Drew Cogbill | Thesis Blog

The default device in Africa is the mobile phone.

The White African has post about his presentation at Picnic called “If It Works in Africa, It Will Work Anywhere.”  He talks specifically about a variety of mobile innovators and more generally about why this mobile innovation matters on a global scale.

Democracy in America: Convergence Center at Park Aveune Armory is a Creative Time project featuring 40 artists exploring political themes running Sept 21-27.

Sharon Hayes’s Revolutionary Love 1 & 2 recreated public, group speeches at the recent RNC and DNC.  The content o the speech was quite beautiful, but the design of the space to engage you in this content was especially important to me.  When I approached the installation, I heard this crowd of chanting voices;  the environment felt very cultish to me.  After entering the space, however, I felt totally at ease and, more importantly, like I was at the protests.  Hayes strategically placed multiple screens and speakers each with one voice around the room in such a way that allowed the protest to be bigger and more meaningful than it perhaps was when it was carried out in real time.

Pigeon will now properly play back the public messages for all of a user’s contacts.

Direct US Phone: (713) 574-9488

Skype: +99000936 9996079967

6 Billion Others is a ethnographic, online video project that weaves individual interviews together by linking their common exploration into human experience.

via Tim Brown, Design Thinking

Asterisk “the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit.”

Redial: Inteactive Telephony is a NYU ITP class that teaches Asterisk with an online syllabus.

(Thanks Mike!)

Kiva is an online tool for microloaning.  With it, lenders can choose specific entrepreuneurs to support, who then work to repay the loan.  When the loan is returned to the lender, they will hopefully cycle the money back into the sytem to another entrepreuneur.

“Cometh the hour, Cometh the technology”

The interesting thing about these three projects is that they all proved that they worked — in other words, proved there was a need and developed a track record — before receiving significant funding…. If there is a lesson to learn here then it would have to be this: Don’t let a lack of funding stop you from getting your ICT4D solution off the ground, even if it does involve “failing fast.”

cogbill_21_sept_brief

Now you can add contact on Pigeon if you know the member number of your desired contact.  Figuring out how to accomplish this was a bit more complicated than the sign up code.

Here’s an old map of my database schema, which I have been referring to and helps to explain my logical organization: dbschema.pdf.

The contactLink table is used to join to members together and make them contacts.  I had to change my plan for organizing this table to make it easier to approve or decline contact requests.  There needs to be an option for ignoring a request and dealing with it later, but for the purposes of quick prototyping, this option was put on hold to get the main funcitonality going.

In my old prototype, I had faked the ability to leave messages for only your contacts.  Only this functionality needs to be added for a round of interesting user testing to occur.

Phone access:

• Direct local (713) 568-7265
• Skype +99000936 9996079900

contactsadding.zip contains all of the Pigeon code up to this point.

Here’s two conferences from 2007 that I should spend more time looking into:

Web2ForDev (many of the presentations are avaliable on video on the site)

UN meets Silicon Valley