XO laptop purchases:<div style="float: right; margin-l...
The XO Files Part IV: New Years Resolutions for 1CC
This entry is the beginning of a four part series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO" Read Part I here, then Part II, The New 4PC Market, and its Fa...
Drupal Mapping IV: Filtering and Customization of the Map
This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, a...
Holiday Computer Shopping
People always come to me for advice on computers and technology options over the giftmas season. To head this off somewhat at the pass, let me remind everyo...
Drupal Mapping III.5 - moving up in the world
It's been a while since I posted on my Drupal Mapping project, and that's partially because I've been spending some time getting a great site that aggregates...
What’s happening in Mumbai: Twitter and Real-time Citizen Media
Initial reports are now showing up on news sites; this very light-on-details article on BBC seems to be the first up on major news sites - but it's been burn...
Microsoft, the “third world” and anti-virus
For the past year or so, I've repeatedly been trying to bring up what I see as a huge, gaping hole in any project which uses Microsoft products for an ICT4De...
Drupal and Maps III: Getting Dirty.
This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, a...
TCO for low-cost computing in Education
The video archive of last Thursday's discussion at the World Bank on the total cost of ICT4E projects is now online at the Bank's eDevelopment thematic group...
Tomorrow: Total Cost of Operation and ICT4Education
Come by for a lively discussion on TCO (that I get to start out!) From the world bank: EVENT REMINDER A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interes...
Vote
If you see irregularities, call 1-866-our-vote for help and to report problems, and follow the current reports at OurVoteLive. Text your zip to Twitter Vote...
World Bank webcast: How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
I'll be leading the discussion at the World Bank this Thursday with a presentation by Vital Wave Consulting on their recent TCO calculations for low-cost com...
Drupal and GYSD Maps II: Modules in Play
Series: Overview | Modules | Structure and Taxonomies | On Drupal 6 | Functionality Drupal by itself is pretty powerful, but where it really shines is when ...
How I made a map for Global Youth Service Day 2009
Series: Overview | Modules | Structure and Taxonomies | On Drupal 6 | Functionality This is my "journal" of work in creating a user-modifiable map of the Gl...
The latest OLPC Upgrade
OLPC Upgrading - like an old defrag!Last Thursday, I upgraded my OLPC over some beers – sometimes, the best (and worst) ways to really test technology’s limi...
Linux Audio Server amusement
I'm currently using the laptop as the interim solution / testbed for the LAS idea. It's struggling to run amarok, but works nicely with qiv running a slides...
Social Media and ICT in Kenyan Agriculture
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 ...
A Linux Audio Server
I admit it. I have a Windows laptop at home. For a very long time, it was my primary system. For the past year or so, I've been using a Linux laptop as my...
What’s old is new again
Thin Clients - a.k.a. "dumb terminals" have a long history in computing, and tend to come up every few years (seems to be a ten year cycle) as the Grand Solu...
SMSing political questions
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...
Venezuela Chooses the Intel Classmate over the OLPC XO - kinda
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 partnershi...
The 3G OLPC Laptop
That’s three grand, not third generation.
Tech Salon: Information Sharing and Development
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 lect...
Microsoft4Dev Conference Wrap-up, Day 2
Day 2 was slightly less enervating regarding the blatant Microsoft plugs (only about 40 direct plugs, compared to the first day, where I lost count) Edward ...
ICT4D Conference Wrap-up - Day 1
The conference opened with presentations by three hard hitting visionaries -- Counsellor Lisa Chiles, the senior most career officer at USAID; Michael Rawdin...
Quick ways to go Mobile
MobileActive has a great entry on a handful of low cost, low-barrier ways to go mobile, from Twitter to desktop "guerilla" SMS campaigns (best run in develop...
The XO Files Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution
This entry is the third in the four-part series, “The XO Files: I Want to Believe” Read Part I here</em> What has OLPC done and what should it continu...
The XO Files Part II: The New 4PC Market, and its Failings
The same constraints that make the XO revolutionary for schools also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users wh...
The XO Files: I Want to Believe
This entry is the beginning of a four part series, The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO
Rescuing the baby from the thrown-out bathwater
Worldchanging's Jeremy Faludi calls it "reverse-leapfrogging", but is looking for a better name. It's reviving or importing concepts that used to exist: Gre...
Social Media for Change
Ning, if you haven't heard of it, is a roll-your-own "web 2.0" platform, where you can combine blogs, videos, forums, and so on in seconds in a web interface...
My 5 Minute Rule for Documentation
I have a policy which I follow religiously regarding when to document something, which I promote to my co-workers when training them on the staff wikis I cre...
SuBtle tricks
I enjoy activities that put the 'b" in subtle. This Greasemonkey script for FireFox translates dollar figures in webpages you view into Oil Barrels:
NPR Covers the OLPC
OLPC fell short?Morning Edition’s Cyrus Farivar talks about the One Laptop Per Child project: One Laptop Per Child was an ambitious promise to children in t...
A Simple Social Media Analogy
This quirky animation compares social media to ice cream to explain the value of basic customer generated content (uin the form of tagging, rating and commen...
Picking Nits with Microsoft over XP-on-XO
XP on the XOSo after the LaptopMag review of XP on the XO, the W2 Group (“a global marketing services ecosystem that helps CMOs in their new role as builders...
RSS is my favorite web magic
Note to techies - this article is intended for the nonprofit crowd and as such is basically an introduction to RSS. There's a few interesting things at the ...
XP on the OLPC XO, Round Two
Hands on with XP on the XO
One old OS per Child
I keep swearing that I’ll shift gears and focus more on the good parts of the One Laptop Per Child project like the fusion of public and private interests in...
More on OLPC in India
NextBillion on the OLPC in India
The OLPC / OSS Dream
The always-amusing XKCD webcomic illustrates the secret dream on the OLPC project in encouraging children to learn and, in doing so, learn programming:
Zero to Fame in Three Hours
Today, Twitter launched one person from their normal Internet life to getting news on the California-regional LAist and valleywag blogs, CNet, a top-rated d...
The world’s (new) cheapest laptop (for today)
Following fast on the heels of the CherryPal low-cost computer is the Impulse, advertised at $130 for each laptop (but you have to buy 100 at a time). It ha...
Slashdotted
I seem to be up at Slashdot.org again with the OLPC; this time with my OLPCNews piece combing through the video of Windows on the OLPC (also published on Jon...
OLPC GrassCon
Watching the GrassCon Watch live video from GrassCon Channel on Justin.tv
mBanking: Fears and Promises
This morning's Technology Salon covered the legal hurdles facing mBanking - using your cell phone to interact with your bank account - in developing world sc...
OLPCs with CellModems
Someone's stealing my best ideas Wayan found a gem in the Times of India article on OLPC and World Bank funding:
OLPC joyride no so joyful (or, what Jon did all day Sunday)
So, this weekend I thought it'd be a great time to upgrade to the latest joyride builds, which are rumored to have solved the earlier record problems, and ho...
Many Paths Leading to the “Base of the Pyramid”
BoP Spending (on Flickr by Merkur*) (on Flickr by Merkur*)NextBillion, which spends most of its time praising social entrepreneurship, comments on Michae...
eBay Market Data
In thinking about eBay in my post on tricky ways to "Give Many" OLPC XO laptops, I was reminded about something that has bugged me for a very long time about...
Could Many Give Many?
Peer networks of small schools, governments, and any other interested parties banding together to be able to meet the minimum order.
Simple Global Pleasures
You might remember the Youtube video of this guy named Matt who did this silly dance and captured it on video everywhere he went a few years ago? Well.. h...
Technology Transformations for the Base of the Pyramid by Al Hammond
BoP Spending (on Flickr by Merkur*)Last Wednesday, Al Hammond of NextBillion.net fame (who now hangs his hat at Ashoka), presented to the Washington, DC I...
DC XO Chat Server
Join local activities!So, after xochat went into deep hibernation (though it’s back to stay and has its own regional servers), Wayan asked for friends to cha...
Turnabout is fair(-use) play
The Associated Press has been rattling sabers of bloggers quoting (even with credit and links) from AP articles, claiming that any quote longer than 5 words ...
Portability vs The World
The DC area mailing list for nonprofit technologists has been alight with suggestions on what the best portable machine is this past week, debating screen si...
Twitter and Outreach
I'm sure you're tired of hearing me talk about twitter as an innovative and easy tool for outreach and engagement. So listen instead to Amy Gahran and her c...
On Hubris and the 1CC version of OLPC
Business Week has a good article summing up the recent history of the OLPC project and it's difficulties with sales numbers, fading promises, Intel, and its ...
SpaceWarp
Some kids had train sets. Actually, I did but it bored me to death. One xmas I got a SpaceWarp. Sure, I started out building the basic design they gave el...
2.0 NonProfit Conference wrap-up and notes
While few of the concepts at the 2.0 nonprofit conference were hardly new to me (Use twitter! uh, ok.); it was good to see where other nonprofits were and w...
Windows Free
No, not the OLPC, but here's a good story about a guy who's been MS-free for a year.
Vacation!
Jon is on vacation this week on the west coast, so don't expect any insight (or email responses!)
Ultraportable Ubuntu?
Would you like an Ubuntu to go?A recent The Guardian interview with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth reveals this gem: TG: Will you be coming out with a tail...
Project HA-T1093
No, it's not some early George Lucas film, it's the IADB project title for the "Pilot of the One Laptop per Child Model" in Haiti that Wayan gave a great ove...
MS on XO: It’s so bad you have to laugh
Check out this video of James Utzschneider from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team walking us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO (Video via OLPCNews.com h...
OLPC Now Microsoft-only
I hope it goes just as well as the Intel partnership. What a disaster. OLPCNews and the NYTimes have more information on the story.
Pots, kettles and OLPC fanaticism
Like most in the OLPC community, Ivan Krstić's discussion on the OLPC yesterday left me (almost) speechless, and even Wayan at OLPCNews left it mostly as a r...
Good will sharing
I read BoingBoing - it provides a steady stream of new and interesting things around the net, and the occasional IT policy tidbit. Lots of people read boing...
Scott McNealy video from CGD
Unfortunately; this clip seems to focus tightly on his IP statements; leaving out some of his more relevant popoints on "sharing" - centric resource creation...
Notes from Open Source, Open Education and Eco-friendly: Can Sharing Improve Policy?
Scott McNealy from Sun was hosted by the Center for Global Development to talk about how ideas of openness and sharing work in business and how they can help...
It’s full of stars….
Somehow, this is exactly like what I expect it should look like: Courtesy of Nexus's Facebook plugin All I can say is wow.
Robert Strauss vs. Peace Corps: Round 2
You may remember Strauss from his NYT article damning the Peace Corps back in January. It made the point that the increasing numbers of volunteers is decrea...
Twittering for Global Youth Service Day II
Global Youth Service Day will be brought to you in live Twitter form with event updates (and locations, to broadcast on TwitterVision.com) throughout the day.
The Opposite of Schadenfreude
OLPCNews has been ripe with the continuing disintegration of OLPC, from Mary Lou Jepsen who got out just in time, then with Ivan's departure due to differenc...
Negroponte on the future of OLPC and Sugar
The Big NN sent out an email, reposted at OLPCNews.com, with the current status of OLPC and Sugar, it's UI, to address the issues finding their way out of th...
ICT4Dev Career Meetup Notes
Here is essentially a list of resources from the DC ICT4Dev Meetup on careers (you'll have to do the googling and hyperlinking yourselves. Email me at jon @...
Notes from “Democratizing Development: How Technology is Disrupting Traditional Development Models”
Below the fold are my notes from the Democratizing Development: How Technology is Disrupting Traditional Development Models panel by SID/W at Chemonics on th...
Lower Your Eee-XPectations
APCMap has an insightful review of their experiences with Windows XP on the Asus Eee. This isn't (yet) any different version of XP than you'd have on a "nor...
Updating the XO
I updated my OLPC from the shipped build 656 to the release candidate for the muh-anticipated Update.1, here's what I did and what happened: from a root term...
How low-cost portables can compete
Wayan at OLPCNews.com has an article up on what he's terming "3P computing" (Power, Price, Performance). Some of the commentators and myself would also add ...
