• Get a First Life: A One Page Satire of Second Life
  “Go outside”, “Find out where you really live”, “Fornicate using your own genitals” and the other pleasures of First Life, a one-page parody of Second Life
  (tags: secondlife funny)
• Wired News: A Real Music Store Sprouts Online
  Legendary NYC indie music store starts selling mp3s in competition with iTunes. Evidently labels are very happy to have an Aplple/eMusic alternative. No word on issues of selling discontinued/out of print music…
  (tags: music lpbiz)
• The Doc Searls Weblog : Monday, January 22, 2007
  Doc uses my “story I didn’t write” experience as a jumping off point to talk about “the story” as the fundamental unit of human consciousness. A really useful train of thought… as well as some (overly) kind words about my work writing about OLPC
  (tags: olpc narrative story journalism media)

So, I realize the vast majority of my readers don’t want to hear about my personal health issues – y’all can skip this post. But, to be honest, I’ve spent much of January in doctor’s offices or hospitals and many of the topics I’ve been following most closely are medical ones. And now I find myself very interested in a bit of a medical controversy, a controversy involving a drug I’m hoping to have injected in my eye in about a month.

I’ve been a type 1 (juvenile onset) diabetic for 21 years. I monitor my diabetes very closely and am in “tight control” (hgbA1c = 5.3, for you diabetes geeks out there). But, like a lot of diabetics, I’ve been having problems with diabetic retinopathy. For those unacquainted with this charming disease, it’s the result of the degredation of very small blood vessels in the retina of the eye. Excess sugar in the blood causes the vessels to swell and degrade. Parts of the retina get insufficient oxygen, so the body responds by trying to grow new vessels on the retina. Unfortunately, these new vessels are fragile and malformed – they have a very high chance of breaking and causing bleeding within the eye, which can cause vision loss or blindness. Diabetic retinopathy is the leading cause of blindness in adults.

Once this sort of retinopathy – proliferative diabetic retinopathy – starts its course, the major weapon you’ve got to preserve your eyesight is “photocoagulation”. This procedure involves shining a green laser through your pupil to cause burns on the retina. These burns kill off the new blood vessels – the opthamologist doesn’t target the center of the retina, just the periphery, which means it damages your peripheral vision, though not the central vision.

I’ve had eight photocoagulation treatments done over the past year, with another scheduled for tomorrow morning. They suck. Everything you read about the procedure suggests that it might be “uncomfortable” – believe me, when the laser hits a branch of the optic nerve, it’s more than uncomfortable. I’ve learned to prepare for treatments with a large dose of aspirin and a shot of whiskey before I get into the operating room… I actually have formal medical instructions telling me to drink a shot of rye half an hour before the treatment.

Photocoagulation kills off the blood vessels, but it doesn’t stop them from regrowing. In most diabetics, you fry a few thousand holes in the retina and tell the patient to get their blood glucose under control in the hopes that vessel growth will slow. But my glucose is about as good as it’s going to get, and we’re starting to look for other options. One (really bad) option is vitrectomy, the surgical removal of the vitreous humor that fills the inside of your eye. While the surgeon is scooping goop out of tiny incisions in your eye, she scrapes the new vessels from the retina. This is very effective – very few people experience new proliferation of blood vessels afterwards – but it’s major surgery, and something I’d very much like to avoid.

Doctors have been wondering if there’s a way to turn off blood vessel regrowth in retinopathy patients. They’re focused on blocking the effects of a protein called VEGF (vascular endothelial growth factor) which promotes blood vessel growth. There’s a bunch of drugs that block VEGF – most of them need to be injected into the eye, close to the retina, to be effective. Two of the most effective drugs are made by Genentech – Avastin, which was developed as an anti-cancer drug, and Lucentis, which was developed specifically for use in the eye.

The drugs work through similar mechanisms and are chemically similar, though the drug in Lucentis is a smaller molecule. Genentech believes this means that Lucentis will bond more tightly to VEGF (a good thing, as that’s what we’re trying to block) and will leave the system faster than Avastin (a good thing, as it lessens chances of side effects.)

