Archive for August, 2008
Goals and Motivations
At the end of my summer explorations, here are my goals and motivations going into the thesis academic year:
- Create a way for people living poverty to communicate with greater ease and affordability
- Deliver ‘the internet’ in some way via voice and/or SMS
- Prototype work in Belize as this is the context I’m most familiar with
- Make a sustainable system - the best way to facilitate this seems to be by creating a for-profit or non-loss business
These are things I need to cull through before class starts (beyond my paper and presentation that are due):
- Interviews that need to be transcribed
- Finishing maps which I’ve already made notes and observations for
- A bit of prototyping
- Reading through my increasing pile of academic papers
DIRSI
Downloaded a bunch of papers and a book from DIRSI (Regional Dialogue on the Information Society) to read and comment on soon. This is an important academic source for me as it focuses on information and communication technology use in Latin America and the Caribbean, the context in which I will be carrying out my work.
Twitter SMS Service Stopped
Twitter has stopped their SMS service in all but the US, India, and Canada (via White African). The service was stopped due to the cost to the company.
At it
I’ve been a bit off of my blog these last weeks which were Belize beaches > Arkansas (lake, home singing at a wedding) > and now back to New York. I’m working on my summer paper now. Cheers.
Google invests in Keyna-based SMS company
Google invests in Mobile Planet
Mobile telephony is already popular in Africa, and has seen significant growth over the past few years, particularly in countries like Kenya. SMS is clearly a very important technology that provides access to the majority of mobile subscribers. Mobile Planet’s expertise with SMS related technology and mission to “empower the African people with information” make this a very exciting partnership for us. We’ll be sure to keep you updated on how things go!
Arkansas at the Lake
I’m back in the States, in Arkansas, and spent last weekend at the lake. Apparently there is a demand for ice which was going unmet, hence new automatic, 24 hour ice dispenser machines:
Charlie Brown: “Open Sourcing Social Solutions”
This paper argues that when more people can work to generate and carry out social innovation, they are able to be more effective than individuals working on their own. Ashoka attempts to facilitate this with Changemakers, an online competition narrowed by ‘the public’, but ultimately decided on by a panel of experts.
In the paper they over-extend the ideas of ‘open-souce’ collaboration and ‘crowd-sourcing’ instead of focusing on what they actually do well, which is create a collaborative environment which encourages innovation through funding and knowledge of similar projects. If they want to extend an internet term it seems more appropriate to call their approach ’social networking.’ They are creating a site where like-minded people people can connect in a way that they could not in person.
Beyond all of this, the most interesting part of the paper for me in the ‘Mosaic of Solutions’. An expert from Ashoka has pooled together common obstacles in related innovations giving guidance and provoking thought from new innovators. They provide precedents and solutions to particular problems which can be extended and changed by new innovators. This is a very valuable resource for those beginning to create answers to similar problems which have been addressed before. The more widely available these charts were, the more useful they could be to such people.
“Open Sourcing Social Solutions” from innovations summer 2007