More on Low Cost Laptops
Slashdot's wading in to the discussion on what is a low-cost laptop and what features should it have. At least this time no one's calling me a child hater.
HP enters the low-cost laptop market (kinda)
HP, the current #1 global PC seller, has entered the mini/low-cost laptop market:
DC International Development Events Calendar
Big thanks to GWU's Organization for International Development for importing their events calendar into google calendars. I was getting pretty close to doin...
Innovation is not adding more of the same
You might say that I've at times been critical of the OLPC project, but rarely do I have anything bad to say about their actual technology. Intel has a new ...
Good People Day 2008
I like the good people day idea all about giving props where due. Since I'll be nose-down in work preparing for the upcoming Global Youth Service Day April ...
Twittering for Global Youth Service Day
So coming up on 25th-28th of April is the 20th annual Global Youth Service Day, and I'm trying to see if I can do something fun with Twitter; like having you...
TurnYourWorldAround’s Connect-a-Kid and the OLPC
Disclosure: I work at Youth Service America, where Tara Suri is a member of the National Youth Council</a>, a collection of amazing young people who ma...
I have to ask…
To reveal the fathomless depths of my geek depravity, one Friday a month I get together with fellow alumni and current students of my International Science a...
Using the OLPC - Day 2
Installing xo activities is a snap, up there with OSX's .dmg install process. Installing anything else can be a bit of a pain, as it's command line installa...
LiveBlogging my OLPC
So I got my OLPC around 11am Saturday morning. Finally. Note: the FedEx AltRefTracking never registered that it was on its way, and I never go to the Lapto...
Web 2.0 ‘08 Predictions Update
I predicted in January that Facebook would "hit its limit. I predict some more ad snafus a la Beacon, and the 3rd party apps become overwhelming and all-too-...
It’s Late March, where’s my G1G1 OLPC Laptop?
One month ago today was the last time I heard anything from OLPC about my laptop, ordered back in December:
Rethinking the OLPC Distribution: A “Base of the Pyramid” approach?
<p>What would a "bottom of the pyramid" approach for the OLPC look like? While the OLPC vision is bottom-up and ch...
LOLPC - One LOL per OLPC
Disclaimer: If you take this post seriously, you need to relax. UPDATE:There are some LOLPCs hiding away at lolnptech!
Negroponte stepping away from the OLPC helm
Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization […] staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the worl...
Martin Langhoff and the XS-ive OLPC School Server
The XS School Server list has been a hotbed of activity the past few weeks with management changes as well as some disgruntled people seem to realize that th...
Twittering for Good
There's increasing buzz on using Twitter for non-profit goals; from the familiar sources of Idealist, NetSquared and of course Beth Kanter. It seems mostly ...
Fujitsu joins the tiny laptop market
The new Fujitsu LifeBook u810 looks, frankly, a lot like the OLPC.
Slacktivisism for Fair Trade (Updated)
My friend over at Esperanza en Accion in Nicaragua, has let people know that someone is attempting aland grab against a cooperative clothing factory, Nueva V...
The OLPC’s Stone Soup
Birmingham, Alabama has had possibly the first of many rude awakenings worldwide as they realize that the XOs don't come with an Internet connection included...
MS offers to buy Yahoo?
Engadget is reporting that Microsoft has posted a formal offer to buy Yahoo (and by proxy, flickr, del.icio.us, and steer the development of Flock (...into t...
Rubber, meet Road…
The original goal for the G1G1 project was hoped to be around 40 million dollars, making for almost 200,000 "get one" laptops -- and they set that goal well;...
OLPC Learning Club DC: Tonight!
Provided I can sneak out of work early enough to hit the gym and make it over; I'll be at Greater DC Cares tonight as they host an OLPC Learning Club event, ...
OLPC in the US
OLPC will now also be available to US schools:
OECD on Web 2.0 and Copyright
You normally don't expect such staid bodies as the OECD to go and start talking about Web 2.0 and user-created content (or "UCC" in their terminology), but t...
Social Technology is also Social (in real life)
Wired is running a story on how social networking technologies support, rather than diminish real-life networks of people:
Inside the XO-1 Laptop with Bunnie Studios
Bunnie Studios (e.g. Andrew Shane Huang), who just finished his Ph.D at MIT's Project Ares group, has published an insightful review of the hardware design o...
More on Intel and OLPC
Even NextBillion.net has weighed in on the Intel/OLPC divorce and included the full interview with Negroponte, even as Slashdot dredges up last year's "scand...
A Review of One-to-One Laptop Programs in the USA
Being the geek that I am, I got a copy of Mark Warschauer's latest book, Laptops and Literacy, having been a huge fan of his insightful commentary on the "di...
News Update: Competitors have a hard time partnering
The GeekCulture comic mashes up the OLPC/Intel spat with the well-worn, "heartfelt" Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! video that made the rounds a few mon...
OLPC Give One Get One: A Learning Experience?
Over at OLPCNews, Wayan's written a wrap-up of the Give one, Get one (G1G1) program by the OLPC Foundation to date, and its successes and shortcomings. Here...
Computer Choices FAQ
People often ask me, as a technology geek, what kind of computer they should get, so I'm putting this post together as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to ...
Web 2.0 ‘08
A few predictions for what we'll see online in 2008:
Other Web 2.0 resources
A recent thread of emails over on the 501 Tech Club DC email list brought more Web 2.0 resources to light. So in the spirit of sharing: NetworkForGood has a...
Google Maps Mashup
Change.org has a wonderful mashup of 501 c 3 nonprofits arranged on a Google Map, as an example of a Good Idea (tm) for Google Maps usage. You can start at ...
Web 2.0 Guide for NonProfits
A quick rundown of my recent posts looking at the value of using Open Source in combination with Web 2.0 tools for non-profits / NGOs and the like: The Powe...
OSS and Web 2.0: The Natural Partnership of Peer Production
In an earlier post I took you through some of my favorite desktop F/LOSS projects, and I've blathered on about the Flock browser separately. If you really w...
Write Once, Post Everywhere
I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me sho...
Teens and Social Media
Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out on Teens and Social Media; finding that girls are the leading content creators (excepting video p...
Immigrants take all the best jobs
For example, I bet there's a long line of good ol' american workers who would love to have solid, agriculture jobs in Florida, like the one described in this...
Good thoughts on code bloat
Steve Yegge writes on code bloat: I recently had the opportunity to watch a self-professed Java programmer give a presentation in which one slide listed Pro...
Who’s to blame for a bad loan?
A good friend of mine has condensed a lot of good, critical thoughts on lending -- from the subprime market to the World Bank, into one good blog post, riffi...
A Better Browser II
Hopefully you're enjoying Flock now. If you already had accounts on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and/or del.icio.us, you've seen how amazingly easy i...
Vista Loses 2007
All I can say is ouch: It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient fil...
A Better Browser
The problem I face most often when trying to show someone a new powerful open source tool is that they just can't believe that the things I tell them are pos...
Twitter Account
In case you hadn't noticed, I now have a Twitter account which you can follow, have SMSed to your cell phone, and so on. I wrote a longer entry talking abou...
Open Source Software: By volunteers, for volunteers.
If you think back to the opening Econ 101 entry, I ran through network effects, transaction costs, rivalrous and excludable goods, and their inverse, anti-ri...
Off Topic: Torture
Salon.com has an exclusive article detailing the detainment of an innocent Yemeni citizen in CIA's black site prisons:
An Overview of Popular Web 2.0 sites
So far we've really been pushing the underlying concepts, with a few tips to actual websites, examples, and tools. Without further ado, I'd now like to jump...
Web 2.0 101: Speaking the Language
The last entry was the theoretical underpinnings of how this whole web 2.0 thing can work, so today let's get into some of the more common terms you've heard...
This should come later in the F/LOSS and Web 2.0 101 series, but Twitter is a fun and simple tool with huge potential. I've begun using Twitter, and have it...
The Power of Open
I presented and later ran a roundtable discussion on using web 2.0 and open source software for service/volunteer organizations. I kept getting requests for...
Nicaraguan Artesania for Giftmas!
Esperanza en Accion, a fair-trade, social justice organization working with Nicaraguan artisans, has a huge selection of items in their online eBay store, ju...
Repeat after me
"Buying falafel mix does not a terrorist make." The FBI might do well to write that in chalk 500 times, and hope that it sinks in, as they're wasting our mo...
A Halloween Horror Story: Nigeria Buys Replaces Linux with Windows XP on Classmate PCs
Originally published at OLPCNews.com, check there for the comment thread.
Unintended Consequences of the OLPC Give-one-Get-One
Originally published on OLPCNews.
Celebrate LOGO’s 40th Birthday
Originally published on OLPCNews The Logo programming language is 40 years old, writes WIRED. A Logo spiral
JWZ on backups
JWZ as usual offers good, if acerbic, advice; today on backups: I am here to tell you about backups. It’s very simple. Option 1: Learn not to care about yo...
DRM Redux
Back in the late 90s, as Napster was being circled by vultures, I dreamt of starting a consulting group which would seek out clients needing help and place d...
Firefox Addons
You could probably guess that I love the Firefox web browser, right? I'm also naturally a big fan of the addons you can get to extend its power. I'm always...
World Bank Roller Coaster Press Release
Carrot: "The World Bank has promised to contribute a record $3.5bn (£1.7bn) to help the world's poorest countries. The figure is double what the agency init...
Update on Burma and the Internet
It sounds like the Burmese government has simply cut off their net connections. From Boingboing:
Proxies
The BBC has a story on the Burmese Monks and their cyberskills: The internet has also become a virtual space for political groups who could not openly expre...
India
I'll be in India for most of the rest of September...
Going their own way
The WaPo has an excellent story of the New Latin Left movement, which has reduced their dependence on IMF and Bank loans (and their requisite policy prescri...
The OLPC and the Internet
Michael Bletsas stands ready to defend the OLPC The bitfrost specification indicates that perhaps some countries may not believe that the unique green bra...
Blasts from the Past
Remember our discovery over at OLPCNews.com of the proto-OLPC project in Senegal? Our insightful readers dug even deeper and found some more news articles f...
User Interfaces: Aero vs. Beryl
I don't have all the bells and whistles that the guy in this movie has running, but maybe it's time to suck it up and upgrade to the newest version. Aero is...
A bit of privacy for your email!
The AP reports that email may now enjoy 4th amendment rights:
Vatican vs Amnesty International
The Vatican urges Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International (BBC): The Vatican also said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty over what it ...
OLPC History: Senegalese Failure in Implementation
What does a Senegalese technology implementation project from 1982 have to do with One Laptop Per Child? Well, you might be surprised. At the same time tha...
Own your own number!
Sure, you've named a star after yourself by paying some scammers lots of moolah, but now you can get your own 128-bit number!, just like the AACS-LA! Mine i...
Google’s Shareholders Whack Google with a Cluestick
The recent shareholders meeting for Google has an interesting section on Internet Censorship, which is appended in whole below. It seems that these sharehol...
Geektopia achieved
My geektopia has arrived: The fridge has now become aware of its contents; and it is capable of establishing direct contact between you and their producers....
Guess the Country
From Development Gateway: X plans to offer 1.2 million of the country’s poorest citizens a computer with broadband Internet access for a daily fee of €1 (...
Let’s try this again
Here's a scenario. My company, who you'be never heard of before, has just created a revolutionary new car. It will run almost as well as a new "normal" car...
The true cost of the OLPC
A while back I wrote on the real cost of the OLPC laptop for OLPCNews:
Library Grants, Laptop Gambles
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds asks the simple question of the OLPC: "Will this laptop save the world?" in MIT's Technology Review.
OLPC Implementation Costs
I'm now writing some OLPC posts for OLPCNews.com; my first post is uncovering some of the hidden costs in OLPC implementation - it turns out that the $100 ...
A Million Laptop Hangover
Over the next few years, ministers of education worldwide will be waking up from their celebratory launch parties announcing the agreements for the OLPC lapt...
World Bank and National Economic Models
I got to attend a lecture by William Easterly on his new book, focusing on whether or not foreign aid can affect world poverty (spoiler: the past 5 decades d...
OLPC now XO?
There's a developing thread at Engadget about the branding efforts on the OLPC, as well as some argument to its utility. I of course jumped in, responding to...
