Nov 22, 09
CFCM Show and Tell: Making Change
Ryan Toole is designing a platform called Red Ink, a tool designed to enable secure, collective financial action. He points out that there are existing tools – wesabe, mint.com, yodlee – which unify your online financial information. The bleeding edge in this field is financial tools for collective action – carrotmob, groupon, merry miser, buy it like you mean it. Red Ink fits into this latter category. It’s a “social financial platform” designed to let...
Threatened Voices: An Interactive Map
My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly...
Hossein Derakhshan, Now Detained for Over a Year
Hossein Derakhshan (”Hoder”) has now been in prison in Iran for more than a year. My friend Cyrus Farivar has followed his case closely, and has been in touch with Hoder’s family, who confirm that he’s beeing held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. Reports from the activist group Human Rights in Iran suggest that Hoder has been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time, beaten and otherwise mistreated, and that Hoder was considering a hunger strike...
Will Allen and the Urban Farming Revolution
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. Will Allen is redefining farming. His farm is a set of greenhouses in a corner of Northwest Milwaukee, walking distance from the city’s largest housing project. His farm doesn’t just feed 10,000 local residents – it’s a source of jobs, of training in polyculture and transformation of waste into food, and a model for the future of urban farming. Will’s a soft-spoken guy, a...
Neri Oxman: Design is Truly Alive
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. Celebrated designer Neri Oxman wonders what is the origin of form? How do we invent form? Is it a preconcieved image of narrative? Intelligent design? Getting rid of the stone in the way, as Michelangelo speculated? If form is to follow function, how is that function tested and evaluated? It has been my assumption that design by shift of perspective may be, perhaps, considered a second nature. ...
Esther Duflo: Experiments Against Poverty
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. Professor Esther Duflo is a new Macarthur fellow, recognized for her pioneering work in studying a wide set of issues in development economics. Her reseach has looked at the effectiveness of financial remittances (it’s better to send money to grandmothers than grandfathers) and the health issues associated with charcoal stoves. Her weapon of choice is the randomized trial, used extensively in drug...
Paul Van Zyl: Why America Needs a TRC
Ethan Zuckerman is blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. Paul Van Zyl was an anti-apartheid organizer in South Africa. When Mandela became president, he became the executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he’s now co-founder and EVP of the International Center for Transitional Justice. He explains that in the four years from Mandela’s release from prison to free elections, an enormous amount of work had to be done. South...
Steve Barr: Outlaw Private School
I'm blogging from Camden, Maine, at the wonderful Pop!Tech conference. This year's a special treat. My wife, the lovely Velveteen Rabbi, and I are team-blogging, trading off posts. You can read her posts on her website, or just read all of ours on the Pop!Tech site, where Michelle Riggen-Ransom has been doing brilliant work thus far. There's lots of bloggers in the crowd and on twitter - follow the #poptech tag for lots of different perspectives. Steve Barr, the founder of GreenDot schools,...
Mapping Main Street
US politicians talk a lot about Main Street. But what does Main Street actually look like in contemporary America? That’s what Harvard PhD students Jesse Shapins and James Burns, and journalist Kara Oehler, along with public radio producer Ann Heppermann, are doing with their “collaborative documentary”, “Mapping Main Street“. Shapins, Burns and Oehler are speaking at Berkman today explaining the nature of a documentary which is attempting to document...
Towards Hackable Architecture
My presentation at Applied Brilliance today was a quick version of my Innovation from Constraint talk, a talk that makes the argument that some of the best design ideas come from facing the constraints provided by material circumstance. Using a whole mess of examples stolen from Afrigadget, the talk argues that we hack technologies once they become familiar – from charcoal to bicycles to mobile phones. I ended with a couple of examples of innovative uses of social network technology,...
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