I’ll be speaking on a panel called ICT4D, Innovations and the MDGs next week during UN Week in New York and another on Girls and Mobiles hosted by Mobile Active. So, I’ve been putting together my thoughts around girls, child rights, ICTs and the MDGs. The angle I’m taking is not from the large donor, top down, huge institutional program side, but instead, looking at examples from the work I’ve been closest to over the past few years at the community and district level, mostly focused on child and youth participation in the development process.
The latest UN report on the MDGs states that progress towards the Millennium Development Goals has been made, but it’s uneven. It looks like the Goals will be missed in most regions.
Creating an ecosystem of early warning and response actors in Liberia necessitates involvement from various levels of that system – local civil society organizations, international NGOs, the UN, government ministries, the national police and armed forces. Our team on the ground has spent much of the first couple months meeting with international NGOs (of which there are more than 70 based in Monrovia alone) and the UN – key players in this multi-layered approach to conflict prevention and intervention. Many of these potential partners were eager to begin mapping – but with several of them, we hit the same wall: our maps, they said, didn’t have enough information. Well, not “our” maps, but rather the base layer maps used here in Liberia for Ushahidi instances – Google Maps. And Googl
Following the successful deployment of Ushahidi in Kenya during the constitutional referendum ‘Uchaguzi’, and the community meetups held every month at the ihub, the developer community in Kenya came together at the ihub yesterday. The main reason for coming together was to learn from long time coder Jason Mule, and developer Linda Kamau.
Angelica Valeria Ospina recently wrote about the role of social memory and ICTs in building climate change resilience. She refers to Carl Folke’s definition of social memory as “captured experience with change and successful adaptations embedded in a deeper level of values, and actualized through community debate and decision-making processes into appropriate strategies for dealing with ongoing change.”
On August 16, Twitter will be limiting requests using basic authentication for requests to their API and shutting them off entirely on August 31. What does this mean for Ushahidi? Ushahidi uses this method to connect to your Twitter account and download direct messages. If you have your own deployment of Ushahidi and you have added your Twitter username and password in the admin settings, you will no longer be receiving these messages. However, keep in mind that you will continue to receive messages based on your hashtag settings!
One of the first tasks as Ushahidi’s Mobile Project Manager, is to deliver the much-anticipated Ushahidi iPhone app. We’ve had an iPhone app in the works for the past year, however a lot has changed since we first envisioned the app. For example, background processing is now available on the iPhone 4.0, and the iPad now offers a much larger screen real estate.
So if we built the app from the ground up, what would it look like? How could we design the app to be as simple as possible, and yet still familiar to the user?
Do the majority of people working in “mobiles for development” work in mobile, or development? It may seem like an odd question, but how people approach “m4d” may have more of an impact on success or failure than we think.
The world of social mobile isn’t short of anecdotes. “Put the user first”, “Consider the technology only at the very end”, “Don’t re-invent the wheel” and “Build with scale in mind” are just a few. Ignore these and failure won’t be far around the corner, we’re told. But maybe we’re missing something here. Sure, there’s a growing number of ‘best’ practices, but one thing we rarely seem to question are the very credentials of the project origin itself.
What has been will be again,what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 In my last post (Orgasmatron Moments) I compared re-hashed development and aid work ideas to re-makes of songs, lamenting that often people don’t realize that their favorite new innovation is more like a cover of an old idea. Dave Algoso at Find What Works commented:
On August 16, Twitter will be limiting requests using basic authentication for requests to their API and shutting them off entirely on August 31. What does this mean for Ushahidi? Ushahidi uses this method to connect to your Twitter account and download direct messages. If you have your own deployment of Ushahidi and you have added your Twitter username and password in the admin settings, you will no longer be receiving these messages. However, keep in mind that you will continue to receive messages based on your hashtag settings!