Copyright
I used to use recipes as a good, non-new/Internet-y example of how you can still make profits (recipe books) with no attempt at copyright enforcement (who c...
Zimbabwe
A lot more information about Zimbabwe, some history, and also a look at their draconian proposed wiretap law (it's possible even worse than in the US!)
The limits of ICT4D
Someone has to pay the 'net bill: Internet traffic in Zimbabwe has come close to a standstill after an international satellite firm slashed its bandwidth be...
Nica Tech Writeup: The importance of local
Sometimes, knowing the local context is not only important, but a stark requirement. Scratch that - always. In Managua, Nicaragua, this is point is driven ...
Morality of Development
Development, like politics, is a metaphorical room where you're amazed at just how many elephants can fit simultaneously, and yet be ignored. These elehpant...
The Economics of Free
While not strictly dev/ICT related, this blog is tracking the economic implications of Open Source, (focusing on the university software development context)...
Technology and the University
More tangentially related tech info, my former employers, The University of Texas' Office of Technology Commercialization are hosting their next big conferen...
Esperanza En Accion
I'm on the technology committee of the Esperanza En Accion board, and as part of this, and in fulfilling a long-standing promise to EeA's director, I'm off t...
Net Neutrality
Dan Kaminsky is working on a software testing tool to check to see if your ISP is giving equal quality to all your traffic, or if they are favoring certain t...
IPR and … plants?
Brazil is registering list of plant names to fight pharma companies from trademarking the names when using compounds extracted from these plants. India also ...
Blogreement
Steven Johnson has a nice quick list of topics we can move beyond when discussing blogs: Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to p...
“Launch At” ?
Techsoup has a good interview with the Chief Connectivity Officer, Michael Bletsas, of OLPC. Unfortunately, it does nothing to quell my concerns about their...
The Dutch Boy vs. the Great Firewall
a fascinating analysis reveals that for the keyword-blocking aspects of the Chinese firewall, there is a simple workaround where you can just ignore its effe...
Collective Action
Edge.org is running an article by Jaron Lanier on the current drive towards meta-content and collective-rule on the Internet (think Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Di...
Choice in IP regulation a barrier to WTO entry?
Russia's copyright law is different from ours. I imagine there's lots of differences in lots of laws, some of which may be distasteful or just odd to anyone...
OLPC is Linux, after all
1st working model (OLPC)
Re-mapping development
The WorldMapper remaps the globe according to various statistics gathered mostly by the Bank and the IMF. Particularly interesting are the maps for license ...
This is not the digital divide you’re looking for.
Via the Info Policy blog, I found the news story and EIU/IBM e-readiness report that's just come out, with the great news that the digital divide is narrowin...
Wiki4Dev
So, more as an elaborate bookmarking system than a full wiki (for now), I have installed the latest and greatest MediaWiki server here at JonCamfield.com an...
OLPC redux
The OLPC laptop is fading for me. Not only is it being a bit vaporware-y, they've dropped the hand-crank, and are planning on running it on WinCE, because ...
Death by synonym
Sterling (who's iron is in this fire, preferring his own neologism, "spime"), has linked to a compiled list of all the synonyms for "blogjects" -- objects wh...
Sustainable…computing?
Computers aren't green. The article covers the market in computer scrap smuggling into China, for labor-intensive, environmentally-unfriendly scrapping and ...
The myth of leapfrogging?
Kevin Kelly provides an excellent analysis of the rust beneath the chrome of leapfrogging:
The Digital Ditch
The Digital Divide Simulator lets you select the website you want to test, then select the bandwidth you want to simulate, and click "simulate". You will be ...
There was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air
So, between getting back from Peace Corps and coming to DC for grad school, I lived in a rather unique house, which fuels stories from cross-border under-the...
World Bank and ICTs
I think I'm pretty much obligated to talk about the World Bank's ICT data and report about "Investments in information and communication technologies (ICT) i...
Fostering Innovation
John Daly wins the award for insanely detailed blog entries with his blogel (my neologism for novel-length blogs, spread it!) on K4D, which is its own neolog...
Spimes and blogjects?
Well, here it is, post SXSW and I've been nowhere near Austin. Not that, as a native Austinite, I really get hyped up about SXSW. All these people invade t...
Lo-Techs
… not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a ve...
ICT on the homefront
DC seeks city-wide wifi, and actually focuses on free access for the poor.
Censored Net Access?
With all this ire suddenly released against Google (have we been waiting for them to prove that they weren't perfect?) Yahoo (it's been a while since we got ...
Cultural eHegemony
Der Spiegel, as picked up in YaleGlobal and Eldis's ICT-for-Dev RSS feed reports a (French) worry about "the homogenization and commercialization of culture ...
Glocal Internet Freedom
I think it's abhorrent that China is even sending uniformed patrols to local libraries to enforce what citizens can and cannot read on the often-already-filt...
Pringles Cans on the Saudi Border
In "Weaving the Authoritarian Web: Liberalization, Bureaucratization, and the Internet in Non-Democratic Regimes," Boas, details primarily Saudi and Chinese ...
Snails-Pace ICT Development
There’s an old adage among geeks that goes something like, Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon packed full of tape drives travelling at high...
3rd World Cyber Activism and the DOS
Electronic mobilization (as seen, for example, in the Dean campaign) is good at building a swarm of activity, but bad at moving to a more self-monitoring w...
Basics in ICT4Dev
So yeah, it's obvious that I like computers, and think that this whole "Internet" thing holds some transformative power for development
Web 2.0 + 10
So, I have a problem with the hype surrounding "Web 2.0" [1], which is mainly that it's not as new as everyone claims. Definitely, it's a new ballpark from ...
olpc
Commercial OLPC Sales‽ Five years late, but great!
I’m glad that OLPC has finally released what was originally put out as the vapourware-ish XO-3 concept
Cyber-Security and ICT4D: Notes from the Info Security Tech Salon
Cross-posted at the Tech Salon site: https://technologysalon.org/2013/04/why-information-security-matters.html
On Pragmatism and the OLPC
The XO-4 is the XO-1, and that’s… ok?
Technology, Cost, Outcomes: The Open Source debate does matter in ICT4D
The ICT_Works blog has come out swinging: Linux vs. Microsoft is the most useless debate in ICT4D
Reminder: ICT4D@SXSW Happy Hour: Monday 5pm @ The Ginger Man
When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of tec...
OLPCs, Uruguay and Educational Value
My recent blog post on Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal generated a buzz of discussion over at OLPCNews on the value of measurement, test scores, and updates from the f...
Another OLPC TCO study
1:1 Computing costs are a difficult thing to nail down, because there are so many factors that go into it. I worked with GeSCI’s Roxanna Bassi to create a w...
Hardware, Easyware, and Flow
Is hardware hacking becoming more accessible in the development context? A positive psychologist friend once explained the concept of (watch as I butcher th...
Social Change - to go, please
Cross-posted at the FrontlineSMS Blog The recent Technology Salons have been on local and sectoral implementations of mobile technology in development. Mob...
Nevermind: OLPC shouldn’t sell the XO laptop
OLPC News recently ran a (somewhat tongue-in-cheek article on How to buy an XO Laptop, which mainly pointed people to eBay. Which is sad, but eBay has long ...
ICT4D Meetup in Austin during SXSW
In Austin for South By SouthWest? Join folks interested in ICT for development at the Gingerman (3rd and Lavaca) from 4-7pm on Sunday! I’ll bring my OLPC f...
The OLPC Vaporware Product Line Vs. the iPad
iPad or OLPC? Update: the EE Times has a great, similar article on the OLPC fantasy vs Apple reality. So, the XO-2 has moved from promise to hope to scrap,...
The OLPC Haiti Project Reports Back
When the IDB plans to “evaluate its performance from a quantitative standpoint,” it’s a good sign that they mean to do just that. The XO project in Haiti, d...
I’m Still Not Convinced
At the IADB seminar on ICT in the classroom, I asked Nicholas Negroponte why not sell the XO laptop – at or near cost – to anyone who wanted one? This gets ...
The Inter-American Development Bank and ICT4Edu
Today’s IADB event, Reinventing the Classroom, brought together thought-leaders, practitioners and government officials to discuss the role of technology in ...
In Defense of the Laptop
Reading Alanna Shaikh’s writeup on the OLPC Program as a failure in the UNDispatch and clicking through to Timothy Ogden’s harsh commentary, I began to feel ...
ICTs in the Classroom: Next Thursday at the IADB
Next Thursday at the IADB is a huge event delving into the role of ICTs in the classroom, with heavy-hitters including Nicholas Negroponte of OLPC, Tabaré Vá...
OLPC TCO Deathmatch (2 of 4)
Let’s talk Total Costs of Ownership of One Laptop Per Child. Taking our set of different OLPC implementation cost calculators, as well as actual numbers tha...
Use the XO Chat Mesh, Luke.
I’ve updated my mesh post with new Jabber server info - click read more for the full scoop!
It’s Raining OLPC TCOs (1 of 4)
Update: Hello readers from Alanna’s post on the OLPC at UNDispatch - You should check my original article on the OLPC TCO - written back in 2006 - over at O...
A Tale of Two (or more) TCOs (3 of 4)
So based on your feedback, existing pilot data, existing TCO research and numbers, and limitations and suggestions from the TCO calculator tools themselves, ...
Collaboration and the XO Mesh
Time to mesh XOs Unless you're lucky enough to live within mesh range of many other XO users (or are part of an XO deployment or an innovative classroom pro...
Mobiles vs. Computers in Education
This is my response to the current EduTech Debate on the role of mobiles Vs. computers in education. Join the conversation and disagree with me! I’m sure I...
XP on the XO, round three.
Who's using XP? With a surprising lack of fanfare, OLPCNews recently revealed that Sugar is beating out Windows XP in XO deployments: Apparently the convers...
A revolution you can run with : FrontLineSMS on the OLPC \o/
By attaching a computer (Linux, Mac, or Windows) to a cell phone with a data cable and installing his (free, open source) software, FrontlineSMS, that comput...
Another path forward for the One Laptop Per Child Project
I’ve long been an advocate for selling the XO commercially or at least following a Grameen Village Phone style approach to create OLPC XO-centric small busin...
Let’s get together and mesh alright (One Laptop in Jamaica)
Jamaican ICT4D practitioners and teachers see the XO in action</div> OLPC and F/LOSS enthusiast Dr
$10 laptop in India?
I’ll believe it when I see it, but the Times of India is reporting that the promised $10 laptop is closer to a reality, but right now it’s as real as the cra...
Small is bigger than big for OLPC deployment
Via Morgan Collett we learn that OLPC is discontinuing it’s “small” deployment support of 100-1000 XO laptop purchases:<div style="float: right; margin-l...
The XO Files Part IV: New Years Resolutions for 1CC
This entry is the beginning of a four part series, "The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO" Read Part I here, then Part II, The New 4PC Market, and its Fa...
Microsoft, the “third world” and anti-virus
For the past year or so, I've repeatedly been trying to bring up what I see as a huge, gaping hole in any project which uses Microsoft products for an ICT4De...
TCO for low-cost computing in Education
The video archive of last Thursday's discussion at the World Bank on the total cost of ICT4E projects is now online at the Bank's eDevelopment thematic group...
Tomorrow: Total Cost of Operation and ICT4Education
Come by for a lively discussion on TCO (that I get to start out!) From the world bank: EVENT REMINDER A World Bank ICT and Education Community of Interes...
World Bank webcast: How much does it really cost to introduce and sustain computers in schools?
I'll be leading the discussion at the World Bank this Thursday with a presentation by Vital Wave Consulting on their recent TCO calculations for low-cost com...
The latest OLPC Upgrade
OLPC Upgrading - like an old defrag!Last Thursday, I upgraded my OLPC over some beers – sometimes, the best (and worst) ways to really test technology’s limi...
Venezuela Chooses the Intel Classmate over the OLPC XO - kinda
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 partnershi...
The 3G OLPC Laptop
That’s three grand, not third generation.
The XO Files Part III: Re-imagining the OLPC Distribution
This entry is the third in the four-part series, “The XO Files: I Want to Believe” Read Part I here</em> What has OLPC done and what should it continu...
