I have a critical flaw - not being able to say no to helping out worthwhile projects get their technological house in order.

I've left a trail of wikis, content management system-run sites, and creative cabling across three continents. One such effort was in the pre-iPhone world of the early 2000s with a creative social enterprise that empowered artisans to realize the full market value of their goods (often undercut by middlemen taking advantage of innumeracy, a need for liquidity, or both). These goods are then shipped to the US to sell. The NGO takes a small cut for its operations and the shipping cost, and everyone benefits. Beyond dealing with the unpredictability of the Nicaraguan electrical system, they were efficient in their offline practices, but saw the need for inventory tracking. That seemingly basic task is both a key to empowering online sales and other scaling activities, but is no short order. The system must be able to know what items were stored in what locations in the US and in Nicaragua, and meet the needs for a geographically disperse set of volunteers to sell those items at events. It also has to have a simple and largely foolproof way of adding inventory from the Nica office that can absorb a backlog of work if the power or Internet connection is off.

No problem - totally doable. For the US side, we work with a Salesforce Foundation volunteer to create an online, cloud-based inventory system where the volunteers can log transactions live on the site using a re-purposed cue:cat barcode scanner -- the cue:cat itself being a dotcom-era QR code wannabe, best summed up by Jeff Salkowski of the Chigao Tribune as "You have to wonder about a business plan based on the notion that people want to interact with a soda can." and by Wired’s Leander Kahney as "a cheapo bar-code scanner that looks like a marital aid."

On the Nica side, the staff can add the inventory on a spreadsheet and batch upload it into SalesForce whenever they have power. This gives them an offline backup, and lets work continue (on a laptop) even if power cuts out. The Excel sheet automatically creates a code that can be barcode-ified for matching by the volunteer sales staff without painstaking scribbling of notes.

Perfect, right? With so much time spent on the “challenging” part of the equation in Nica, not enough thought went into the sales side - often outside, at craft markets, sometimes in the rain. Not happy environments for laptops, rarely enough electricity or battery power to last the day, and never any wifi to actually connect to the Internet to track sales in realtime.

Times have changed, and the plan, like the cue:cat itself, may have a new life in our 3G-saturated world with QR Codes and Square point-of-sale gadgets replacing the bulky laptop, but at the time, it was simply a failure.

What do you do when your project just falls flat? Moving on and hiding it is the wrong answer. The right answer is that you get up in front of a crowd of your peers, donors, and investors (past and potentially future) and spill the beans. In the startup world, some amount of failure is expected, and even welcomed. Learning from failure is, after all, the best education out there. But in the do-gooder space of non-profits and international development organizations, failure is not an option.

The challenge is that we’re in this industry if you will to save and improve lives, not make a profit. If a plan fails, it’s lives lives - not just bank accounts -- that are not enriched.

There are obviously failures in development, as evidenced by the mere fact that we’re five to six decades in to concerted global efforts, and still working on it. More ICT4D projects fail than ever scale beyond the pilot stage. The World Bank bravely released its internal study revealing that while most of its projects succeed overall, in the ICT4D category of projects, only achieve their intended outcomes 30% of the time. Some of those may be wildly successful in unanticipated ways, others just complete flops.

Katrin Verclas has done the community a huge favor in creating and open-sourcing the concept of the FailFaire.

The Failfaire celebrates and de-stigmatizes failure by loosening lips with some alcohol and then throwing people on staqe for a tightly scheduled 5 minute moment of candor. Thanks to the open-source philosophy, these have spread to internal organizational events as well as a few public failfaires, most recently one hosted by Inveneo’s Wayan Vota in DC at the World Bank itself, and another coming up this December in NYC hosted by MobileActive.

The risks of failure in development work are clearly weightier than Q3 profits,which makes the relaxed, raucousness of a failfaire that much more important. For a community that has no normal mechanism for learning across the various implementers, the only way we can advance the whole cause is through these commiserations over good goals, good people, and solid technology completely failing - and learning from them.

This was best encapsulated after the event. One presenter discussed his media-darling pedal-powered phone booth for remote villages, which was a complete failure. Another Failfaire-er approached him afterwards to commiserate on similar problems - their own popular bike-powered computer system actually took almost seven people pedaling to reliably power the system. While bikes garner tons of often-misguided warm feelings and media popularity, they aren’t necessarily silver bullets -- a lesson for the road.