But there’s a major reason that people want to use Avastin instead of Lucentis – it costs $50 a dose, as compared to Lucentis, which is priced at $1950 a dose. And eye doctors believe it’s as effective as Lucentis, possibly more effective.

What you’d really like to do in this case is a side by side study of Avastin versus Lucentis to see whether there’s really a measurable difference in efficacy and safety between the drugs. But Genentech has made it clear they’ve got no interest in running that study. Why should they? They’ve spent millions of dollars developing a drug specifically for retinopathy and macular degeneration – sure, it’s expensive, but it’s far cheaper than fitting your computer out with a braille reader, or getting another half dozen sessions of photocoagulation.

Most of the patients who would be receiving Lucentis are elderly. Many of those patients are on Medicare, which means the $2,000 per shot is financed by the US taxpayer. This is likely one of the factors that inspired the National Institutes of Health to run a side-by-side study of the drugs, estimated to cost $16 million over the course of four years. The cost difference per year for American taxpayers, if Avastin were available for this use, is estimated at $5 billion.

NIH says that they’re not performing the study for cost reasons – their reason for the study is that an uncontrolled study is already taking place, with opthamologists purchasing Avastin and using it in an off-label use instead of Lucentis. (This off-label treatment is something I’m currently scheduled for late next month.)

Genentech is evidently pretty pissed that a US government agency is running a drug trial instead of allowing them to choose whether or not to test a drug for a particular use. Irv Arons, who writes about opthamology issues on his blog, quotes a report from an American Academy of Opthamology meeting:

Industry entities (pharmaceutical and device companies in general – not just Genentech) reportedly are attempting to prevent the newly announced head-to-head trial sponsored by the National Eye Institute (NEI) of Genentech’s Lucentis and Avastin in AMD. Dr. William Rich, an American Academy of Ophthalmology legislative expert, said, “We are very concerned about an intervention of industry into getting this trial carried out…We are monitoring it very carefully…We do anticipate some interference with the start of this trial by industry…Industry is going to petition not to see this trial carried out…I wouldn’t be surprised (to see the trial stopped). And public interest groups (e.g., AARP) around the country are going to be watching carefully, too.”

I’ll be watching, too. I understand and respect the need for pharma companies to recover their research costs. I understand that having Avastin approved for this use would likely cost Genentech billions of dollars and would likely tank their stock price. (My opthamologist has advised me to short Genentech based on this controversy…) But given the cost differential and the fact that many opthamologists are already using Avastin, it seems pretty churlish to try to block this study.

Even if I’m able to scrape up several thousand dollars a year to afford monthly Lucentis injections (my HMO is unlikely to cover the full cost of the drug – Medicare covers less than a third of the cost of Lucentis), diabetes is a global disease that’s growing quickly. Doctors in middle income nations aren’t going to be able to persuade their patients to use a drug that costs over $10,000 a year. They’re going to use Avastin, for a few hundred dollars a year. Which means that it would be a really, really good idea to do a systemic study on the use of the drug to make sure that it doesn’t cause brain warts or the unexplained dissapearance of fingers and toes somewhere further down the line.

I trust the doctors who’ve been treating me. They haven’t even put Lucentis on the table as an option, possibly because they’re sufficiently antagonized by Genentech’s behavior. If they think Avastin is safe enough to inject it into my eye, I’m willing to give it a shot. Here’s hoping the National Institutes of Health will be able to tell me if I made a bad mistake in about four years.

I’ve taken to thinking about the One Laptop Per Child project in terms of three tiers: hardware, software/content and usage/support. In describing my enthusiasm for and concerns about the project to both people working on the laptop and people critiquing it, I’ve flippantly offered an observation: there’s been roughly ten times as much thought about the hardware as about the software, and roughly ten times as much thought about software as about the challenges of rolling this device out to schools around the world. (There may well be a fourth tier – disposal and recycling of these machines – and I’m open to the argument that that’s received only a tenth as much thought as the third tier.)