The XO Files Part II: The New 4PC Market, and its Failings
The same constraints that make the XO revolutionary for schools also produce technological solutions that make the XO attractive to a certain set of users wh...
The XO Files: I Want to Believe
This entry is the beginning of a four part series, The XO Files: I Want to Believe in the XO
NPR Covers the OLPC
OLPC fell short?Morning Edition’s Cyrus Farivar talks about the One Laptop Per Child project: One Laptop Per Child was an ambitious promise to children in t...
Picking Nits with Microsoft over XP-on-XO
XP on the XOSo after the LaptopMag review of XP on the XO, the W2 Group (“a global marketing services ecosystem that helps CMOs in their new role as builders...
XP on the OLPC XO, Round Two
Hands on with XP on the XO
One old OS per Child
I keep swearing that I’ll shift gears and focus more on the good parts of the One Laptop Per Child project like the fusion of public and private interests in...
More on OLPC in India
NextBillion on the OLPC in India
The OLPC / OSS Dream
The always-amusing XKCD webcomic illustrates the secret dream on the OLPC project in encouraging children to learn and, in doing so, learn programming:
The world’s (new) cheapest laptop (for today)
Following fast on the heels of the CherryPal low-cost computer is the Impulse, advertised at $130 for each laptop (but you have to buy 100 at a time). It ha...
Slashdotted
I seem to be up at Slashdot.org again with the OLPC; this time with my OLPCNews piece combing through the video of Windows on the OLPC (also published on Jon...
OLPC GrassCon
Watching the GrassCon Watch live video from GrassCon Channel on Justin.tv
OLPCs with CellModems
Someone's stealing my best ideas Wayan found a gem in the Times of India article on OLPC and World Bank funding:
OLPC joyride no so joyful (or, what Jon did all day Sunday)
So, this weekend I thought it'd be a great time to upgrade to the latest joyride builds, which are rumored to have solved the earlier record problems, and ho...
Could Many Give Many?
Peer networks of small schools, governments, and any other interested parties banding together to be able to meet the minimum order.
DC XO Chat Server
Join local activities!So, after xochat went into deep hibernation (though it’s back to stay and has its own regional servers), Wayan asked for friends to cha...
Portability vs The World
The DC area mailing list for nonprofit technologists has been alight with suggestions on what the best portable machine is this past week, debating screen si...
On Hubris and the 1CC version of OLPC
Business Week has a good article summing up the recent history of the OLPC project and it's difficulties with sales numbers, fading promises, Intel, and its ...
Project HA-T1093
No, it's not some early George Lucas film, it's the IADB project title for the "Pilot of the One Laptop per Child Model" in Haiti that Wayan gave a great ove...
MS on XO: It’s so bad you have to laugh
Check out this video of James Utzschneider from Microsoft's Unlimited Potential team walking us through Windows XP on the OLPC XO (Video via OLPCNews.com h...
OLPC Now Microsoft-only
I hope it goes just as well as the Intel partnership. What a disaster. OLPCNews and the NYTimes have more information on the story.
Pots, kettles and OLPC fanaticism
Like most in the OLPC community, Ivan Krstić's discussion on the OLPC yesterday left me (almost) speechless, and even Wayan at OLPCNews left it mostly as a r...
The Opposite of Schadenfreude
OLPCNews has been ripe with the continuing disintegration of OLPC, from Mary Lou Jepsen who got out just in time, then with Ivan's departure due to differenc...
Negroponte on the future of OLPC and Sugar
The Big NN sent out an email, reposted at OLPCNews.com, with the current status of OLPC and Sugar, it's UI, to address the issues finding their way out of th...
Updating the XO
I updated my OLPC from the shipped build 656 to the release candidate for the muh-anticipated Update.1, here's what I did and what happened: from a root term...
How low-cost portables can compete
Wayan at OLPCNews.com has an article up on what he's terming "3P computing" (Power, Price, Performance). Some of the commentators and myself would also add ...
More on Low Cost Laptops
Slashdot's wading in to the discussion on what is a low-cost laptop and what features should it have. At least this time no one's calling me a child hater.
HP enters the low-cost laptop market (kinda)
HP, the current #1 global PC seller, has entered the mini/low-cost laptop market:
Innovation is not adding more of the same
You might say that I've at times been critical of the OLPC project, but rarely do I have anything bad to say about their actual technology. Intel has a new ...
TurnYourWorldAround’s Connect-a-Kid and the OLPC
Disclosure: I work at Youth Service America, where Tara Suri is a member of the National Youth Council</a>, a collection of amazing young people who ma...
I have to ask…
To reveal the fathomless depths of my geek depravity, one Friday a month I get together with fellow alumni and current students of my International Science a...
Using the OLPC - Day 2
Installing xo activities is a snap, up there with OSX's .dmg install process. Installing anything else can be a bit of a pain, as it's command line installa...
LiveBlogging my OLPC
So I got my OLPC around 11am Saturday morning. Finally. Note: the FedEx AltRefTracking never registered that it was on its way, and I never go to the Lapto...
It’s Late March, where’s my G1G1 OLPC Laptop?
One month ago today was the last time I heard anything from OLPC about my laptop, ordered back in December:
Rethinking the OLPC Distribution: A “Base of the Pyramid” approach?
<p>What would a "bottom of the pyramid" approach for the OLPC look like? While the OLPC vision is bottom-up and ch...
LOLPC - One LOL per OLPC
Disclaimer: If you take this post seriously, you need to relax. UPDATE:There are some LOLPCs hiding away at lolnptech!
Negroponte stepping away from the OLPC helm
Naturally, it failed. Nothing is that independent, especially an organization […] staffed by highly individualistic industry visionaries from around the worl...
Martin Langhoff and the XS-ive OLPC School Server
The XS School Server list has been a hotbed of activity the past few weeks with management changes as well as some disgruntled people seem to realize that th...
Fujitsu joins the tiny laptop market
The new Fujitsu LifeBook u810 looks, frankly, a lot like the OLPC.
The OLPC’s Stone Soup
Birmingham, Alabama has had possibly the first of many rude awakenings worldwide as they realize that the XOs don't come with an Internet connection included...
Rubber, meet Road…
The original goal for the G1G1 project was hoped to be around 40 million dollars, making for almost 200,000 "get one" laptops -- and they set that goal well;...
OLPC Learning Club DC: Tonight!
Provided I can sneak out of work early enough to hit the gym and make it over; I'll be at Greater DC Cares tonight as they host an OLPC Learning Club event, ...
OLPC in the US
OLPC will now also be available to US schools:
Inside the XO-1 Laptop with Bunnie Studios
Bunnie Studios (e.g. Andrew Shane Huang), who just finished his Ph.D at MIT's Project Ares group, has published an insightful review of the hardware design o...
More on Intel and OLPC
Even NextBillion.net has weighed in on the Intel/OLPC divorce and included the full interview with Negroponte, even as Slashdot dredges up last year's "scand...
A Review of One-to-One Laptop Programs in the USA
Being the geek that I am, I got a copy of Mark Warschauer's latest book, Laptops and Literacy, having been a huge fan of his insightful commentary on the "di...
News Update: Competitors have a hard time partnering
The GeekCulture comic mashes up the OLPC/Intel spat with the well-worn, "heartfelt" Chris Crocker - LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE! video that made the rounds a few mon...
OLPC Give One Get One: A Learning Experience?
Over at OLPCNews, Wayan's written a wrap-up of the Give one, Get one (G1G1) program by the OLPC Foundation to date, and its successes and shortcomings. Here...
A Halloween Horror Story: Nigeria Buys Replaces Linux with Windows XP on Classmate PCs
Originally published at OLPCNews.com, check there for the comment thread.
Unintended Consequences of the OLPC Give-one-Get-One
Originally published on OLPCNews.
Celebrate LOGO’s 40th Birthday
Originally published on OLPCNews The Logo programming language is 40 years old, writes WIRED. A Logo spiral
The OLPC and the Internet
Michael Bletsas stands ready to defend the OLPC The bitfrost specification indicates that perhaps some countries may not believe that the unique green bra...
Blasts from the Past
Remember our discovery over at OLPCNews.com of the proto-OLPC project in Senegal? Our insightful readers dug even deeper and found some more news articles f...
OLPC History: Senegalese Failure in Implementation
What does a Senegalese technology implementation project from 1982 have to do with One Laptop Per Child? Well, you might be surprised. At the same time tha...
Let’s try this again
Here's a scenario. My company, who you'be never heard of before, has just created a revolutionary new car. It will run almost as well as a new "normal" car...
The true cost of the OLPC
A while back I wrote on the real cost of the OLPC laptop for OLPCNews:
Library Grants, Laptop Gambles
James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds asks the simple question of the OLPC: "Will this laptop save the world?" in MIT's Technology Review.
OLPC Implementation Costs
I'm now writing some OLPC posts for OLPCNews.com; my first post is uncovering some of the hidden costs in OLPC implementation - it turns out that the $100 ...
A Million Laptop Hangover
Over the next few years, ministers of education worldwide will be waking up from their celebratory launch parties announcing the agreements for the OLPC lapt...
OLPC now XO?
There's a developing thread at Engadget about the branding efforts on the OLPC, as well as some argument to its utility. I of course jumped in, responding to...
“Launch At” ?
Techsoup has a good interview with the Chief Connectivity Officer, Michael Bletsas, of OLPC. Unfortunately, it does nothing to quell my concerns about their...
OLPC is Linux, after all
1st working model (OLPC)
OLPC redux
The OLPC laptop is fading for me. Not only is it being a bit vaporware-y, they've dropped the hand-crank, and are planning on running it on WinCE, because ...
web 2.0 and f/loss
the failwhale in the room
A eulogy for twitter
From the Tusks and Safety Department
What security and safety tooling do we need to build now if Mastodon scales to tens or hundereds of millions of users.
On Twitter and Mastodon
Mastodon is not a drop-in twitter replacement. It shouldn’t be, and there is also such a vast opportunity in this moment.
Building Tools for Human Rights
It’s time to add formal requirements to our tool funding process to reduce risks while also contributing to building more inclusive tools
Goodbye, Drupal.md
This is (hopefully!) the last post on my joncamfield.com drupal instance and will be the first on my new jekyll-bases static site.
Into the fediverse
This is an experiment to be both more social, and less on "social media". I have created a personal and private account in what’s called Mastodon.
Centering Decentralization
“Oh great, another white dude from a western democracy going off about decentralization.” I promise that I will not be hawking a crypto-currency or even talk...
I (Still) Believe in the Internet
This is the first in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet
From Usability to Threat Modeling
Building a wide array of foundational resources to advance threat modeling.
Cylons, Open Source, and Security
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.
On Piracy
Software licensing limits are a bigger human rights problem than software piracy is a cost.
Of Tor and Condoms
I am far from the first to compare digital security practices to safer sex practices; Jillian York even rapped about it on stage at re:publica in 2014
Do you trust your tools?
Let’s actually talk about how you might have trust in a software project, using Tor as an example.
Of BBQ, Open Source, and Heartbleed.
There’s a point here about heartbleed and security — I promise.
Stop doing Technology for Good So Badly.
I’ve been reflecting on some of the challenges I’ve faced across multiple organizations trying to leverage the power of technology to create positive social ...
The Anti-Halo Effect
Create pro-consumer mobile technology and open up a new market of multi-platform and platform-agnostic users who want the best devices.
Scaling Social Entrepreneurship, New Economics, and more!
Video links for my Campus Party Europe presentations
Of Code, Free Speech, and Weapons
We are in a world where free speech (in the form of computer code) can create real world objects and actions that are themselves regulated or outright illegal.
Campus Party Europe 2012 presentation: Scaling Social Innovation
Speaking notes from my talk with on the role of open source models in scaling social change.
Technology, Cost, Outcomes: The Open Source debate does matter in ICT4D
The ICT_Works blog has come out swinging: Linux vs. Microsoft is the most useless debate in ICT4D
Open Source Society
This is a rough summary of my talk Tuesday night at DCWeek’s Hot Tech Trends.
Tech Trends: Come discuss at Digital Capital Week!
I will be discussing the tech trends from 2011 and looking forward to what 2012 holds for us with a fine group of panelists during DCWeek.