I will be discussing the tech trends from 2011 and looking forward to what 2012 holds for us with a fine group of panelists during DCWeek. Our panel still has some free tickets left - RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/net2dc/

Want to get in the action early? Join our thread over at Quora.

My fellow panelists are Nisha Chittal, Colin Delany, Bob Fine, and Bonnie Shaw, and Roshani Kothari is going to have the arduous task of wrangling us as our moderator.

Read more about the event at DCWeek: http://bit.ly/dcweektechtrends1108

A colleague and I have the first of two articles posted on FastCompany - discussing the role of automation in job creation -- and destruction:

Look deeply into the beady little electronic eye of your vacuum-cleaning robot, and you’ll see a machine bent on world domination. For now, it focuses on finding and eradicating dirt, but every time it gets into a particularly extracted fight with a wall, your feet, or a house pet--you know it has larger ambitions. More concerning than the Roomba’s aggressive policy stance against furniture legs is what it as a product means for labor, job creation, and automation.

We’re used to a well-worn path in manufacturing, and business in general. An extra bright cave-dweller figures out how to use a round object to help move large things, early adopters begin to share the practice, and then pretty soon everyone is using wheels. Eventually, artisan wheel-makers find themselves out of a job when factories start pumping out robot-manufactured wheels, and we move on as a society--wheels are now a given commodity.

The thing is, those robots have taken over the factory floor, and are moving upstairs.

Read more: http://www.fastcompany.com/1781904/instead-of-just-eliminating-jobs-auto...

If May 3rd gets to be World Press Freedom Day, then after today's events, July 14 (in addition to already being Bastille Day) should be Citizen Media Day.

The "celebrations" really started yesterday, with Ashoka Changemakers (with the support of Google) launching a global competition (fully supported in nine languages, no less) to source innovative ideas in citizen media. I've got to say, I love how the timeline goes "backwards" in Right-to-Left languages like Arabic. Many thanks to our work with Ashoka Israel in launching Kikar (loosely, "Market square") in Hebrew.

Today, the Changemakers blog is buzzing with amazing citizen media stories from Ashoka fellows and others, leading up to a #SocEntChat today on Twitter at 2pm EDT.

Later in the day, at 5:30pm, I will be moderating a panel on "Online Activism after #ArabSpring : What's Next?" - there are a few seats still available, more information and RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/intlrel-76/events/23103221/ . Follow along on twitter with the hashtag #AAS, and there's a remote possibility we may be able to livestream the event.

Finally, we get to wind down at Circa Bistro with a happy hour co-hosted with ICTWorks - information and RSVP here: http://ict4drinks-july14.eventbrite.com/.

Via MobileActive, I got to reading this article at the WSJ.

Unsurprisingly, the Libyan cell network is built to be Tripoli-centric, "giving him and his intelligence agents full control over phones and Internet" according to the WSJ. If that's not a stark reminder of the challenges of using SMS and mobiles in human rights work that I've been concerned about, I don't know what is.

The brilliant response here has been to wrest control over segments of the Libyan mobile network. This has taken some outside effort, external government support, and massive funding - it is, at least for now, successful at creating an independent domestic network with limited external access:

A team led by a Libyan-American telecom executive has helped rebels hijack Col. Moammar Gadhafi's cellphone network and re-establish their own communications.

The new network, first plotted on an airplane napkin and assembled with the help of oil-rich Arab nations, is giving more than two million Libyans their first connections to each other and the outside world after Col. Gadhafi cut off their telephone and Internet service about a month ago.

That March cutoff had rebels waving flags to communicate on the battlefield. The new cellphone network, opened on April 2, has become the opposition's main tool for communicating from the front lines in the east and up the chain of command to rebel brass hundreds of miles away.

When I asked the Ginger Man if they could host a crazy crowd of ICT4D and mobile4dev geeks rolling in to network and share stories from the frontlines of technology and development, they replied simply, "bring it."

I forward that sentiment on to you. If you hack, build, or implement tools all the way from water pumps to LED lanterns to OLPCs to citizen journalism software, bring your best toy, story, or idea for how technology can support global development, promote equality, and topple authoritarian regimes.

