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Current News

The ICT4D 2.0 Manifesto: Where Next for ICTs and International Development?

Vision statements and manifestos for sectors of organizations and causes play an important role in advancing our work. I've written a few myself, but I also applaud the work that others do in pushing us all to think big. Most recently, I've enjoyed Richard Heek's The ICT4D 2.0 Manifesto: Where Next for ICTs and International Development? (33 page PDF). He identifies and explores the same forces we are all having to deal with as the trend toward personal communication and information empowerment continues. We could get away with thinking that ICT was just for us, the organizations, but now we know that everyone is an author, a participant, a contributor. Heeks very clearly defines the opportunities for development work and the structural and strategic changes required of us to seize on those opportunities. Posted: 10/6/09; 5:58:38 PM #

How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them)

As you know, I believe deeply in the power of social media but I remain cautious about the role of the large, centralized, and commercial online "social networking" sites. One reason for this is the enormous level of trust we (mis)place in them, in regard to our personal information and that of our stakeholders. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a piece on How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online (and What Social Networks Are Doing to Help Them), which should be required reading for anyone thinking of putting their content into such sites or recruiting their stakeholders to do so. The article covers four main topics: (1) How 3rd parties get to see what you do on the web. (2) They can track us, but do they know who we are? (3) