2011 | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

Last Wednesday, Ashoka delivered a terrific panel conversation at the World Bank called, Public Goods through Social Enterprises: Creating Hybrid Value Chains. Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich spearheaded the discussion with their thoughts on the growing impact of hybrid value chains, full economic citizenship, and the inevitability of a changemaker world. I had three take-aways that I will consider under the current framework of technology.

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How can digital activists harness new technologies, tools, and platforms to be as effective as possible in their work?

Digital organizing has arguably been at the heart of the recent protests in the Arab world. In the case of Egypt, a successful campaign run by online activists contributed to bringing hundreds of thousands of people to protest and force the resignation of President Mubarak. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, wrote: “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase… makes the change unprecedented.” We can expect that any issue worth demonstrating about in the future will be organized online and its success will weigh heavily on how well the Internet and other technological tools are leveraged.

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Whether you think of HTML as a familiar friend or a terrifying alien monster, we can all agree that sometimes code just takes too much time. In an attempt to help a friend build her web presence, and my own while I was at it, I worked my way through the abundance of e-Portfolio options. The benefits of using an e-Portfolio as a personal page are that 1. You can create a portfolio specific to your profession and interests, from academe to graphic design, 2. You don’t have to know how to write html, and 3. You can link all of your social networking and personal sites in one place. The below options are far from exhaustive and there are many notable examples left of this list. (more…)

This is the second post in a two part series on this topic. The first installment was written by TJ earlier in the week.

The Exchange 2.0 conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace on 4/27 offered a stimulating discussion that centered on using new technologies to further cross-cultural learning. While it was clearly conveyed that face-to-face study abroad programs are one of the best vehicles for promoting cross-cultural understanding, the reality is that many people (especially more disadvantaged students) may never have these opportunities. In an era when American young people need to know more than ever about our world and the people in it, the best estimate is that less than 2 percent of Americans enrolled in higher education participate in study abroad programs. Even then, the majority go to Europe. (more…)

This is part one of a two part series on Exchange 2.0.

Even though I never had the chance to do a study abroad, for ten years of my life I had over 150 international students live in my house, which practically made up for it. They all came to learn English, but after sharing a dinner table, a bathroom, and a TV with them I learned quite a lot about their culture too. My family noticed after a few years that the amount of students that would come from each country would fluctuate depending on their nation’s economic health. Now with highly accessible online interaction, a new type of youth exchange program has formed that isn’t dependent upon travel and accepts exponential amounts of students— it’s called Exchange 2.0.
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On Monday May 2, 2011 Canadians will be voting in the 41st Canadian Federal Election. The election comes as the result of non-confidence vote held on March 25th, 2011 that saw the defeat of the Conservative party’s cabinet in the House of Commons on a motion declaring the Government to be in Contempt of Parliament – a first in the history of the Commonwealth of Nations. (more…)

Last month, the government of Sudan declared a “cyber-jihad” against youth groups and other anti-government organizations organizing protests in that country. Responding harshly to earlier protests with beatings and arrests, the government of Sudan has now turned its attention to cyberspace with teams managing what the Government calls “online defense operations.” Internet agents infiltrated organizers’ websites in an attempt to determine the identities of leading activists. The result: their Facebook accounts and phone networks compromised, activists spent upwards of 12 days in jail and were subject to the brutality of security forces. Though many have been released, they are now wary of utilizing almost any organizational strategy involving telecommunications. (more…)

The issue of Internet censorship has cycled throughout headlines, whether it’s Congress interrogating Microsoft and Yahoo! as to why they are selling products that assist Chinese filtration or Google deciding that they are no longer censoring Google.cn. The largest cause for concern has been the violation of human rights, which has lead to new Internet freedom scales from organizations like Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders. However, research of Internet censorship from an economic perspective has been pretty limited. I performed a mini case study of China and India, two countries that have had similar ICT growth but one is censored and the other is not. Unfortunately, there is not much evidence that shows that censorship is causing much of a negative effect on China’s ICT industry, but its continual growth could still influence policy change as the entire nation gets online. (more…)

For the frustrated governance advisor, exasperated force commander, and perpetually under funded election observer the notion that technology can solve our problems is a tempting one. But as Dr. Raul Zambrano of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and Dr. Matthew Levinger from the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) point out, the challenges faced by development and peace making professionals can only be solved by human ingenuity, social awareness and ethics. Mobile technology is only a means to more efficiently achieving this end. (more…)