RSVP here, but attendance will be governed by the space we have available: http://ict4dev.eventbrite.com/

Bonus: Learn about the upcoming Ashoka/Changemakers collaborative competition on building sustainable models supporting access, freedom of speech, information quality and privacy! You can read the background on our googly adventure.

Monday, March 12 starting at 5pm at The Ginger Man (301 Lavaca)

We are also supporting the development of new tools that enable citizens to exercise their rights of free expression by circumventing politically motivated censorship. We are providing funds to groups around the world to make sure that those tools get to the people who need them in local languages, and with the training they need to access the internet safely. [ ... ] We want to put these tools in the hands of people who will use them to advance democracy and human rights, to fight climate change and epidemics, [...]

Great ideals, sure, but what about WikiLeaks? Who in this day and age would vocally and publicly support tools that would "[circumvent] politically motivated censorship" when these crazies could be terrorists being censgored by a friendly government, or when their "free speech rights" could be potentially tied to copyrighted material?

Those were the words of Secretary Clinton, speaking earlier this year Hat-tip to BoingBoing. Kinda less relevant today, huh?

WikiLeaks has changed political discourse, and quite possibly the path of the Internet's evolution. I can't claim to have completely digested my own views on this, but here's a start, and some links to a lot of great thoughtwork on the situation.

1) Maybe this is the world we want. Long discussions about the value of a hegemonic global political system and its values on stability (at the cost of human rights, generally speaking) aside, the USA's political power is in flux right now, and possibly fading out. Do we want another superpower to emerge and dominate the world? USA, for all our foibles, has some strong ideals around democratic rule and human rights. We don't always practice those, but they're at least core to our political discourse. A truly multipolar world needs global-level democracy, and it's tools like wikileaks that begin to create that. Well, that, and a roving band of crypto-anarchists who get pissed off at this ham-handedness and decide to take the websites of mastercard and visa down. And Wikipedia. And torrent-sharing sites. Any tool that's good at promoting human rights in repressive regimes is also good at enabling dissidents, whistleblowers, pedophiles, and people swapping mp3 files. You don't get to pick and choose who uses these things, and trying to do so destroys their value immediately. These tools also lend themselves towards mob rule, so we need to choose our next steps carefully. As a side note, if you really disapprove of harshly, externally-enforced transparency of what you consider private details, then I really hope you're not reading this from a link on Facebook.

2) It's OK to be a Voltaire here. While not technically his own words, he certainly held and espoused the concept: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Wikileaks is being, well, over the top and careless in what it's releasing. The Collateral Murder video seems pretty clearly whistleblowing. The cable leaks are un-aimed. Clay Shirky summed this up solidly:

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want. [...]

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

It's OK, if not strongly encouraged, to be not a big fan of WikiLeaks, but still supportive of their right to exist and disseminate "leaked" information. Would the US be upset if this was a leak of internal Chinese diplomatic ramblings, or North Korea, or Iran -- or would we be chalking another success up for "the little guy" in the global struggle for democracy and freedom of speech? We're all sovereign States here, at some level, there should be at least an illusion of equal rights among States.

3) Don't be Grand Moff Tarkin. Yeah, a Star Wars reference for good measure. The actual reference is to some parting advice from Leia on his tough stance around the use of force to put down rebels; "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." As an anonymous commenter on the BoingBoing story above said;

I think you misunderstood what she said. The attacks are the tool. Just look at the effect its had on wikileaks. Its gone from being hosted on a single server with rather unsafe DNS etc to being mirrored over 1000 times across the world!

Truely this government is driving the development of anti-censorship tools and increasing the power of free speech online.

This is the first of many problems of this sort, and here we are showing off all the tricks in our playbook. Over at Crooked Timber, Henry puts it more succinctly:

The US response to Wikileaks has been an interesting illustration of both the limits and extent of state power in an age of transnational information flows. The problem for the US has been quite straightforward. The Internet makes it more difficult for states (even powerful ones such as the US) to control information flows across their own borders and others. [The jurisdictional problems of the Internet] makes it much harder for the US and other actors to use the traditional tools of statecraft[...]