This hierarchy of project attention makes a certain amount of sense: it’s hard to start designing software for a machine until you understand what the hardware will make capable, and even harder to get teachers thinking about how that application will change how they teach until they can touch it, play with it and understand it. But there are other reasons as well. Talented hardware and software designers have flocked to the project, but it’s been harder to get experts on deploying technology in the developing world involved. There’s fewer of us, and most of us are working in the developing world rather than wandering the streets of Cambridge. There’s skepticism from some of the best people in the developing world geek field, and even those of us who are enthusiastic about the project realize that there’s much less control over phase three of the project than the first two phases: many of the decisions and much of the hard work of rolling out the laptop is going to made in the schools and education ministries of the nations where the laptop premieres. I can sit in a conference room in Cambridge and offer advice on using PCs effectively in West Africa, but I would have very little control over whether the Nigerian government takes my advice.

There’s another reason as well – constructivism. Alan Kay and Seymour Papert have had a great deal of influence on the design and goals for the One Laptop project, and they’re both closely associated with educational constructivism, specifically with Constructionism, a theory of education Papert developed in his work at MIT. To massively oversimplify a movement I know very little about (invoking blogger’s license), constructionism practices “learning by making”, encouraging learners to build either in the real-world or in simulation, and asking teachers to work as facilitators of learning, rather than as imparters of knowledge.

(To get a sense for just how strongly constructionism has influenced the OLPC project, try referring to the laptop as a “teaching tool” within the OLPC offices. The phrase tends to inspire the sort of embarrased silence that you generally hear in the wake of someone loudly passing gas.)

Because the laptops are devices that enable students to explore, discover and learn – either on their own or with the mentorship of talented educators – much of the focus of tier one and two has been on creating devices that function far outside the classroom. When I’ve expressed my concerns that the devices are subversive to teacher’s authority in the classroom and that some teachers might be led to actively thwart laptop use in classrooms, OLPC software and content President Walter Bender has responded, “That’s why it’s a laptop.” In other words, if the schools are broken pedagogically, at least curious learners will have the chance to explore at home with their human-powered, self-meshing machines.

(This is also a possible response to some of Knut Foseide’s criticisms of the project. Yes, a lab of up to date Pentiums would cost less than equipping a school with OLPCs. But that would give students only a few hours a week of computer instruction, rather than giving them a tool they can take home and explore on their own. Much of the “inferiority” of the OLPC Foseide critiques is neccesary to make the laptops portable devices which each student can own.)

In a little more than a month, 3,500 laptops will be distributed to schools in the nations who’ve agreed to pilot the laptop. This debate about constructionism versus more traditional educational models will be informed pretty damned rapidly by the questions, concerns and feedback offered by teachers and students in the field. One of the people thinking hardest about this question is SJ Klein, OLPC’s director of content, who I spent much of Friday with, in a multiparty conversation about what content needs to ship with the One Laptop.

When we’re talking about shipping content, we’re talking more about servers than the laptops each student carries – the current version of the laptop has 512MB of flash RAM storage, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for large content libraries. But some subset of these laptops will be attached to external hard drives, and likely to some form of internet connection – while they’re otherwise unmodified OLPCs, they’ll act as caches of content and will share their connections via the wireless mesh – despite the fact that they’re peers to the other computers, it seems logical to call them “servers”.

To explain my interest in the topic: getting the content right for OLPC has potential impact far beyond the OLPC effort. OLPC is a very effective lever in getting publishers of educational content to think about releasing their content under an open license. Because so many publishers are interested in being associated with OLPC, SJ has been able to take a very strong stance: unless you’re going to release your content under a license like the GNU documentation license, it isn’t worth our time to talk with you. If this leads lots of people to release their content under these licenses, and if collections of content can be indexed and made accessible through repositories, lots of useful content could be available both to students lucky enough to have a OLPC laptop, and to those who live in schools approaching other strategies towards computerization. A school with a tuXlab or a SchoolNet computer lab could have access to a rich and wide array of books; a school that couldn’t afford a full computer lab, but had internet access and a printer could create textbooks and learning materials in the spirit of the Internet Bookmobile. Even if OLPC fails, an open educational content movement sparked in part by OLPC could have important implications for education in the developing world.

