Extension 337
Technology, serendipity and social change
Updated: 6 hours 5 min ago
16 hours 41 min ago
I’m trying to teach myself to pay more attention to design. Some of it is this design-thinking riff I’ve been on. And some of it is, well, honestly, I just want to be able to answer when someone says “What do you think about this?” Anyway, a twitter shout for help netted me some resources and I’ve stumbled across a few others and though I’d share ‘em back with you all.
Here goes:
And thanks to hanabel, ruby, StaceyMonk, kikijean, and kariapeterson for the help.
tagged: design, resources, blogs, books
Tue, 11/11/2008 - 10:58
Take a few minutes to read Tim O’Reilly’s A Critical Choice Regarding Innovation. Here’s the quote that really grabbed me:
But I also believe that the choice is stark: just give people want they want, leading us deeper into a consumer culture whose very financial fabric is wearing thin, or seek out big, hard problems that other people take for granted as unsolvable, and remake the world.
I don’t think it really is a choice. And I suspect that’s probably pretty common. The real issue, I think, isn’t about that big choice but the smaller ones that we make every day that keep the big things out of grasp.
And I think that in the nptech community we make small choices all the time to settle. Settle for inferior technology. Settle for less funding and less support. Settle. And it’s because we don’t see all the things that we are doing that recognize and define the big hard problems but also all of the information we have about what’s working. About the small choices that we make — choices about whether to drive or take the bus, buy this product or that. Choices about the ways in which we partner and uncover and share information.
I think that we, in the social benefit sector, have the problems. And I think in the nptech community we have the ability express these problems. This is one of the problems — expressing project challenges in way that engage people — that we’ve been working on at Net2. We’ve come at it through the challenges. Let’s give busy people working on social problems a chance to get some dollars but along the way let’s give them a chance to get input and help on their ideas. But we haven’t made it easy to see our intent, navigate the information or really realize the benefits of the kind of community of innovation we’re trying to build.
How do we get to this point, as a sector, where we recognize our strengths, express them, and give people clear ways to contribute to the solution? Or clear ways to completely remake the issue through the kind of game-changing innovations that O’Reilly is writing about?
How do we make our choice clear and step up to the challenge that’s being issued?
(Photo credit: Choices by lucias_clay)
tagged: net2, nptech, choice, movement, problem, engagement, change
Mon, 11/10/2008 - 09:44
I’m doing a little office clean up and those boxes of leftover t-shirts, Net2 bags, stickers and miscellaneous TechSoup items does nothing when they are just packed up in the corner of a room. So, I’m sending ‘em out.
It’s a while supplies last kind of thing but if you send me you address via email (or twitter or whatever communication mechanism works best for you), tell me you t-shirt size (just in case I have them), I’ll pack up a thing or two of send it your way.
You? Well, you can make a mint on eBay with this offer. I’m just saying.
(Photo credit: Clean Up by marinegirl)
Tagged: housekeeping, offer, swag
Wed, 11/05/2008 - 17:10
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On the passage of Proposition 8 (Lessig Blog)
We need to try again. Let us launch, now, a new petition movement. Let us spend a year talking to people who disagree with us. Let us win this battle by persuading the other side. I volunteer to do whatever would help, including traveling to every church or community in this state to make the case for equality. But please, let's not try to win this battle by summoning the Supremes. Even if it is right that this Amendment is contrary to the best interpretation of Equal Protection, let us bring the ideals of Equal Protection to life, by getting people to support them.
(tags: noonprop8 community change movement)
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Social Media: Election Day participatory media projects
2008 is a hallmark year in many ways, including participatory media projects that focus on coverage of the election process.
(tags: election08 socialmedia examples net2)
Sun, 10/26/2008 - 17:04
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/Message: Better Social Plumbing For The Social Web
The basic premises that underlie social media — the fundamental relationships that link authors to the community of readers — are changing in the face of new and different social tools. In a sense, I am chasing the elusive question about where community resides, once again.
In this presentation, I plan to explore the root causes of today’s social media plumbling — the stuff that makes it social — and to outline the stresses that new social metaphors are creating. Lastly, I wave my hand at where it might all be headed.
(tags: net2 presentation stoweboyd socialmedia nptech)
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BrightKite iPhone App Goes Live (Finally) – ReadWriteWeb
(tags: brightkite iphone app net2 mobile location)
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Slashdot | Which Phone To Develop For?
Good discussion of how to decide which mobile platform to develop for.
(tags: net2 mobile develop applications)
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EchoDitto Blog | EchoDitto
Released on Sept. 28 but officially launched today, the app has seven main functions: call friends, get involved, receive updates, news, local events, media and issues. Each of these makes participation in the campaign, at increasing levels of engagement, ridiculously easy. Oh yeah, and it's pretty, too.
