Holistic ICT for EcoLiving

Semantic Seed is a San Jose based business incubator founded by serial entrepreneur Toby Morning. They are working with OVF to promote and develop our Ecotourism & Service Learning Program.

In addition to supporting our Service Learning work, we are working together to create an ICT-based Social Entrepreneurship Program that (through the Open Digital Village Program) will eventually:

1. Create sustainable business models for the Centers by incubating businesses;
2. Support rapid economic growth in the local economies in which the centers are located through the development of outsourcing services;
3. Promote the Effective Localization of information technology services and content;

1. Enable efficiency gains through IT increasing local business productivity making the local economy more competitive within the global economy.

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What we see with the rise of the Internet is an unprecedented level of opportunity to particpate in various competitions and dialogs around the world.

The Pioneer of this effort has been Skoll’s Social Edge and also Ashoka’s Changemaker’s challenge. Now even the USDA has gotten into the ring and is offering their Global Development Commons as  way to seek innovation and use the Internet to make best practices more accessible to the development community and particularly those in the field.

Really this trend is another sign of the rise of peer to peer systems of communications that enable more decentralized ways of communications and evolution. The existing top down approaches are becoming more irrelevant because its becoming obvious that the tiny section of the society that now controls innovation and how we see innovation from the mainstream lens of society is really often not that innovative when it comes to consider what we humans need to continue to exist as a global modern civilized society.

USAID’s Global Development Commons – USAID has launched GlobalDevelopmentCommons. This initiative seeks innovations that to make knowledge more accessible and affordable to help people in developing countries solve social and economic problems. The Commons seeks to catalyze the international development community to become more open and collaborative through information and communication technologies. The site profiles successful applications of technology that improve access to information in developing countries…

smartMeme – I came across smartMeme several years ago at the 2003 PlaNetwork Conference in SF. Recently they sent me a mass email and apparently they are still around and doing work to help show how to effectively communicate virally in a world being altered by “memes.” Memes are similar to genes according to Richard Dawkins the NeoDarwinist who coined the term in the classic book Selfish Genes. The smartMeme project is “Connecting grassroots movement building with strategies to change the stories that shape mass culture.” Currently Patrick Reinsborough of smartMeme is involved in an effort at “Re:Imagining Change – An Introduction to Story-based Strategy * The New Strategy + Training Manual from smartMeme!”

Re:Imagining Change is an interactive and accessible resource guide to smartMeme’s story-based strategy tools and methods. Download 60 pages of ideas, analysis, case studies, and strategies to change your campaign, your community and your world.

You can watch the Re:Imagining Change Video & Download the Re:Imagining Change Strategy Manual. Join the Conversation on smartMeme’s Changing the Story Blog.

Project for the Future – Recently some people in our network participated in the Project for the Future Summit including Chris Bui who I just met at The Global Summit on Nov 17th. The event focused on Dr Doug Engelbart’s work to promote collective IQ. Valerie Landau worked with him on a recent book about his work. For more go to the Engelbart Book website.

Be a Blogger for Change.org - Want to blog on an issue you are passionate about for an audience of
hundreds of thousands of activists and nonprofit leaders? Change.org is currently hiring part-time blogger/editors to create the premier online space for some of the most important issues of our time. Each blogger will lead an online community focusing on a single issue, maintain a daily blog covering news and offering commentary, convene leading nonprofits and activists working on the issue, and help people translate their interests and passions into concrete action. Some of the issues that they are looking for bloggers for include: Global Poverty; Universal Health Care; Microfinance; Human Trafficking; Public Education; Poverty In America; Global Health; Sustainable Agriculture; Human Rights.

Michael Bauwens (of P2P Foundation) recently reported on a very good article about the geek social milieu (Chris Messina) of the bay area that mentions Andrius Kulikauskas on page 4 of San Francisco Magazine

One of Messina’s early influences was an obscure Lithuanian philosopher named Andrius Kulikauskas whose manifesto, “An Economy for Giving Everything Away,” argues that the best way to find the answer to a problem is to look at what other people are doing, then share your data so that others can benefit. “The value,” Messina says, “is no longer in having monopolistic control over the entire conversation.”

He stumbled on the paper during high school in Manchester, New Hampshire, where he was a bright, restless kid with a libertarian streak. “I rejected the way that school was done,” he recalls. “In class, we did rote exercises. I thought, ‘All of these problems have been solved before; why not work on things that enrich the world?’” He was artistic, with an innate grasp of all things tech—”I had no fear of destroying computers and putting them back together again, much to my parents’ chagrin”—so web design was a natural outlet. But when Messina created a web page for a gay student group, he was suspended. “It gave me the feeling that I couldn’t trust these institutions,” he says. Traditional modes of protest, like the rallies he attended as an ACLU volunteer in college, left him even more cynical. Harnessing the Internet to spread ideas was “a better use of energy then yelling at someone you don’t like,” he decided.