There’s at least six families of content that SJ and crew are thinking about:

Textbooks are the hook Negroponte and crew have used to make OLPC make sense to beancounters in education departments around the world. If students can own a laptop and use textbooks as e-books, the cost of the laptop can be offset by the cost of paper texts over five or more years. From SJ’s perspective, textbooks are largely the recipient nation’s problem – they’re generally chosen by the school system or the education department, and aren’t likely to be replaced by open texts imported from outside – if Nigeria, for instance, decided to start using an open-licensed US history book, it’s not hard to imagine a strong backlash from Nigerian authors and publishers who currently make money in the textbook industry.

Supplements are materials teachers and students can use to make a curiculum richer. This could include materials intended to complement textbooks, like exercise workbooks, as well as standalone texts. In other words, a Nigerian english textbook isn’t part of this category, but Shakespere plays and sonnets are, as are Chinua Achebe’s novels, or a guide to teaching biology using local Nigerian plants. Because these supplements are produced by smaller publishers than textbooks in some cases, and by individual educators in other cases, SJ sees a much greater opportunity to build libraries of this material. He’s already working with Project Gutenberg to select a set of 100 public domain books which would be most useful for OLPC environments.

Media includes current events and news information in text, video or audio format. Most of this information is published directly to the web – OLPC’s interest in this category of material is making sure that it can be archived and distributed on the servers, and in making it possible for content that might be locked to be unlocked to an educational audience. (You might imagine the New York Times or the Economist making their content accessible to OLPC schools, for instance.)

Arts and Culture includes open cultural content which could be distributed with the laptop. This could include music or video suitable for remixing, or to inspire creativity with the laptop devices. (This is the subject area we talked least about, and I may be misrepresenting SJ’s thinking about this area.)

Unique Capabilities of the OLPC machine need to be showcased so that educators and students will use the full capacities of OLPC, not just treat it like an electronic book. To get a sense for what some of these unique capabilities might be, it’s worth looking at eToys, a Squeak/Smalltalk-based multimedia tool, which is one of the applications pre-loaded on the laptop – OLPC is trying to get developers to build eToys for distribution with the computer, but really great applications are likely to need the cooperation of teachers in the field with developers who feel comfortable in the Smalltalk environment.

Manuals and Instructional Material include everything a laptop user – student or child – will need to know to use their laptops, as well materials for a network administrator and anyone repairing the laptops. This needs to include documentation for the operating system and all the applications, localized into the appropriate languages. The team sees four levels of neccesary documentation: end user, teacher/parent, first-tier tech support (the folks dropping off the laptops) and second-tier support (escalation on more serious technical issues.)

Based on my experience in developing nations and the experience of cybercafes and educational projects, I suggested that grouping parents and educators together probably wasn’t a good idea – some of the parents are going to be a much lower level of literacy than educators. I also suggested that projects like SchoolNet Namibia had done a good deal of work in figuring out how to make tiered support work for school computer labs – SchoolNet maintains a phone support line that network administrators can lean on when they get into trouble. Learning from these existing projects and building systems like this so that people’s first experiences with OLPC are positive ones is going to be a major challenge for the project.

This outline helps me get a sense for just how vast the content challenge alone is for OLPC – solving the “supplemental” problem alone would probably be a good multi-year project for an NGO. To do it well, you’d need to interview groups of teachers and students in each country, figure out what resources are needed, then start identifying materials that already exist in repositories, as well as negotiating with content owners for critical materials that need to be released under open licenses. But entirely separate teams will need to focus on documentation and rollout, as well as on building content that showcases the coolest bits of the OLPC project.

While thinking about the logistics and support neccesary to roll out even the first 3,500 machine gives me hives, I had an experience yesterday which went a long way to increasing my confidence about OLPC. I played with one of the Beta machines through the meeting and got significantly more comfortable with the Sugar interface than I’d been in previous encounters. After about an hour’s worth of play, I could write in the word processor, open sites with the web browser, find wireless networks and start – though not quit – most applications. But there were things that were driving me nuts – when I started an application, nothing indicated to me that the application was opening, which led me to open half a dozen windows. The Sugar “Desktop” is accessible by moving the mouse to the edge of the screen (kinda like widgets on my mac), but it requires finer mouse control than I have to access it – and the key on the keyboard that brings it up doesn’t work.