So - What Next?
The events in London over the past few days have been deeply interesting in the wake of last month’s conversation on mobile and online activism during and af...
July 14: Citizen Media Day?
If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today’s events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.
Reminder: ICT4D@SXSW Happy Hour: Monday 5pm @ The Ginger Man
When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of tec...
ICT4D Happy Hour during SXSW
Register now at https://ict4dev.eventbrite.com/ - only 20 RSVPs available until we nail down a venue!
Ubuntu 10: Worth the wait
Just a quick note: Ubuntu 10 totally rocks. Better digital video and audio support (via HDMI and toslink) than Windows 7, slicker than Mac OSX with a great ...
Waiting for Ubuntu 10
I finally broke down and bought a laptop, as my existing bevy of half-working laptops is now seriously impacting my ability to actually get things done, as o...
Behind the Wire: How To build your own news portal
</a> ServiceWire.org is a refreshed version of a news system that’s been part of YSA’s servenet.org toolset for years. In fact, when servenet.org was ...
Site Updates
JonCamfield.com now has a mobile-friendly site at https://m.joncamfield.com -check it out on your computer or phone (it’s not WAP, just lighter and linear). ...
Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer
In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term commu...
Beyond Crowdsourcing
I am weary of the term “crowdsourcing.” Now, I’m not against the concept
The answer for “I don’t get Twitter”
The next time somebody cracks wise about Twitter, points to the vast numbers of Twitter Orphan Accounts, or otherwise belittles it, I will point them to this...
XP on the XO, round three.
Who's using XP? With a surprising lack of fanfare, OLPCNews recently revealed that Sugar is beating out Windows XP in XO deployments: Apparently the convers...
Update on Guatemala, Twitter arrests, and citizen media
As always, Ethan Zuckerman brings together all the threads surrounding the Guatemala protests, including information about the arrested Twitter user and some...
Twittering about a Revolution
There’s been a lot of noise about the role of Twitter in the recent Moldova protests.
Let’s get together and mesh alright (One Laptop in Jamaica)
Jamaican ICT4D practitioners and teachers see the XO in action</div> OLPC and F/LOSS enthusiast Dr
Cory Doctorow, or how I learned to start worrying and hate IP regulation
Sometimes, I lie awake at night and worry about copyright. I then start worrying if this makes me irreconcilably weird. </param></param></pa...
Drupal Mapping IV: Filtering and Customization of the Map
This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, a...
Drupal Mapping III.5 - moving up in the world
It's been a while since I posted on my Drupal Mapping project, and that's partially because I've been spending some time getting a great site that aggregates...
Drupal and Maps III: Getting Dirty.
This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, a...
Drupal and GYSD Maps II: Modules in Play
Series: Overview | Modules | Structure and Taxonomies | On Drupal 6 | Functionality Drupal by itself is pretty powerful, but where it really shines is when ...
How I made a map for Global Youth Service Day 2009
Series: Overview | Modules | Structure and Taxonomies | On Drupal 6 | Functionality This is my "journal" of work in creating a user-modifiable map of the Gl...
Tech Salon: Information Sharing and Development
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 lect...
Social Media for Change
Ning, if you haven't heard of it, is a roll-your-own "web 2.0" platform, where you can combine blogs, videos, forums, and so on in seconds in a web interface...
A Simple Social Media Analogy
This quirky animation compares social media to ice cream to explain the value of basic customer generated content (uin the form of tagging, rating and commen...
RSS is my favorite web magic
Note to techies - this article is intended for the nonprofit crowd and as such is basically an introduction to RSS. There's a few interesting things at the ...
Zero to Fame in Three Hours
Today, Twitter launched one person from their normal Internet life to getting news on the California-regional LAist and valleywag blogs, CNet, a top-rated d...
Twitter and Outreach
I'm sure you're tired of hearing me talk about twitter as an innovative and easy tool for outreach and engagement. So listen instead to Amy Gahran and her c...
2.0 NonProfit Conference wrap-up and notes
While few of the concepts at the 2.0 nonprofit conference were hardly new to me (Use twitter! uh, ok.); it was good to see where other nonprofits were and w...
Windows Free
No, not the OLPC, but here's a good story about a guy who's been MS-free for a year.
Ultraportable Ubuntu?
Would you like an Ubuntu to go?A recent The Guardian interview with Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth reveals this gem: TG: Will you be coming out with a tail...
It’s full of stars….
Somehow, this is exactly like what I expect it should look like: Courtesy of Nexus's Facebook plugin All I can say is wow.
Twittering for Global Youth Service Day II
Global Youth Service Day will be brought to you in live Twitter form with event updates (and locations, to broadcast on TwitterVision.com) throughout the day.
Twittering for Global Youth Service Day
So coming up on 25th-28th of April is the 20th annual Global Youth Service Day, and I'm trying to see if I can do something fun with Twitter; like having you...
Web 2.0 ‘08 Predictions Update
I predicted in January that Facebook would "hit its limit. I predict some more ad snafus a la Beacon, and the 3rd party apps become overwhelming and all-too-...
Twittering for Good
There's increasing buzz on using Twitter for non-profit goals; from the familiar sources of Idealist, NetSquared and of course Beth Kanter. It seems mostly ...
MS offers to buy Yahoo?
Engadget is reporting that Microsoft has posted a formal offer to buy Yahoo (and by proxy, flickr, del.icio.us, and steer the development of Flock (...into t...
Web 2.0 ‘08
A few predictions for what we'll see online in 2008:
Other Web 2.0 resources
A recent thread of emails over on the 501 Tech Club DC email list brought more Web 2.0 resources to light. So in the spirit of sharing: NetworkForGood has a...
Google Maps Mashup
Change.org has a wonderful mashup of 501 c 3 nonprofits arranged on a Google Map, as an example of a Good Idea (tm) for Google Maps usage. You can start at ...
Web 2.0 Guide for NonProfits
A quick rundown of my recent posts looking at the value of using Open Source in combination with Web 2.0 tools for non-profits / NGOs and the like: The Powe...
OSS and Web 2.0: The Natural Partnership of Peer Production
In an earlier post I took you through some of my favorite desktop F/LOSS projects, and I've blathered on about the Flock browser separately. If you really w...
Write Once, Post Everywhere
I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me sho...
A Better Browser II
Hopefully you're enjoying Flock now. If you already had accounts on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and/or del.icio.us, you've seen how amazingly easy i...
A Better Browser
The problem I face most often when trying to show someone a new powerful open source tool is that they just can't believe that the things I tell them are pos...
Twitter Account
In case you hadn't noticed, I now have a Twitter account which you can follow, have SMSed to your cell phone, and so on. I wrote a longer entry talking abou...
Open Source Software: By volunteers, for volunteers.
If you think back to the opening Econ 101 entry, I ran through network effects, transaction costs, rivalrous and excludable goods, and their inverse, anti-ri...
An Overview of Popular Web 2.0 sites
So far we've really been pushing the underlying concepts, with a few tips to actual websites, examples, and tools. Without further ado, I'd now like to jump...
Web 2.0 101: Speaking the Language
The last entry was the theoretical underpinnings of how this whole web 2.0 thing can work, so today let's get into some of the more common terms you've heard...
This should come later in the F/LOSS and Web 2.0 101 series, but Twitter is a fun and simple tool with huge potential. I've begun using Twitter, and have it...
The Power of Open
I presented and later ran a roundtable discussion on using web 2.0 and open source software for service/volunteer organizations. I kept getting requests for...
hactivismo
From Usability to Threat Modeling
Building a wide array of foundational resources to advance threat modeling.
Cyberpunk Standards
The future of technology requires a dramatic shift from the present to place ownership and control back in the hands of consumers
We have always been at war with crypto
This now exists (and will be updated) as a github repository!
Entropy Story-time: From Claude Shannon to Equifax
A review of a review, and a lot of discussion of password security, chaos, and entropy.
The PGP Hotel: Let’s talk about public keys
I’ve been working on a new way to explain email encryption; I’d appreciate feedback on this approach.
Power to the Users
Cross-posted from the USABLE blog <p>Three years ago, I led a digital security training for independent media in Kyiv during the peak of the EuroMa...
New GPG Keys!
I am transitioning both my professional and personal GPG keys.
What Good Are Secure Communications Tools if No One Uses Them?
It was the second day of digital security training, and I was losing the room.
A Recent History of Back Doored Encryption, in 4 links
This is partially a footnotes section from last week’s Crypto Saves Lives post, but every week brings new stories, and this week was a doozy.
Of Tor and Condoms
I am far from the first to compare digital security practices to safer sex practices; Jillian York even rapped about it on stage at re:publica in 2014
Do you trust your tools?
Let’s actually talk about how you might have trust in a software project, using Tor as an example.
Of BBQ, Open Source, and Heartbleed.
There’s a point here about heartbleed and security — I promise.
A Senate response to The Day We (Fought) Back
Senator Cruz’s office’s response to my personal note about surveillance
The promises of a decentralized currency
I once rented a part of a house that had been, well, not fully cleaned out from the previous occupants… A bit of digging uncovered a fascinating tale of cros...
Kyiv on #Jan25
I spent this past week in Kiev. You may have heard something about the protests, and possibly even about some of the policy changes and new laws that sparke...
Jam Echelon Day, Redux
(Or, how to remind anyone snooping your email of your fourth amendment rights)
Cyber-Security and ICT4D: Notes from the Info Security Tech Salon
Cross-posted at the Tech Salon site: https://technologysalon.org/2013/04/why-information-security-matters.html
Of Code, Free Speech, and Weapons
We are in a world where free speech (in the form of computer code) can create real world objects and actions that are themselves regulated or outright illegal.
Social Currency Unleashed: Bitcoin? (on FastCoExist)
Here’s our cryptocurrenct FastCo big idea from last week
Against Appification
My wife and I bought a new TV that comes with, as most new TVs seem to, an app store. And it sucks. By gods, the offerings are horrible.
The Art of Failing
I have a critical flaw - not being able to say no to helping out worthwhile projects get their technological house in order.
Open Source Society
This is a rough summary of my talk Tuesday night at DCWeek’s Hot Tech Trends.
Tech Trends: Come discuss at Digital Capital Week!
I will be discussing the tech trends from 2011 and looking forward to what 2012 holds for us with a fine group of panelists during DCWeek.
Back from Dakar: How I built a Drupal 7 site in 7 days
Dakar. It’s hot. Lots of goats. In 2-5 years, it could be a major tech hub – sooner with some policy and infrastructure changes
The robots are coming
A colleague and I have the first of two articles posted on FastCompany - discussing the role of automation in job creation – and destruction
Privacy, Trust, NymWars, and Social Change
Social change takes trust.
July 14: Citizen Media Day?
If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today’s events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.
Rebuilding cell networks in Libya
A stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work
Apples that are neither green nor easy to digest.
“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”
The Jasmine Revolution
This is brilliant, and a bit funny. Until some innocent person taking a stroll is killed for insurgency. A long quote from this blog by way of Warren Ellis...
Reminder: ICT4D@SXSW Happy Hour: Monday 5pm @ The Ginger Man
When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of tec...
ICT4D Happy Hour during SXSW
Register now at https://ict4dev.eventbrite.com/ - only 20 RSVPs available until we nail down a venue!
Five thoughts on WikiLeaks
We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated c...
Social Change - to go, please
Cross-posted at the FrontlineSMS Blog The recent Technology Salons have been on local and sectoral implementations of mobile technology in development. Mob...
Development using SMS, not SMS4Dev
Cross-posted at TechnologySalon.org Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impa...
Waiting for Ubuntu 10
I finally broke down and bought a laptop, as my existing bevy of half-working laptops is now seriously impacting my ability to actually get things done, as o...
SXSW 2010
I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media ...
In Defense of the Laptop
Reading Alanna Shaikh’s writeup on the OLPC Program as a failure in the UNDispatch and clicking through to Timothy Ogden’s harsh commentary, I began to feel ...
Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer
In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term commu...
Packets, Please: Government monitoring and #IranElection
Wired reminds us that we can rail against and complain about the intrusive, privacy-destroying and free-speech-threatening monitoring that Iran has been empl...
Academic view on secure communication in repressive regimes
iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes: htt...