However, there is a set of tools that states can use to greater effect. The Internet and other networks provide some private actors with a great deal of effective transnational power. Banks that operate across multiple jurisdictions can shape financial flows between these jurisdictions.

The Internet has this amazing and annoying problem that's baked pretty deeply in to its architecture - it is designed to move information as efficiently as possible. This makes censorship attempts backfire every time. Somehow, no one has learned this.

4) Shooting the messenger is a fast way to being uninformed. Disabling, hobbling, and otherwise subjecting tools to political will is a very dangerous path. Amazon has a great business around providing "elastic" computing and hosting services to companies, and I'm going to bet that anyone using Amazon's services is re-examining their hosting choices right about now. Breaking the DNS system to take the main wikileaks site off the web -- I'm sure that sounded like a brilliant idea, and it's going to reignite a debate around the US's control of huge swaths of the DNS system, and probably make that power very difficult to enact both politically and technically. Again, the trust in what was considered a trusty tool has been eroded, and anyone working on hot-button issues is going to take extra care such that they have secondary systems to provide future resiliency against a similar attack. Beyond the points made in (3), we're hurting normal business that trusts these services to be reliable. Ethan Zuckerman has a good Q&A about this at the Columbia Journalism Review

5) Don't forget the real story. Did Julian Assange actually commit a crime in the US? He's not a citizen, he didn't do any of this in the US, and he's not the one who stole the classified documents. And he hasn't been charged with a crime (in the US, yet). Are we really pursuing someone for re-broadcasting already leaked, classified documents? That worked so well with the Pentagon Papers.

Hey, at least we live in interesting times.

Cross-posted at TechnologySalon.org

Where the last SMS4D Technology Salon reminded us of the unique gift of mobile technologies to be based where there impact will be, The Cloudy SMS4D Salon really drove home mobile as a multifunctional tool whose true impact is tied more to the usage than the technology itself. While we gathered to discuss SMS4D, we really talked about heath reporting and outreach, education, and community-building through knowledge management and sharing. It just so happened that these health projects were using SMS codes to report longitudinal child health statistics.

Data gathering in health, and even knowing when to gather data, is a huge burden, often relying on community health workers doing the healthcare version of the T&V system of the agricultural extension world. Waiting around for a planned infrastructure is hopeless, but working with the more incremental nature of mobile can improve reporting rates and reduce errors -- "utter chaos works everywhere" being the best quote of this tech salon. Childcount builds on existing SMS reporting to enable community health workers to rapidly register children, note any symptoms or diseases they might have, improve patient tracking (and thereby reducing duplication), and schedule immunizations and outreach. The SMS "encoding" builds off of a simple and familiar paper form, which is handy for training (but less useful than a mango tree, as we'll see). The runner-up quote from this Salon dealt with discussion around the potential risk of intentionally fabricated data -- "humans are awful at falsifying data" -- digitizing and quick, auditable reporting exposes both errors and lies.

RapidResponse Overview from Matt Berg on Vimeo.

Winning the award for innovative ideas in mHealth was the HappyPill project -- instead of boing old SMS, HappyPills uses "flashing" - where you call a number and hang up immediately to "ping" someone. Usually, flashing is just a free way to ask someone to call you back, or you can sometimes work out extensive codes -- one missed call is just saying hi, two is call me back, three means an emergency, etc.. HappyPills takes this basic, essentially binary interaction and applies it to help improve adherence rates for prescription regimens. A medical center can send out flashes to their patients, and the patients are reminded to take their pills and would then flash back to signal that they took their medicine. It's naturally not foolproof, but hugely more cost effective (almost cost-free) in comparison with sending a community health worker out to the patient on a motorcycle to witness their pill-taking.

It turns out that people are not just willing, but economically motivated and excited to use (and pay for) basic SMS-based services to improve their numeracy and literacy skills, improving their ability to communicate cheaply over their phones as well as better navigate market prices. In these low-technology communities, Tostan's Jokko Initiative is creating a curriculum to enable this via SMS, and they have also come up with an amazingly simple methodology to introduce people to menu systems using a mango tree metaphor which gracefully transitions from the concrete (planning a climbing route on a real tree to get to a specific mango) to the semi-concrete (the same, on a diagram of a tree), to the abstract (the tree diagram becomes the menu diagram, the mango a specific function). Anyone who thinks that is basic has never shown their grandparents a new shiny piece of technology, or had their entire worldview of user interface challenged by someone physically pointing a mouse at a screen).