Around 5pm, Mako Hill brings in a USB key with the latest build of the OLPC software. I shut down the machine, plug in the key, and three minutes later, have an OLPC running on a fully updated OS. It’s a surprisingly smooth process, which is a good thing, as this is also the restore process for a busted laptop. Better yet, some of my main complaints have been fixed in the new release – when I launch an application, get immediate feedback that it’s loading; my menu button works and I can quit the web browser without crashing the machine. Clearly it’s still alpha software, but it’s changing quickly, and it sounds like the developers are listening closely to the concerns and complaints of many of the people testing the machine.

I’m still not sold on the need for an entirely new operating environment for the OLPC machines. I share many of Mike Hearn’s enthusiasms about the changes Sugar invokes – moving to a full-screen system instead of tiled windows seems very smart, and using a journaling filesystem to do away with saving and opening files is hugely overdue. But this leads to another worry about OLPC – many countries are investing so heavily in the project because they want students to be computer-ready and able to move into IT-intensive industries. Using a computer that doesn’t have windows, menus or many of the other trappings of the PC as we know it is going to require something of a learning curve… or might spark the rise of Sugar as a professional PC environment in countries where OLPC takes hold. I think the new interface is likely a terrific step in making machines more usable for kids, but there’s going to need to be a way to “outgrow” Sugar and work in a more conventional environment for some of the older students.

• Asashoryu rounds off tourney victory with final day win – MSN-Mainichi Daily News
  Alas, Ama didn’t get the fighting spirit prize – he finished 10-5, a strong finish, but the prize went to Toyonoshima who finished 12-3 and threatened the Yokozuna until almost the last day. A better tournament than the critics expected
  (tags: sumo mongolia japan)
• Nieman Reports
  Article from Rebecca and me on Global Voices and the ways in which people “witness” around the world
  (tags: globalvoices media journalism berkman)
• Refugees find hostility and hope on soccer field – International Herald Tribune
  Really excellent story about a soccer team in an Atlanta suburb composed solely of child refugees. The team is kicking ass under the guidance of an inspirational Jordanian coach, who is fighting with the local city hall to ensure that her team has a place
  (tags: uspolitics soccer football congo jordan bosnia)

• OLPC is Genius
  Mike Hearn really, really likes the Human Interface Guidelines that OLPC is folllowing. I’m not as convinced, but I share his sense that the interface is trying for a revolution…
  (tags: olpc interface design)
• article
  Fierce – and often wrong – critique of the one laptop per child project. Given that the group offering the critique is involved in computer recycling, it’s easy to understand why they might favor some alternative models… And several of the critiques are
  (tags: olpc recycling ict4d)

I haven’t written much about the One Laptop Per Child initiative in the past few months. This isn’t because little has happened with the project – in the months since I wrote a long OLPC post, we’ve seen a prototype of the machine, a factory-produced device, major work on the “Sugar” operating environment, and a finalization of the first five countries to pioneer the device. It also isn’t because I’ve lost interest in the device – I continue to be fascinated both by the audacity of the project and by the degrees of success it’s had so far.

I agreed to write a long piece for a well-respected technology journal about the laptop late in the spring of 2006. The editors of the journal asked – not unreasonably – that I not use in the information I was going to publish in that piece on my blog, and I agreed. I turned in a draft of the piece in early July, went through several edits with my editor, and generally felt pretty good about where the piece was going. (A slightly updated version of that draft is available here.)

But then the managing editor of the journal got hold of the piece, and I discovered they wanted something very different from what I’d written – they wanted critique, tension and controversy about the project. I got a draft back that bore very little resemblance to what I’d written – it was filled with international development clichés (“In a world where half the world has never made a phonecall, does it make sense to give children a laptop?”) and mean-spirited skepticism about the project (“if the laptops overheat, poor people can use them as pot warmers”.)