ICT and the Iran Election
The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and sho...
XP on the XO, round three.
Who's using XP? With a surprising lack of fanfare, OLPCNews recently revealed that Sugar is beating out Windows XP in XO deployments: Apparently the convers...
Update on Guatemala, Twitter arrests, and citizen media
As always, Ethan Zuckerman brings together all the threads surrounding the Guatemala protests, including information about the arrested Twitter user and some...
Twittering about a Revolution
There’s been a lot of noise about the role of Twitter in the recent Moldova protests.
A revolution you can run with : FrontLineSMS on the OLPC \o/
By attaching a computer (Linux, Mac, or Windows) to a cell phone with a data cable and installing his (free, open source) software, FrontlineSMS, that comput...
Vote
If you see irregularities, call 1-866-our-vote for help and to report problems, and follow the current reports at OurVoteLive. Text your zip to Twitter Vote...
SMSing political questions
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...
SuBtle tricks
I enjoy activities that put the 'b" in subtle. This Greasemonkey script for FireFox translates dollar figures in webpages you view into Oil Barrels:
Off Topic: Torture
Salon.com has an exclusive article detailing the detainment of an innocent Yemeni citizen in CIA's black site prisons:
DRM Redux
Back in the late 90s, as Napster was being circled by vultures, I dreamt of starting a consulting group which would seek out clients needing help and place d...
Update on Burma and the Internet
It sounds like the Burmese government has simply cut off their net connections. From Boingboing:
Proxies
The BBC has a story on the Burmese Monks and their cyberskills: The internet has also become a virtual space for political groups who could not openly expre...
User Interfaces: Aero vs. Beryl
I don't have all the bells and whistles that the guy in this movie has running, but maybe it's time to suck it up and upgrade to the newest version. Aero is...
A bit of privacy for your email!
The AP reports that email may now enjoy 4th amendment rights:
Own your own number!
Sure, you've named a star after yourself by paying some scammers lots of moolah, but now you can get your own 128-bit number!, just like the AACS-LA! Mine i...
Google’s Shareholders Whack Google with a Cluestick
The recent shareholders meeting for Google has an interesting section on Internet Censorship, which is appended in whole below. It seems that these sharehol...
The Dutch Boy vs. the Great Firewall
a fascinating analysis reveals that for the keyword-blocking aspects of the Chinese firewall, there is a simple workaround where you can just ignore its effe...
Collective Action
Edge.org is running an article by Jaron Lanier on the current drive towards meta-content and collective-rule on the Internet (think Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Di...
There was music in the cafes at night, and revolution in the air
So, between getting back from Peace Corps and coming to DC for grad school, I lived in a rather unique house, which fuels stories from cross-border under-the...
Lo-Techs
… not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a ve...
Pringles Cans on the Saudi Border
In "Weaving the Authoritarian Web: Liberalization, Bureaucratization, and the Internet in Non-Democratic Regimes," Boas, details primarily Saudi and Chinese ...
Snails-Pace ICT Development
There’s an old adage among geeks that goes something like, Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon packed full of tape drives travelling at high...
3rd World Cyber Activism and the DOS
Electronic mobilization (as seen, for example, in the Dean campaign) is good at building a swarm of activity, but bad at moving to a more self-monitoring w...
The Trout Guerilla Consulting Group
Many years ago - decades - I dreamt of staring a small, rude consulting group, called the “Trout Guerilla Consulting Group.” These were its founding document...
development theory
Building Tools for Human Rights
It’s time to add formal requirements to our tool funding process to reduce risks while also contributing to building more inclusive tools
Centering Decentralization
“Oh great, another white dude from a western democracy going off about decentralization.” I promise that I will not be hawking a crypto-currency or even talk...
Time to Ideate!
Pivot-Twist-Dev takes the classic “pivot-twist” approach for idea pitches of taking a familiar concept and twisting it in a new way to the international deve...
The promises of a decentralized currency
I once rented a part of a house that had been, well, not fully cleaned out from the previous occupants… A bit of digging uncovered a fascinating tale of cros...
Distributed Solutions for Distributed Attacks
Let’s rewind back to the 90s. Denial of service was a very, very different thing then
Stop doing Technology for Good So Badly.
I’ve been reflecting on some of the challenges I’ve faced across multiple organizations trying to leverage the power of technology to create positive social ...
On Pragmatism and the OLPC
The XO-4 is the XO-1, and that’s… ok?
Scaling Social Entrepreneurship, New Economics, and more!
Video links for my Campus Party Europe presentations
Campus Party Europe 2012 presentation: Scaling Social Innovation
Speaking notes from my talk with on the role of open source models in scaling social change.
Maddening Development Madlibs
There is a set of tropes, if you will, in startup social-enterprise projects.
Exploring the Un-mappable: Bangkok Markets
Bangkok is truly infinite in all directions.
Social Currency Unleashed: Bitcoin? (on FastCoExist)
Here’s our cryptocurrenct FastCo big idea from last week
The change economy
Over at FastCoExist, my colleague and I are rolling out a series of big changes and ideas in economy
At FastCo.Exist: It’s Time To Start Judging Nonprofits Like For-Profits
A rant on the tight hold “overhead” has on nonprofit financials and giving decisions I wrote with my colleague is up on Co.Exist.
The Art of Failing
I have a critical flaw - not being able to say no to helping out worthwhile projects get their technological house in order.
Open Source Society
This is a rough summary of my talk Tuesday night at DCWeek’s Hot Tech Trends.
In the Global Mirror, the #OWS 99% looks a lot like the 1%
Let me be clear - I have a difficult relationship with the Occupy movement.
More on bots saving the world at FastCompany
Alexa and I have another article up at FastCompany on social entrepreneurs and bots
Back from Dakar: How I built a Drupal 7 site in 7 days
Dakar. It’s hot. Lots of goats. In 2-5 years, it could be a major tech hub – sooner with some policy and infrastructure changes
The robots are coming
A colleague and I have the first of two articles posted on FastCompany - discussing the role of automation in job creation – and destruction
Panels to support for an amazing SXSW 2012
It’s not to early to start making sure that your SXSW 2012 experience is fully awesome. How you ask? Why, by voting for awesome panels to attend.
Monitoring and Evaluation is broken. Let’s really break it.
One of the sad truths that emerged at the Technology Salon on ICTs and M&E was that failure in development is rarely about the project performance, but a...
Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What’s Next?
So, I’ve been beating this drum for a while - oppressive governments are increasingly quick and intelligent in responding to protests that use mobile and new...
Apples that are neither green nor easy to digest.
“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”
Support Property Rights
Ashoka’s Changemakers is running a global competition with the Omidyar Network to source the most innovative approaches for providing property rights to thos...
Five thoughts on WikiLeaks
We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated c...
#PulseCamp : Building a vital stats monitor for the world
My brain was pretty close to silly putty by the end of last week
Soccer for Social Change
One of the competitions we run over at Ashoka's Changemakers is now up for voting - it's focused on the use of Football (Soccer) for social change. The fina...
Development using SMS, not SMS4Dev
Cross-posted at TechnologySalon.org Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impa...
The Secret Sauce in Technology For Development isn’t the Tech.
Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier has a fantastic graph of deployment time for Ushahidi’s amazing crisis-mapping solution (which has been deployed for such diverse p...
Going Nuts over the Value of Local Production
For some background, I highly recommend Alanna Shaikh’s post here: https://aidwatchers.com/2010/04/the-plumpy%E2%80%99nut-dustup/ and follow-up here: https:/...
SXSW 2010
I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media ...
I’m Still Not Convinced
At the IADB seminar on ICT in the classroom, I asked Nicholas Negroponte why not sell the XO laptop – at or near cost – to anyone who wanted one? This gets ...
The Inter-American Development Bank and ICT4Edu
Today’s IADB event, Reinventing the Classroom, brought together thought-leaders, practitioners and government officials to discuss the role of technology in ...
In Defense of the Laptop
Reading Alanna Shaikh’s writeup on the OLPC Program as a failure in the UNDispatch and clicking through to Timothy Ogden’s harsh commentary, I began to feel ...
Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development
World-wandering BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin writes about a video from the “What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation,” NYU conference, where Leona...
Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer
In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term commu...
Beyond Crowdsourcing
I am weary of the term “crowdsourcing.” Now, I’m not against the concept
Academic view on secure communication in repressive regimes
iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes: htt...
ICT and the Iran Election
The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and sho...
ICT4Dev Reading List
Here's a hastily-constructed Amazon store of some of the books and essays I've read which provide great insight and contrarian positions to modern developmen...
What’s Next
Tonight’s <a href=”https://intlrel.meetup.com/76/calendar/9824817”“>ICT4D meetup</a> asks the question, “What’s Next?” While it’s always risky t...
Mobiles Vs Computers
Are Mobile Phones the Winner? February’s Technology Salon was on the (false) dichotomy of mobiles versus computers in development
Rescuing the baby from the thrown-out bathwater
Worldchanging's Jeremy Faludi calls it "reverse-leapfrogging", but is looking for a better name. It's reviving or importing concepts that used to exist: Gre...
Many Paths Leading to the “Base of the Pyramid”
BoP Spending (on Flickr by Merkur*) (on Flickr by Merkur*)NextBillion, which spends most of its time praising social entrepreneurship, comments on Michae...
Simple Global Pleasures
You might remember the Youtube video of this guy named Matt who did this silly dance and captured it on video everywhere he went a few years ago? Well.. h...
Robert Strauss vs. Peace Corps: Round 2
You may remember Strauss from his NYT article damning the Peace Corps back in January. It made the point that the increasing numbers of volunteers is decrea...
DC International Development Events Calendar
Big thanks to GWU's Organization for International Development for importing their events calendar into google calendars. I was getting pretty close to doin...
Good People Day 2008
I like the good people day idea all about giving props where due. Since I'll be nose-down in work preparing for the upcoming Global Youth Service Day April ...
Slacktivisism for Fair Trade (Updated)
My friend over at Esperanza en Accion in Nicaragua, has let people know that someone is attempting aland grab against a cooperative clothing factory, Nueva V...
Who’s to blame for a bad loan?
A good friend of mine has condensed a lot of good, critical thoughts on lending -- from the subprime market to the World Bank, into one good blog post, riffi...
Nicaraguan Artesania for Giftmas!
Esperanza en Accion, a fair-trade, social justice organization working with Nicaraguan artisans, has a huge selection of items in their online eBay store, ju...
World Bank Roller Coaster Press Release
Carrot: "The World Bank has promised to contribute a record $3.5bn (£1.7bn) to help the world's poorest countries. The figure is double what the agency init...
Going their own way
The WaPo has an excellent story of the New Latin Left movement, which has reduced their dependence on IMF and Bank loans (and their requisite policy prescri...
Vatican vs Amnesty International
The Vatican urges Catholics not to donate to Amnesty International (BBC): The Vatican also said it was suspending all financial aid to Amnesty over what it ...
World Bank and National Economic Models
I got to attend a lecture by William Easterly on his new book, focusing on whether or not foreign aid can affect world poverty (spoiler: the past 5 decades d...
Morality of Development
Development, like politics, is a metaphorical room where you're amazed at just how many elephants can fit simultaneously, and yet be ignored. These elehpant...
Re-mapping development
The WorldMapper remaps the globe according to various statistics gathered mostly by the Bank and the IMF. Particularly interesting are the maps for license ...
human rights
the failwhale in the room
A eulogy for twitter
From the Tusks and Safety Department
What security and safety tooling do we need to build now if Mastodon scales to tens or hundereds of millions of users.
On Twitter and Mastodon
Mastodon is not a drop-in twitter replacement. It shouldn’t be, and there is also such a vast opportunity in this moment.
Internet Freedom’s Final Frontier
The gravity of terrestrial attacks on human rights is not magically escaped in orbit
Building Tools for Human Rights
It’s time to add formal requirements to our tool funding process to reduce risks while also contributing to building more inclusive tools
As they say, some personal news.
After a decade advancing digital rights and resilience work at Internews, I’m excited to start a journey in the private sector.
Centering Decentralization
“Oh great, another white dude from a western democracy going off about decentralization.” I promise that I will not be hawking a crypto-currency or even talk...