Patatat is an early-stage solution which puts SMS into the role of a community town hall/newsletter/email list. It removes not only the normal geographic barriers that a listserv gets around, but also infrastructure barriers, so (for example) farmers across a region or the world can share knowledge around their crops without relying on the grid and hardwired phones/Internet to do so. This also centralizes costs to one "host" and minimizes it to the community, so a farmer could send one SMS (free to receive, costs to send), and the host would re-broadcast it to the entire "community." With Twitter already showing that it can (technically) report earthquakes faster than the earthquake itself spreads, this rebroadcasting tool also has clear applications in emergency announcements, citizen journalism and a myriad of other fields.

So, was this technology salon about technology, or was it about development projects? Sure, all of the projects discussed at the salon happened to use server and cloud-based SMS technologies. They also probably use paper, transportation, and people. That the technology is now moving from the focus of a project to being a (cool, exciting, powerful, still new-and-shiny) tool in the toolbox is truly heartwarming. It means it is maturing into a cross-sector role and not into another silo (sorry, a "cylinder of excellence" in the parlance of our times).

I made it to South By Southwest this year, where I immersed myself in innovative ideas for open-sourced businesses, technology design for good, social media for change, and the general awesome insanity of SXSW.

The absolute best part of this conference is the new world of twitter-powered discussions. At a talk yesterday, the entire Q&A session was run over twitter. The presenters paused a few questions in and asked for a show of hands of anyone who was not using twitter. In a large crowded ballroom, no one raised their hands. Every session ends up having a running, silent conversation and collaborative note-taking.

You can follow my notes in twitter at http://twitter.com/joncamfield, and see what events I went to (or was trying to decide between) at http://my.sxsw.com/user/schedule/joncamfield

On Sunday afternoon, I worked with CrisisCamp DC's Heather Blanchard and @HastingsCJ to organize a meetup for ICT4D practitioners at the Gingerman, which turned our great. Lots of faces were put to twitter-names, connections were made and beer was consumed.

Few, if any, tweet-ups will compare, however, to Monday night's Good Capitalist party that Ashoka's Changemakers co-hosted with a variety of other social entrepreneurship groups. Without a dime of marketing money spent, it had 2000 RSVPs and over 600 people who made it by to network, learn about social entrepreneurship, and enjoy the wonderful outdoor Austin weather..

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.

iRevolution has a good, academic-style breakdown of challenges and communication technologies for use to communicate securely within repressive regimes:

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/06/15/digital-security/

It covers a lot of ground, balancing ease of use against level of security, and is looking for input!

Who's using XP?

With a surprising lack of fanfare, OLPCNews recently revealed that Sugar is beating out Windows XP in XO deployments:

Apparently the conversations are going pretty much as many of us had expected: Initially country representatives inquire if Windows XP runs on the XO laptop. That doesn't really come as a surprise - for many people Windows is the definition of a computer. However, upon further investigation every country decided to stick to Sugar.

It's hardly a surprise, based on the wretched state of XP on the XO for educational purposes.

The surprising part is that after thousands of people screaming (including myself) about XP on the XO, the news that everyone is choosing Sugar went almost unnoticed.

This is a very good, if somewhat Pyrrhic, victory - there was a lot of time and effort lost to get XP to run, and a lot of bad blood created.

Long-term, however, the fact that head-to-head, Sugar is winning installations after review by education ministries is fantastic:

-It's an important mindshare victory for open source, especially at the operating system level (on the computing side) and at the ministry-decision-makers level on the policy side. This win will put downstream decisions on software on a more level playing field (hopefully?)

There's been a lot of noise about the role of Twitter in the recent Moldova protests. Ethan Zuckerman took it on himself to quantify the data. It's not as glamorous as blindly claiming that twitter did (or did not) ignite the protests based on some stories, but it does provide a good sanity-check:

My bitter, cynical hope had been to demonstrate that the conversation switched from a small Romanian-language conversation about the actual protest events to a self-congratulation festival in the English-language twittersphere. Good thing we’ve got data to prove me wrong. [...] I’d expected to see “twitter” emerge as one of the most popular terms by Wednesday or Thursday, and to see the conversation shift into English. [...] But by Thursday, Twitter’s out of the top 20 entirely and “comunistii” ranks behind Moldova and Chisinau. So yes, the conversation on Wednesday - the busiest day with over 1,000 authors - included lots of non-Moldovans. But the conversation quickly shifted back to the political standoff.