Basically, it wasn’t something I was willing to have my name attached to. And so I withdrew from writing the piece and told the editor I’d been working with – not the editor who’d demanded these changes – that she was free to run the piece under her name using my research, but that I wasn’t going to be associated with the tone or the conclusions of the piece.

So… eight months, several drafts and many, many unhappy phonecalls later, I’m not going to have the peer reviewed journal article that I could hold up to my colleagues at Berkman to prove that, yes, I really am trying to be an academic. And I’m left with some questions that I need to think through before taking on an assignment like this again.

One of my best friends, Nathan Kurz, read through the draft I ended up refusing and helped me conclude that I shouldn’t allow it to be published. He flew home a few days later and read “The Best American Science Writing 2006″ on the flight home, which gave him a useful insight on my experiences. “I’d wager that about half the pieces had the same tone of breathless controversy that your editor added.”

This comment helped me understand the experience I’d had with my editors regarding this piece. When I first started writing it, my editor asked about a possible “hook” based on Bill Gates’s opposition to OLPC. Later, we talked about creating tension between mobile phones and inexpensive computers as dueling strategies for wiring the developing world. The draft of the article I ended up refusing created tension between the cyberutopian optimism of the laptop creators and my hard-earned field-tested cynicism about the stresses Africa puts on laptops.

It’s not that I don’t think there’s any tension, conflict or disagreement over the One Laptop project – it’s just that I don’t think the disagreement fits into a neat “He say, she says” form. Personally, I’m pretty convinced that the hardware’s quite well designed and that the software is evolving rapidly. My concerns over the project have to do with whether educators will embrace the project or fight it, and whether the project’s aims will be embraced in developing world schools. But that’s more an open question than it is a breathless conflict. It’s possible that the draft I came up with is simply so boring that it couldn’t appear in this journal without some tension to draw in readers… but it raises the question of how one writes about science or technology when there’s no great drama unfolding, just progress being made.

The other frustration in this process is the timescale. When I drafted this article half a year ago, it was quite up to date and would have broken some new ground in writing about the project. Subsequently, Wayan Vota has reported much of what I’d planned to say on his excellent OLPC blog, and John Markoff has written the definitive OLPC article in the NYTimes. Even had I approved the last edit of the piece, it would have taken another couple of months to get through peer review and into print, possibly nine months from my first draft to publication. And this isn’t even that bad – I have a book chapter waiting for publication which is now over a year old – when I wrote it, it had up-to-date statistics regarding developing world weblogs. By the time it’s published, it will only be interesting as a historical document – not a single figure will be within an order of magnitude of accuracy.

It’s hard to figure out the value of academic publishing if you’re not an academic. When I write here, I tend to get critique – usually smart, well-informed critique – within hours. I often discover that I’m flat out wrong about something I’ve asserted, and I can update my opinions and impressions based on feedback from people better informed than I am. That seems like a much more efficient form of peer review – at least in the academic realm I inhabit – than waiting six to twelve months to find out whether an anonymous reviewer thinks my now-out of date paper is worth publishing.

While I’m sad this article won’t have a life beyond my blog, I’m happy to walk away from it as it lets me start writing about OLPC again. I’m off in a few minutes to a meeting about the content that might be included with the first generation of laptops and hope to share notes and impressions from that meeting over the weekend.

• RConversation: Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Vodaphone display some cojones
  RMack’s post about the recent announcement of a process leading to a corporate code of conduct for engaging in repressive environments. Congrats to RMack, Palfrey and everyone else on this critical project
  (tags: internet censorship humanrights china)
• John Palfrey ? Blog Archive ? Companies, NGOs, Investors, Techies, Academics Step Up on Censorship, Surveillance Issues
  JP talks about the announcement of NGOs and corporations cooperating on a code of conduct for engagement in China and other politically repressive environments
  (tags: china internet censorship filtering humanrights)
• Do carbon offsets live up to their promise? | csmonitor.com
  “…how voluntary carbon offsets actually work is unclear at best, and potentially fraudulent at worst, say experts.” Oh, and by the way, only trees planted in tropical areas have a net cooling effect…
  (tags: economics environment marketing hype)

I really enjoyed my time at the Berkman Center/Sunlight Foundation meeting earlier this week, but felt a little out of place. Sunlight’s focus is primarily on transparency in US government, especially on the role of money in Congress. My interest in tools for political transparency tends to be on developing nations, and while some of the tools built for one environment work in another environment, a lot of the projects described during the Sunlight conference won’t translate easily into a developing world environment.