Censorship and Centralization
We also cannot cede the digital public square to private corporations which do not, at their core, serve the public interest.
De-platforming is censure not censorship.
Not being able to find a company to make your presence on the Internet easy is fundamentally different from having a government actively blocking access to y...
I (Still) Believe in the Internet
This is the first in a series on the past, present, and future of the Internet
From Usability to Threat Modeling
Building a wide array of foundational resources to advance threat modeling.
Re-factoring the Crypto Debate
Backdooring crypto debates are dangerously US-centric; ignoring the role of authoritarian states and how even this tightly scoped debate would put human righ...
We have always been at war with crypto
This now exists (and will be updated) as a github repository!
Entropy Story-time: From Claude Shannon to Equifax
A review of a review, and a lot of discussion of password security, chaos, and entropy.
The PGP Hotel: Let’s talk about public keys
I’ve been working on a new way to explain email encryption; I’d appreciate feedback on this approach.
New GPG Keys!
I am transitioning both my professional and personal GPG keys.
Cylons, Open Source, and Security
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.
On Piracy
Software licensing limits are a bigger human rights problem than software piracy is a cost.
A Recent History of Back Doored Encryption, in 4 links
This is partially a footnotes section from last week’s Crypto Saves Lives post, but every week brings new stories, and this week was a doozy.
Encryption saves lives
There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens
Let’s talk about Organizational Security.
SAFETAG is a project that myself and another colleague have spent countless hours building out to really focus on working with small non-profits on assessing...
5 Headlines about buzzfeed you never expected to read!
Buzzfeed’s writers al have PGP keys
Updates
You know what hasn’t gotten an update in a while? This blog! What else? The cute kittens of digital security over at icanhazdigitalsecurity
Of Tor and Condoms
I am far from the first to compare digital security practices to safer sex practices; Jillian York even rapped about it on stage at re:publica in 2014
Do you trust your tools?
Let’s actually talk about how you might have trust in a software project, using Tor as an example.
A Senate response to The Day We (Fought) Back
Senator Cruz’s office’s response to my personal note about surveillance
Kyiv on #Jan25
I spent this past week in Kiev. You may have heard something about the protests, and possibly even about some of the policy changes and new laws that sparke...
Distributed Solutions for Distributed Attacks
Let’s rewind back to the 90s. Denial of service was a very, very different thing then
Jam Echelon Day, Redux
(Or, how to remind anyone snooping your email of your fourth amendment rights)
Stop doing Technology for Good So Badly.
I’ve been reflecting on some of the challenges I’ve faced across multiple organizations trying to leverage the power of technology to create positive social ...
Of Code, Free Speech, and Weapons
We are in a world where free speech (in the form of computer code) can create real world objects and actions that are themselves regulated or outright illegal.
A shallow alcove on the left.
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound […] would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision ...
Open Source Society
This is a rough summary of my talk Tuesday night at DCWeek’s Hot Tech Trends.
In the Global Mirror, the #OWS 99% looks a lot like the 1%
Let me be clear - I have a difficult relationship with the Occupy movement.
The robots are coming
A colleague and I have the first of two articles posted on FastCompany - discussing the role of automation in job creation – and destruction
So - What Next?
The events in London over the past few days have been deeply interesting in the wake of last month’s conversation on mobile and online activism during and af...
July 14: Citizen Media Day?
If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today’s events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.
Celebrating World Press Freedom Day #wpfd with a linkdump
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day.
The Jasmine Revolution
This is brilliant, and a bit funny. Until some innocent person taking a stroll is killed for insurgency. A long quote from this blog by way of Warren Ellis...
Support Property Rights
Ashoka’s Changemakers is running a global competition with the Omidyar Network to source the most innovative approaches for providing property rights to thos...
Five thoughts on WikiLeaks
We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated c...
The answer for “I don’t get Twitter”
The next time somebody cracks wise about Twitter, points to the vast numbers of Twitter Orphan Accounts, or otherwise belittles it, I will point them to this...
Academic view on secure communication in repressive regimes
iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes: htt...
ICT and the Iran Election
The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and sho...
Update on Guatemala, Twitter arrests, and citizen media
As always, Ethan Zuckerman brings together all the threads surrounding the Guatemala protests, including information about the arrested Twitter user and some...
Guatemala and Citizen Media
You might have heard about the posthumously released video by a Guatemalan lawyer accusing his president of assassination in the event of his death, for not ...
A revolution you can run with : FrontLineSMS on the OLPC \o/
By attaching a computer (Linux, Mac, or Windows) to a cell phone with a data cable and installing his (free, open source) software, FrontlineSMS, that comput...
Immigrants take all the best jobs
For example, I bet there's a long line of good ol' american workers who would love to have solid, agriculture jobs in Florida, like the one described in this...
The Trout Guerilla Consulting Group
Many years ago - decades - I dreamt of staring a small, rude consulting group, called the “Trout Guerilla Consulting Group.” These were its founding document...
mobile4dev
Stop doing Technology for Good So Badly.
I’ve been reflecting on some of the challenges I’ve faced across multiple organizations trying to leverage the power of technology to create positive social ...
Choice is the Challenge - Mobiles for Data
You might think that the topic of collecting data via mobile devices would be a rather dry discussion of data management and statistical methodology. You wou...
Reflecting on Haiti, Disasters, and Technology
Two years ago, in the aftermath of the January, 2010 earthquake, hackers and social activists led a charge and saved lives in Haiti
The Art of Failing
I have a critical flaw - not being able to say no to helping out worthwhile projects get their technological house in order.
Tech Trends: Come discuss at Digital Capital Week!
I will be discussing the tech trends from 2011 and looking forward to what 2012 holds for us with a fine group of panelists during DCWeek.
So - What Next?
The events in London over the past few days have been deeply interesting in the wake of last month’s conversation on mobile and online activism during and af...
Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What’s Next?
So, I’ve been beating this drum for a while - oppressive governments are increasingly quick and intelligent in responding to protests that use mobile and new...
Celebrating World Press Freedom Day #wpfd with a linkdump
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day.
Rebuilding cell networks in Libya
A stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work
The Jasmine Revolution
This is brilliant, and a bit funny. Until some innocent person taking a stroll is killed for insurgency. A long quote from this blog by way of Warren Ellis...
Reminder: ICT4D@SXSW Happy Hour: Monday 5pm @ The Ginger Man
When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of tec...
ICT4D Happy Hour during SXSW
Register now at https://ict4dev.eventbrite.com/ - only 20 RSVPs available until we nail down a venue!
mHealth: Tending the garden of 1000 flowers
At #mHS10, we heard funders talking time and time again for letting “1000 flowers bloom” in mHealth pilots, and programs talking about pilots leading to more...
From #mHS10 to #mHS11: What we need for next year
Herein, a mix of quotidian tasks and big goals for us to prepare for a 2011 mHealth Summit. mHS10 was a great conference, and represents a seachange in the ...
My top take-aways from #mHS10 , the mHealth Summit 2010
As you might have guessed from my tongue-in-cheek #mHS10 drinking game (pilot=1 shot, 1k flowers=2, feature phone=3, “going global with sms phone support” = ...
Maptivism is my new favorite portmanteau
Through the magic of technology, this post at CrissCrossed.net from January just popped up on my radar, covering examples of using the one-two visual and dat...
Hardware, Easyware, and Flow
Is hardware hacking becoming more accessible in the development context? A positive psychologist friend once explained the concept of (watch as I butcher th...
Social Change - to go, please
Cross-posted at the FrontlineSMS Blog The recent Technology Salons have been on local and sectoral implementations of mobile technology in development. Mob...
Development using SMS, not SMS4Dev
Cross-posted at TechnologySalon.org Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impa...
Put your technology where your solution will be
The Technology Salon on SMS4D covered a lot of ground in a few hours, but the reverberating sentiment was the power of mobile technology at the local/regiona...
SXSW 2010
I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media ...
The Inter-American Development Bank and ICT4Edu
Today’s IADB event, Reinventing the Classroom, brought together thought-leaders, practitioners and government officials to discuss the role of technology in ...
Mobile Social Networks
Something is still missing in the world of mobiles and social networks. I strongly believe in the power of social networks in development, be they online or...
The answer for “I don’t get Twitter”
The next time somebody cracks wise about Twitter, points to the vast numbers of Twitter Orphan Accounts, or otherwise belittles it, I will point them to this...
Academic view on secure communication in repressive regimes
iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes: htt...
ICT and the Iran Election
The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and sho...
Mobiles vs. Computers in Education
This is my response to the current EduTech Debate on the role of mobiles Vs. computers in education. Join the conversation and disagree with me! I’m sure I...
Blue-skying Mobile Apps: Common Forms
I missed the recent Technology Salon on Mobiles for Development (I was kind of busy with Global Youth Service Day), and was already scheduled to make it to t...
After the SMS honeymoon? (Updated)
Check out some updates – props to @MobileActive! During the last breakout at the Mobile for Change (#m4change in twitter, a good writeup by Development Seed...
Twittering about a Revolution
There’s been a lot of noise about the role of Twitter in the recent Moldova protests.
Micro Telcos - Business Models for Rural Access?
Can Urban Connectivity Go Rural? This month’s Technology Salon approached last-mile connectivity problems from an entrepreneurship standpoint. What are the ...
What’s Next
Tonight’s <a href=”https://intlrel.meetup.com/76/calendar/9824817”“>ICT4D meetup</a> asks the question, “What’s Next?” While it’s always risky t...
A revolution you can run with : FrontLineSMS on the OLPC \o/
By attaching a computer (Linux, Mac, or Windows) to a cell phone with a data cable and installing his (free, open source) software, FrontlineSMS, that comput...
Another path forward for the One Laptop Per Child Project
I’ve long been an advocate for selling the XO commercially or at least following a Grameen Village Phone style approach to create OLPC XO-centric small busin...
Mobiles Vs Computers
Are Mobile Phones the Winner? February’s Technology Salon was on the (false) dichotomy of mobiles versus computers in development
What’s happening in Mumbai: Twitter and Real-time Citizen Media
Initial reports are now showing up on news sites; this very light-on-details article on BBC seems to be the first up on major news sites - but it's been burn...
Quick ways to go Mobile
MobileActive has a great entry on a handful of low cost, low-barrier ways to go mobile, from Twitter to desktop "guerilla" SMS campaigns (best run in develop...
mBanking: Fears and Promises
This morning's Technology Salon covered the legal hurdles facing mBanking - using your cell phone to interact with your bank account - in developing world sc...
ict policy
Censorship and Centralization
We also cannot cede the digital public square to private corporations which do not, at their core, serve the public interest.
De-platforming is censure not censorship.
Not being able to find a company to make your presence on the Internet easy is fundamentally different from having a government actively blocking access to y...
Cyberpunk Standards
The future of technology requires a dramatic shift from the present to place ownership and control back in the hands of consumers
We have always been at war with crypto
This now exists (and will be updated) as a github repository!
A Recent History of Back Doored Encryption, in 4 links
This is partially a footnotes section from last week’s Crypto Saves Lives post, but every week brings new stories, and this week was a doozy.
Encryption saves lives
There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens
A Senate response to The Day We (Fought) Back
Senator Cruz’s office’s response to my personal note about surveillance
Kyiv on #Jan25
I spent this past week in Kiev. You may have heard something about the protests, and possibly even about some of the policy changes and new laws that sparke...
Distributed Solutions for Distributed Attacks
Let’s rewind back to the 90s. Denial of service was a very, very different thing then
The Anti-Halo Effect
Create pro-consumer mobile technology and open up a new market of multi-platform and platform-agnostic users who want the best devices.
Tech Trends: Come discuss at Digital Capital Week!
I will be discussing the tech trends from 2011 and looking forward to what 2012 holds for us with a fine group of panelists during DCWeek.
Rebuilding cell networks in Libya
A stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work
Packets, Please: Government monitoring and #IranElection
Wired reminds us that we can rail against and complain about the intrusive, privacy-destroying and free-speech-threatening monitoring that Iran has been empl...
ICT and the Iran Election
The Daily Dish reposts a call to action from Twitter: ALL internet & mobile networks are cut. We ask everyone in Tehran to go onto their rooftops and sho...