(tags: obama iphone app net2 mobile)
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Africans and Their Mobiles, Part 2: Using Mobile Phones For Social Good – ReadWriteWeb
This post is the second in a two-part series based on: 1) the African mobile marketplace and how Africans utilize their mobile phones; and 2) how organizations are using social marketing to reach this highly mobile population for social change.
(tags: net2 mobile africa nptech)
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Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing – O'Reilly Radar
So here's the real trick: cloud computing is real. Everything is moving into the cloud, in whole or in part. The utility layer of cloud computing will be just that, a utility, without outsized profits.
But the cloud platform, like the software platform before it, has new rules for competitive advantage. And chief among those advantages are those that we've identified as "Web 2.0", the design of systems that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.
(tags: cloud computing future trends net2)
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Slashdot | Modern Methods For Sharing Innovation
The New York Times is running a story about Johnny Chung Lee, a hardware hacker made famous for his projects which modified the Nintendo Wiimote to do things like positional head tracking and multi-touch display control. The article focuses on the suggestion that Lee's use of YouTube to demonstrate his innovations has done a better job of communicating his ideas than more traditional methods could.
(tags: innovation net2 youtube share example)
Sat, 10/25/2008 - 17:04
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Portland Mercury | The Food Issue 2008 | The Backyard Economy
Fasenfest reframes the conversation, talking about "a backyard economy and what it means." For her, the concept of whether or not growing her family's food "pencils out" is meaningless—she avoids "doing the pencil work," and points out that such language is tied to the current economic structure—a system that "continues to objectify the human world." She's working in an alternative economy, one where cash price isn't a good measure of success. What's she's doing is worth it, she says, "in all kinds of ways, but I can't give you the numbers."
(tags: portland urban farming economy)
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The limits to filter feeds and gain more relevance : crisscrossed blog
Good post on the way to use tools and filters to make sense of the smog of data.
(tags: net2 information filters tips tools)
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Healthtorial Health Wire :: Pop!Tech Unveils Project Masiluleke: Largest-Ever Use of Mobile Devices for Delivery of HIV/AIDS & TB Care
Pop!Tech (www.poptech.org), the renowned annual ideas summit and social innovation network, in partnership with a coalition of world-class organizations, domain experts and cultural figures, today unveiled Project Masiluleke: a path-breaking effort that harnesses the power of mobile technology to help reverse the HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis (TB) crises in South Africa and beyond. The project embodies a vanguard new approach to these intractable public health challenges, tapping the cell phone as a high-impact, low-cost means to deliver healthcare information and catalyze increased testing.
(tags: net2 mobile poptech)
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2008 Manthan Award Winners – ICT and Development « ThinkChange India
Prerna announced the acceptance of nominations for the 2008 Manthan Awards back in March, and Livemint.com now provides highlights of the innovative winners. The full list of winners can be found here.
(tags: net2 india ict development)
Fri, 10/24/2008 - 12:10
Terrific Economist article on cloud computing. Amazon, as is unsurprising, shows where this trend can be heading:
Perhaps surprisingly, it is Amazon, a big online retailer, that shows where things are heading. In 2006 it started offering a computing utility called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Anybody with a credit card can start, say, a virtual machine on Amazon’s vast computer system to run an application, such as a web-based service. Developers can quickly add extra machines when needed and shut them down if there is no demand (which is why the utility is called Elastic Computing Cloud, or EC2). And the service is cheap: a virtual machine, for instance, starts at 10 cents per hour.
This ability, to get the power of servers quickly and easily, has already proven to be transformative. It means that you can make an idea real with much less expense and time and with fewer legacy investments (assuming that you can move your data and applications around). As more and more applications — and applications that allow the sophisticated building of systems, think Ning but even more geeky — become stable and available over the cloud it is less a decision and more a matter of course that data is stored and accessed in this way. Of course, as the report goes on to discuss, there are security implication, service interruptions and environmental impact all to think about here.
There is much in the general concept of cloud computing to recommend it, I think. It really does reduce expense and for many small groups (or project teams) cloud is already the way to go via tools like Basecamp or Google Docs. And the potential for even mid-sized organization to benefit from things like virtualization is huge (and environment and budget friendly, to boot).
But I think that there is also something else here to think about. And that is how can larger organizations become expert in an area and then provide a corner of it to others. We have that conept, in the nonprofit sector, with fiscal agents. But, often, those can just be organizations that provide a way of getting grants and other things funnelled to projects that might not have 501©3 as a legal status.
