July 2009

Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 13:10

In Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development I covered the relevance of local social networks and social capital / trust for successful, long-term community and economic development.

Finding, engaging an empowering local social networks is the first step. I believe connecting these networks to the global communities of interest and practice on the Internet can provide a multiplier effect.

In the recent Technology Salon on Malawian health ICT systems, it was discussed how hiring recent Malawian college grads and connecting them to the global community of open source coders gave them an immense resource to draw on as they began their work; and they were soon contributing as peers and mentors to other programmers around the world.

That's power, and that's the 21st century version of technology transfer.

Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 08:50

World-wandering BoingBoing editor Xeni Jardin writes about a video from the "What Would the Poor Say: Debates in Aid Evaluation," NYU conference, where Leonard Wantchekoz presents on the importance of trust in development:

Video: "If You Don't Trust People You Know, It's Over."Leonard Wantchekon on the Lack of Intra-Community Trust in Benin from DRI on Vimeo.

Beyond Crowdsourcing

Submitted by Jon on Thu, 07/16/2009 - 19:56

I am weary of the term "crowdsourcing." Now, I'm not against the concept. I think small, bite-sized acts of service and kindness can make huge differences in the right situations. Indeed, it's the social-benefits business model of The Extraordinaries, and is at the core of what Yochai Benkler means when he discusses the power of "peer production" in The Wealth of Networks:

People began to apply behaviors they practice in their living rooms or in the elevator — "Here, let me lend you a hand," or "What did you think of last night’s speech?" — to production problems that had, throughout the twentieth century, been solved on the model of Ford and General Motors. The rise of peer production is neither mysterious nor ﬁckle when viewed through this lens. It is as rational and efficient given the objectives and material conditions of information production at the turn of the twenty-ﬁrst century as the assembly line was for the conditions at the turn of the twentieth.

But the term "crowdsourcing" itself is outdated. It presumes that there's some central organization doing the sourcing (paralleling "outsourcing"), and it seems to get applied in all sorts of roles where that's not relevant.

Collaboration and the XO Mesh

Submitted by Jon on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 10:46

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 project, you probably have a pretty empty "neighborhood," and look to Internet jabber servers to connect with other XOs.

The state of the public jabber servers of recent has been in flux for a while, but seems to be settling down.

XOChat.org seems to have disappeared from the Internet (any word on why?), and scouring the OLPC Wiki for community servers has led to more dead ends than I care to relate. To be fair, I've mainly been using Pidgin.im instead of my XO to test the networks out, and some servers, including XO1Share.org, isn't playing nice with my IM client - but does seem to have a decently vibrant community of XO users on it. Jabber.laptop.org and jabber.sugarlabs.org are the other contenders currently (and jabber.laptop.org allows IM clients!, Sugarlabs throttles non-OLPC connections).

There is also a scaling limitation in that any server can only take ~150 concurrent users.

July 2009

Social Networks (including Facebook) and Technology Transfer

Social Networks (not Facebook) and Development

Beyond Crowdsourcing

Collaboration and the XO Mesh

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