Messina wanted to make technology accessible to people like his parents and customers in his first job, as a troubleshooter for an Internet provider. “They would have the same problems again and again, and it was so humiliating to want to connect with people but have the technology get in the way. I thought it was unfair that as the world was moving toward increased technology, a great number of peo­ple were being left behind.”

A recent discussion in Global Villages included mention of P2P’s Intensive coverage of internet and ‘peer governance’ issues. Regarding Internet governance Michel specifically recommends this book: Multi-Stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum. Jeremy Malcolm. Terminus, 2008, excerpted here in their P2P blog.

He also recommends the directory of open design communities at http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hackig and the overall monitoring of their emergence through http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design

Michael Burmeister-Brown is a serial entreprenuer that has developed Yahoo software, a low income internet service installation company called NetEquality and finally and most recently a company called Open-Mesh Wireless.

In The Open Mesh Revolution, Daily Wireless reports that after an initial good start, Meraki has downgraded the features available on its wireless routers and changed its pricing policy, where they now look a lot less attractive as a candidate for getting the consumer mesh off the ground.

Enter Open-Mesh, founded by Michael Burmeister-Brown, developer of the Dashboard Software that made managing dozens, even hundreds, of Meraki repeaters fast and easy.

• It’s inexpensive. Open-Mesh WiFi repeaters cost $49 each or $39.95 (qty 20)
• It’s Ad free. Open-Mesh promises they will never push ads into your networks. You decide what, if any, content you want to display.
• It’s 100% open source and deployed on top of OpenWRT. You can change anything.
• You can re-flash the firmware if you want.
• The Dashboard management system provides free administration, alerting and mapping. It allows you to configure the ESSID, splash page, passwords, and Bandwith allocation of your networks.
• The devices auto-configure. It’s simple to create a neighborhood or apartment network. You don’t need to use their management system if you don’t want to.

Open Mesh is open source and promises to stay that way, unlike Meraki and its Spain-based competitor FON.

Read more about his work in the P2P article here.

Another shared link I explored between our networks is that of Thomas H. Greco, Jr who is recognized as a pioneer of alternative/community currencies on the P2P wiki and author of this article: “Monetary Transformation, not Monetary Reform, is What is Needed“.

We are interested in the value of P2P Foundation research and documentation of global grassroots efforts in a range of interrelated fields related to the promotion of peer to peer alternatives to current development and economics models in the global economy.

P2P Foundation Resources:

• P2P Wiki and Encyclopedia
• P2P Newsletter
• Essay about the P2P movement
• Text Interview
• video interview
• P2P Delicious tags

More bloggers than ever face arrest for exposing human rights abuses or

criticising governments, says a recent University of Washington report.

Since 2003, 64 people unaffiliated with news organisations have been

arrested for publishing their views on a blog, according to the 2008 World

Information Access (WIA) report. And last year, three times as many people

- 36 – were arrested for blogging about political issues than in 2006, the

report revealed.

More than half of arrests since 2003 were made in China, Egypt and Iran,

but British, French, Canadian and American bloggers have also been

detained. The average prison sentence for blogging was 15 months, while the

longest sentence recorded was eight years.

Arrested bloggers exposed corruption in government, abuse of human rights

or suppression of protests. The report said the rising number of arrests

indicates blogging’s growing political importance, especially in times of

political uncertainty such as around general elections or large protests.

This year, the report predicts the number of bloggers arrested will exceed

2007 numbers thanks to greater popularity of blogging as a medium, greater

enforcement of net restrictions, and elections in China, Pakistan, Iran and

the U.S.

Visit these links:

- WIA report: http://www.wiareport.org/index.php/56/blogger-arrests and

http://www.wiareport.org/index.php/2008-briefing-booklet/

- BBC story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7456357.stm

- Ars Technica (technology news website) comment: htt

A Workshop on “Strengthening the Linkages of different ICT4D models” was held by the National Alliance for Mission 2007 for strengthening the partnership among the various alliance members for promoting self-sustaining, self-replicable and self-generative Village Knowledge Centres. The involvement of wide variety of stakeholders in the Alliance provides us with opportunities to to study and understand the structures and functions of different types (Community, Entrepreneur, Corporate Sectors and Government Initiatives) of Village Knowledge Centres, Telecentres, Information kiosks, Village Information Centres, Community Service Centres, etc. 

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