Archive for March 2010
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Walk into the World of Walk in Coolers with Bush Refrigeration
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SocEntChat: Innovation, Education, and Change
Last month, I was lucky enough to attend Ashoka’s Tech4Society conference in Hyderabad, India, as a writer for the AshokaTech blog. Since then, I’ve continued to write at AshokaTech about technological innovations in the nonprofit and social enterprise sectors. This post originally appeared there.
Ashoka hosts a monthly, Twitter-based chat called SocEntChat, in which anyone can participate and discuss issues surrounding social enterprise. It’s a great place to share ideas. This month’s chat was all about technological innovations, hosted by Ashoka’s Tom Dawkins. Along with the usual crowd, Tech4Society organizer (and Twitter newcomer) Rosa Wang was there to share reflections from the conference. You can read the full transcript here.
Tom’s first question was, “What breakthrough invention do you think will reshape the lives of the poor?” There were a lot of good answers - mobile phones, solar power, clean water - but I wondered if perhaps the question was too broad for there to be any one good answer. In a Tech4Society panel on mobile phones, for example, Ashoka-Lemelson fellow Madan Mohan Rao said that the increase in mobile phone use in rural India has the unintended consequence of limiting women’s ability to communicate, as over 90% of family mobiles are carried by men. According to Rao, social equity still requires landline phones. In this way, what’s more important than a specific technological solution is a willingness to pay attention to the needs you’re meeting. The high-tech solution isn’t always the better one, even if the low-tech one is more difficult.
Featured Project Update: NewsTrust
NewsTrust is a N2Y2 Featured Project that was created as a free online social news network to help people find and share good journalism. Three years later, NewsTrust is still helping people make more informed decisions through journalism and offers an integrated online service which includes a news filter, media literacy tools and a civic engagement network.
Recently, NewsTrust has been expanding its platform and over the next six months plans to run pilot programs for use of the following tools:
Why use contributed Salesforce modules for Drupal?
Lobo’s comment on my post yesterday prompted me to complete this blog entry that I’ve been ruminating on for a while. I wrote a blog entry a while back on the state of Drupal/Salesforce integration. What I didn’t say is that a number of shops that have done Drupal/SF integration for production sites chose not [...]
NetSquared Local: What, why and how to get connected locally
NetSquared works on and offline to connect the global community at the intersection of technology and social change. The website and Community Blog are your online spaces to connect, share ideas, and collaborate. Offline we take things local!
I’m Going To Twestival on March 25th, Are You?
The third Twestival will take place on Thursday, March 25th in cities around the world. The event was the brainchild of Amanda Rose, who launched the first Twestival in February 2009 that raised money to support Charity:Water. Thursday’s event will…
The easier it looks, the more expensive it will be (or, how to avoid clusterfrack projects)
As most of you know, I’m a very long time veteran of web application building. I’ve been involved in web application development basically since they started – when a cgi-bin folder with some perl scripts to process simple forms was the norm. Until just a few years ago, there was very little sophistication about the [...]
Attend a Workshop to Help Develop the ISHub 2.0
The IS Hub is a collaborative concept that, when achieved, will create a cohesive network of web platforms to help improve the lives of people all over the world. You are invited to collaborate at an upcoming workshop on April 8 in Utrecht to help shape the future of this technology. The goal of the workshop is to share the IS Hub externally to find people to help develop it further. Rooted in the 2.0 philosophy, the organizers hope that by sharing the idea they can join forces to create something extraordinary.
Here is an explanation of the IS Hub from the workshop coordinators:
What about Pscyho Socialgraphics?
Sigmund Freud I’ve been buried putting the final touches on some new curriculum for social media and nonprofit peer learning approaches. It’s the dance floor and the balcony - both strategy and tactics but deployed in a lab with focused…