But are there ways that organizations are building capaicty that could be borrowed by others. I’m not sure what they are exactly — maybe capacities about reaching specific audiences or holding events or mobilizing individuals. but it seems that we can invest in capaicty organizations that are there soley to provide those kinds of services (and as a represenative of a capacity building organization I do think that’s necessary) but I can’t help but think there can and should be other ways of building capaicty across the sector. Things that we do well because we have ot that can be better integrated into other services.
This is all, I suppose, another word for collaboration — if you are serving a homeless population by prvoidng shelter, it makes sense to offer complimentary services through adding to your own portoflio of work or by partnering. And we’ve had a history of trying to do that (and a lot of that trying is built into funding efforts) but I’m not always sure that we’ve succeeded well.
Are there better ways for us to do this if we use the same cloud to put our data? Or if we just start thinking this way and exposing more of what we do to easier partnership?
What do you think? Is this good old fashioned partnership and community work and I’m making it harder than it needs to be? Is there really somethng that we can learn about how to extend ourselves and competencies to others? Or is this really just for intermediary organizations and capacity builders to own?
Update: Via twitter, Dan McQuillan reminded me of his terrific Cloud Campaigning post which gets at many of the same thoughts.
(photo credit: The Geothermal Genie by Stuck in Customs)
tagged: cloud computing, nptech, trends, services, collaboration
Fri, 10/24/2008 - 11:39
Terrific Economist article on cloud computing. Amazon, as is unsurprising, shows where this trend can be heading:
Perhaps surprisingly, it is Amazon, a big online retailer, that shows where things are heading. In 2006 it started offering a computing utility called Amazon Web Services (AWS). Anybody with a credit card can start, say, a virtual machine on Amazon’s vast computer system to run an application, such as a web-based service. Developers can quickly add extra machines when needed and shut them down if there is no demand (which is why the utility is called Elastic Computing Cloud, or EC2). And the service is cheap: a virtual machine, for instance, starts at 10 cents per hour.
This ability, to get the power of servers quickly and easily, has already proven to be transformative. It means that you can make an idea real with much less expense and time and with fewer legacy investments (assmunig that you can move your data and applicaitons around). As more and more applications — and applications that allow the sophisticated building of systems — think Ning but even more geeky. Of course, as the report goes on to discuss, there are security implication, service interruptions and environmental imapct all to think about here.
There is much in the general concept of cloud computing to recommend it, I think. It really does reduce expense and for many small groups (or project teams) cloud is already the way to go via tools like Basecamp or Google Docs. And the potential for even mid-sized organization to benefit from things like virtualization is huge (and environment and budget friendly, to boot).
But I think that there is also something else here to think about. And that is how can larger organizations become expert in an area and then provide a corner of it to others. We have that conept, in the nonprofit sector, with fiscal agents. But, often, those can just be organizations that provide a way of getting grants and other things funnelled to projects that might not have 501©3 as a legal status.
But are there ways that organizations are building capaicty that could be borrowed by others. I’m not sure what they are exactly — maybe capacities about reaching specific audiences or holding events or mobilizing individuals. but it seems that we can invest in capaicty organizations that are there soley to provide those kinds of services (and as a represenative of a capacity building organization I do think that’s necessary) but I can’t help but think there can and should be other ways of building capaicty across the sector. Things that we do well because we have ot that can be better integrated into other services.
This is all, I suppose, another word for collaboration — if you are serving a homeless population by prvoidng shelter, it makes sense to offer complimentary services through adding to your own portoflio of work or by partnering. And we’ve had a history of trying to do that (and a lot of that trying is built into funding efforts) but I’m not always sure that we’ve succeeded well.
Are there better ways for us to do this if we use the same cloud to put our data? Or if we just start thinking this way and exposing more of what we do to easier partnership?
What do you think? Is this good old fashioned partnership and community work and I’m making it harder than it needs to be? Is there really somethng that we can learn about how to extend ourselves and competencies to others? Or is this really just for intermediary organizations and capacity builders to own?
(photo credit: The Geothermal Genie by Stuck in Customs)
tagged: cloud computing, nptech, trends, services, collaboration
Fri, 10/10/2008 - 23:11
I’ve been pretty enamored of Ubiquity since installing it a month and a half ago. Tonight, I decided to play around with writing a command.
So, in just a few months and with (oh, trust me when I say this) virtually no skills whatsoever, I wrote my first Ubiquity commands: Social Actions Ubiquity Command.
You’ll see the full disclaimer there (and the things that I’d like to figure out how to add). But it was interesting to me to see how genuinely easy it was to do this.
Any feedback is, of course, very welcome
(and big fat thanks to the fine kids at Social Actions for making this swell API. They were a winner at NetSquared Year 3 — an effort with which I have some involvement)
tagged: net2, social actions, ubiquity, commands, experiment, nptech
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