That being said, there are under 200 reported actual twitter users inside Moldova; so while the conversation avoided turning into the twitter version of back-patting, it also is not the twitter flash-mob we're looking for.

Worse, governments are getting more sophisticated in limiting the utility of mobile phones for this kind of disruption, as Evgeny Morozov at ForeignPolicy reminds us:

I've just spoken to a Moldovan friend who is himself a big technology fan; according to him, there is little to none cellphone coverage in the square itself (turning off cellphone coverage in protest areas is a trick that was also used by the Belarusian authorities to diffuse 2006 protests in Minsk's central square), so protesters have to leave it to post updates to Twitter via GPRS technology on their mobiles.

It seems likely that next time around, the government will also make sure GPRS is hobbled as well, and there were reports that the government was strong-arming local ISPs into restricting outside connections.

So while Twitter was involved, it seems too early to claim it's victory, as both Evgeny Morozov and Ethan Zuckerman seem to agree on. There was no sign-in form at the protest with a "Where did you hear about this? ( ) Twitter ( ) Facebook ( ) SMS (non-twitter) ( ) Friend ... " so we can't really be sure of the impact of any one social utility over another (though we could do some interesting things with Facebook photo tagging perhaps?), and this will continue to haunt any attempts to link online social media movements with offline action.

That's not the only story here, though. While I'm excited about turning online interaction into offline action, I strongly believe that the lower-hanging fruit in social media sites is real-time, mass reporting of events. You may get a thousand different viewpoints, but you're guaranteed to not just get one filtered and sanitized report. As Evgeny Morozov notes;

There are also a few moving English-language Twitter posts like this - "in #pman a grenade thrown by the police has torn apart one of the protester's leg"- that would surely be perused by foreign journalists.

We saw the role of SMS and Twitter in getting the news out about the Mumbai bombings in November 2008. As microblogging sites get increasingly sophisticated (or their users settle on hashtags and location update formats) I think we can expect to see fast local news coming not from traditional media but from our peers. Without editorial oversight or research/verification, we'll have to rely on mass numbers of twitterers reporting on each event to present an evenhanded view, but overall I see this move towards instant sharing of information as an amazing development that will only getbetter and more interesting, both in the case of free speech and media, and for mobile possibilities for development.

If you see irregularities, call 1-866-our-vote for help and to report problems, and follow the current reports at OurVoteLive. Text your zip to Twitter Vote Report to send in polling problems.

Now - let's see some change!

I enjoy activities that put the 'b" in subtle. This Greasemonkey script for FireFox translates dollar figures in webpages you view into Oil Barrels:

Back in the late 90s, as Napster was being circled by vultures, I dreamt of starting a consulting group which would seek out clients needing help and place dead fish on their doorstep as an introduction, to point out that they were out of water and needing guidance. I never did this (perhaps I should have), but I did use the conceit to spew some venom towards the RIAA and the MPAA.

The BBC has a story on the Burmese Monks and their cyberskills:

The internet has also become a virtual space for political groups who could not openly express their shared views in public.

Ko Htike met his network of citizen journalists in an internet forum which was rapidly disbanded after initial contact had been made.

Such forums are also used as a space to alert bloggers whenever new content - stills or video - arrives.

The AP reports that email may now enjoy 4th amendment rights:

The recent shareholders meeting for Google has an interesting section on Internet Censorship, which is appended in whole below. It seems that these shareholders took that "do no evil" part pretty seriously, and either are willing to take the potentially huge hit in the wallet if Google stumbles with the Chinese market, or think that the bad press that Google's getting will be a larger hit (at least for now, and hopefully it'll be less of an issue later?).

Edge.org is running an article by Jaron Lanier on the current drive towards meta-content and collective-rule on the Internet (think Wikipedia, BoingBoing, Digg, etc.), and some responses from leaders of "The Collective".

... not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.