ICT4Dev Reading List
Here's a hastily-constructed Amazon store of some of the books and essays I've read which provide great insight and contrarian positions to modern developmen...
Cory Doctorow, or how I learned to start worrying and hate IP regulation
Sometimes, I lie awake at night and worry about copyright. I then start worrying if this makes me irreconcilably weird. </param></param></pa...
Vista Loses 2007
All I can say is ouch: It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient fil...
Repeat after me
"Buying falafel mix does not a terrorist make." The FBI might do well to write that in chalk 500 times, and hope that it sinks in, as they're wasting our mo...
JWZ on backups
JWZ as usual offers good, if acerbic, advice; today on backups: I am here to tell you about backups. It’s very simple. Option 1: Learn not to care about yo...
Geektopia achieved
My geektopia has arrived: The fridge has now become aware of its contents; and it is capable of establishing direct contact between you and their producers....
Guess the Country
From Development Gateway: X plans to offer 1.2 million of the country’s poorest citizens a computer with broadband Internet access for a daily fee of €1 (...
The Economics of Free
While not strictly dev/ICT related, this blog is tracking the economic implications of Open Source, (focusing on the university software development context)...
Technology and the University
More tangentially related tech info, my former employers, The University of Texas' Office of Technology Commercialization are hosting their next big conferen...
Net Neutrality
Dan Kaminsky is working on a software testing tool to check to see if your ISP is giving equal quality to all your traffic, or if they are favoring certain t...
Choice in IP regulation a barrier to WTO entry?
Russia's copyright law is different from ours. I imagine there's lots of differences in lots of laws, some of which may be distasteful or just odd to anyone...
Censored Net Access?
With all this ire suddenly released against Google (have we been waiting for them to prove that they weren't perfect?) Yahoo (it's been a while since we got ...
Cultural eHegemony
Der Spiegel, as picked up in YaleGlobal and Eldis's ICT-for-Dev RSS feed reports a (French) worry about "the homogenization and commercialization of culture ...
Glocal Internet Freedom
I think it's abhorrent that China is even sending uniformed patrols to local libraries to enforce what citizens can and cannot read on the often-already-filt...
Pringles Cans on the Saudi Border
In "Weaving the Authoritarian Web: Liberalization, Bureaucratization, and the Internet in Non-Democratic Regimes," Boas, details primarily Saudi and Chinese ...
tinkering
The Anti-Halo Effect
Create pro-consumer mobile technology and open up a new market of multi-platform and platform-agnostic users who want the best devices.
The robots are coming
A colleague and I have the first of two articles posted on FastCompany - discussing the role of automation in job creation – and destruction
Apples that are neither green nor easy to digest.
“The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs”
#Ubuntu Tips: Amazon MP3 Downloads
So, Amazon now forces you to use their download tool. Which seems silly. But they offer a Linux version, which is nice. But it only is built for 32 bit ar...
Ubuntu and HDMI
Lazywebs, here is an answer. Having problems with a black/blank/undetected screen on your HDMI out in Ubuntu? Using x86_64 and Nvidia? Here...
Tech4Dev: What’s in your backpack?
Inveno’s ICT_Works blog recently advertised their awesome addition to the ICT4D world - a solid toolkit to carry to the field. I made a much lower-tech pers...
Ubuntu 10: Worth the wait
Just a quick note: Ubuntu 10 totally rocks. Better digital video and audio support (via HDMI and toslink) than Windows 7, slicker than Mac OSX with a great ...
Waiting for Ubuntu 10
I finally broke down and bought a laptop, as my existing bevy of half-working laptops is now seriously impacting my ability to actually get things done, as o...
Behind the Wire: How To build your own news portal
</a> ServiceWire.org is a refreshed version of a news system that’s been part of YSA’s servenet.org toolset for years. In fact, when servenet.org was ...
In Defense of the Laptop
Reading Alanna Shaikh’s writeup on the OLPC Program as a failure in the UNDispatch and clicking through to Timothy Ogden’s harsh commentary, I began to feel ...
Being the IT Guy
While I want to quickly and decisively move away from being “The IT Guy” in my career, I must admit that at some level I fear losing that control over my own...
Drupal Mapping IV: Filtering and Customization of the Map
This is the continuation of my journal on getting mapping to work for Global Youth Service Day in Drupal, which starts with an overview of maps and drupal, a...
Holiday Computer Shopping
People always come to me for advice on computers and technology options over the giftmas season. To head this off somewhat at the pass, let me remind everyo...
Linux Audio Server amusement
I'm currently using the laptop as the interim solution / testbed for the LAS idea. It's struggling to run amarok, but works nicely with qiv running a slides...
A Linux Audio Server
I admit it. I have a Windows laptop at home. For a very long time, it was my primary system. For the past year or so, I've been using a Linux laptop as my...
eBay Market Data
In thinking about eBay in my post on tricky ways to "Give Many" OLPC XO laptops, I was reminded about something that has bugged me for a very long time about...
SpaceWarp
Some kids had train sets. Actually, I did but it bored me to death. One xmas I got a SpaceWarp. Sure, I started out building the basic design they gave el...
Computer Choices FAQ
People often ask me, as a technology geek, what kind of computer they should get, so I'm putting this post together as a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to ...
Good thoughts on code bloat
Steve Yegge writes on code bloat: I recently had the opportunity to watch a self-professed Java programmer give a presentation in which one slide listed Pro...
iPod shuffle, gtkpod, and winamp
I just don't like doing things the right way, OK? The right way is boring
Firefox Addons
You could probably guess that I love the Firefox web browser, right? I'm also naturally a big fan of the addons you can get to extend its power. I'm always...
Blogreement
Steven Johnson has a nice quick list of topics we can move beyond when discussing blogs: Mainstream, top-down, professional journalism will continue to p...
Death by synonym
Sterling (who's iron is in this fire, preferring his own neologism, "spime"), has linked to a compiled list of all the synonyms for "blogjects" -- objects wh...
Spimes and blogjects?
Well, here it is, post SXSW and I've been nowhere near Austin. Not that, as a native Austinite, I really get hyped up about SXSW. All these people invade t...
ICT on the homefront
DC seeks city-wide wifi, and actually focuses on free access for the poor.
citizen journalism
What Good Are Secure Communications Tools if No One Uses Them?
It was the second day of digital security training, and I was losing the room.
Kyiv on #Jan25
I spent this past week in Kiev. You may have heard something about the protests, and possibly even about some of the policy changes and new laws that sparke...
So - What Next?
The events in London over the past few days have been deeply interesting in the wake of last month’s conversation on mobile and online activism during and af...
July 14: Citizen Media Day?
If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today’s events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.
Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What’s Next?
So, I’ve been beating this drum for a while - oppressive governments are increasingly quick and intelligent in responding to protests that use mobile and new...
Celebrating World Press Freedom Day #wpfd with a linkdump
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day.
Rebuilding cell networks in Libya
A stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work
Beyond Crowdsourcing
I am weary of the term “crowdsourcing.” Now, I’m not against the concept
Packets, Please: Government monitoring and #IranElection
Wired reminds us that we can rail against and complain about the intrusive, privacy-destroying and free-speech-threatening monitoring that Iran has been empl...
Academic view on secure communication in repressive regimes
iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes: htt...
Guatemala and Citizen Media
You might have heard about the posthumously released video by a Guatemalan lawyer accusing his president of assassination in the event of his death, for not ...
In Defense of Twitter and #swineflu
Everyone from XKCD to NPR has been blaming Twitter for spreading panic about the Swine Flu: Who knew that swine flu could also infect Twitter? Yet this i...
Cory Doctorow, or how I learned to start worrying and hate IP regulation
Sometimes, I lie awake at night and worry about copyright. I then start worrying if this makes me irreconcilably weird. </param></param></pa...
What’s happening in Mumbai: Twitter and Real-time Citizen Media
Initial reports are now showing up on news sites; this very light-on-details article on BBC seems to be the first up on major news sites - but it's been burn...
ipr
On Piracy
Software licensing limits are a bigger human rights problem than software piracy is a cost.
ARRRR: More on Piracy and HBO
Sorry, but you must play in the market - you must offer a price; merely saying it’s too expensive is not acceptable
On Piracy, Business Models, and Game of Thrones
Over at FastCompany, Robert Levine writes that pirating Game of Thrones is a direct attack on this emerging genre of actually good TV shows
SOPA
Look. I’m going on vacation tomorrow. I have promised myself to keep my stress levels down, so this is as much as you’ll hear from me about SOPA
Going Nuts over the Value of Local Production
For some background, I highly recommend Alanna Shaikh’s post here: https://aidwatchers.com/2010/04/the-plumpy%E2%80%99nut-dustup/ and follow-up here: https:/...
Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer
In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term commu...
ICT4Dev Reading List
Here's a hastily-constructed Amazon store of some of the books and essays I've read which provide great insight and contrarian positions to modern developmen...
IP4D
Intellectual Property is an oddball in international development
Cory Doctorow, or how I learned to start worrying and hate IP regulation
Sometimes, I lie awake at night and worry about copyright. I then start worrying if this makes me irreconcilably weird. </param></param></pa...
Turnabout is fair(-use) play
The Associated Press has been rattling sabers of bloggers quoting (even with credit and links) from AP articles, claiming that any quote longer than 5 words ...
Good will sharing
I read BoingBoing - it provides a steady stream of new and interesting things around the net, and the occasional IT policy tidbit. Lots of people read boing...
Copyright
I used to use recipes as a good, non-new/Internet-y example of how you can still make profits (recipe books) with no attempt at copyright enforcement (who c...
IPR and … plants?
Brazil is registering list of plant names to fight pharma companies from trademarking the names when using compounds extracted from these plants. India also ...
crypto
We have always been at war with crypto
This now exists (and will be updated) as a github repository!
Entropy Story-time: From Claude Shannon to Equifax
A review of a review, and a lot of discussion of password security, chaos, and entropy.
A Recent History of Back Doored Encryption, in 4 links
This is partially a footnotes section from last week’s Crypto Saves Lives post, but every week brings new stories, and this week was a doozy.
Encryption saves lives
There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens
comedy
Time to Ideate!
Pivot-Twist-Dev takes the classic “pivot-twist” approach for idea pitches of taking a familiar concept and twisting it in a new way to the international deve...
Updates
You know what hasn’t gotten an update in a while? This blog! What else? The cute kittens of digital security over at icanhazdigitalsecurity
Maddening Development Madlibs
There is a set of tropes, if you will, in startup social-enterprise projects.
networks
Distributed Solutions for Distributed Attacks
Let’s rewind back to the 90s. Denial of service was a very, very different thing then
socent
Maddening Development Madlibs
There is a set of tropes, if you will, in startup social-enterprise projects.
More on bots saving the world at FastCompany
Alexa and I have another article up at FastCompany on social entrepreneurs and bots
copyright
ARRRR: More on Piracy and HBO
Sorry, but you must play in the market - you must offer a price; merely saying it’s too expensive is not acceptable
On Piracy, Business Models, and Game of Thrones
Over at FastCompany, Robert Levine writes that pirating Game of Thrones is a direct attack on this emerging genre of actually good TV shows
privacy
Encryption saves lives
There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens
A shallow alcove on the left.
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound […] would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision ...
ict4edu
Mobiles vs. Computers in Education
This is my response to the current EduTech Debate on the role of mobiles Vs. computers in education. Join the conversation and disagree with me! I’m sure I...
1984
A shallow alcove on the left.
“The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound […] would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision ...
freespeech
Of Code, Free Speech, and Weapons
We are in a world where free speech (in the form of computer code) can create real world objects and actions that are themselves regulated or outright illegal.
digisec
Kyiv on #Jan25
I spent this past week in Kiev. You may have heard something about the protests, and possibly even about some of the policy changes and new laws that sparke...
floss
Of BBQ, Open Source, and Heartbleed.
There’s a point here about heartbleed and security — I promise.
tor
Do you trust your tools?
Let’s actually talk about how you might have trust in a software project, using Tor as an example.
security
Encryption saves lives
There are many great arguments to protect truly private communications from a human rights perspective, and specifically through a Constitutional lens
decentralization
Cylons, Open Source, and Security
This has all happened before. This will all happen again.