I used my (brief) lunchtime talk to try to get some of the attendees focused on the way political activists in the US and the developing world could learn from one another. I tried to make the point that this learning needed to be symetrical – it’s a mistake to assume that American activists will always be teaching developing world activists to use tools developed for the US, and it’s a missed opportunity for US activists not to learn from activists in developing nations.

I outlined four projects that I take inspiration from:

- Bahrani activists using Google Maps to document land use. An anonymous Bahrani activist created a set of maps, distributed by PDF, which highlighted cramped urban neighborhoods and contrasted their size to palaces built for members of the ruling family. The fact that Bahrain responded by (briefly) blocking access to Google Maps suggests that the government found the document troubling and wanted to prevent other activists from doing similar sorts of GIS-based protest.

- Sami Ben Gharbia‘s Tunisian prison map. By plotting the location of documented and secret prisons on a Google Map, Sami offers a powerful graphic representation of the reach of a repressive government, linking to information and video about the dissidents held at these sites.

- Ory Okolloh’s Mzalendo project. Ory mentioned in a comment on one of my posts that she’s interested in the tools outlined here, but that the lack of data in Kenya means that her project to increase transparency around the Kenyan government is dealing with different challenges. I mentioned that Ory’s techniques for getting data about Kenya’s parliament – being given documents from geeks who built the parliamentary website, or from parlimanetary insiders, encouraging bloggers to visit parliament and blog their experiences – should inspire democracy activists in the US.

- The ZCTU video of a failed street protest in Harare. By clandestinely filming the failed ZCTU protest and filming activists after the fact in the hospital, ZCTU supporters created a document that’s a stunning indictment of the Mugabe government.

My point in outlining these projects was to point out a) that the problems people were facing in these nations are significantly different from the problems we’re addressing in the US and b) that activists’ ability to adapt tools to solve these problems should be a source of ideas and inspiration to US activists.

I get the sense that the sort of gathering we had at Harvard was extremely useful for domestic political activists, letting them learn about other related projects, or about fellow travellers. I’ve got high hopes that a future meeting of this sort could include some of the inspiring projects I mentioned above and could help build conversation between activists in different parts of the world. I hope that as Sunlight celebrates its success in bringing increased transparency to US politics that a global focus is a forthcoming step.

• Kunsthaus
  Wonderful series of photos of Chicano immigrants in New York City, portrayed as superheroes while working their daily jobs. Photos include information on how much money the subjects send home to their families, which makes it clear that they are, indeed,
  (tags: mexico photography economics labor immigration uspolitics activism)
• How banking on a mobile phone can help the poor | FP Passport
  Excellent, link-rich piece on mobile banking and its impact in the developing world.
  (tags: economics telephony mobile africa philippines)

The good news: New Scientist, an excellent weekly magazine, has an interview with me in its current issue. The interview is several months old, but is still useful, I think, as it covers a topic that’s going to be with us for a while: how the Internet will change as the next billion users come online. This is pretty much the topic that unites all my interests: social media in the developing world, open content, one laptop per child, media attention… So the chance to talk about it for a couple of pages with a smart guy like Greg Huang was a real pleasure.

Better news: the print version of the article features photos of the ger my friends and I build in our backyard every new years. This year’s ger was especially beautiful, as we got rid of the eaves, resulting in a smooth roof/wall transition, as you see in Mongolian gers.

Bad news: the article is behind a subscription firewall. Which means that you can’t see it unless you’re a New Scientist subscriber, or attend a university with a particular kind of New Scientist subscription.

Worse news: No newsstands carry New Scientist out here in the snow-covered hill country. And I haven’t managed to get my head around the idea of subscribing to a magazine so I can read an interview with me. So I’ll be catching up with the interview the next time I’m at a university library.

Oh well. Another interview I don’t get to read. :-)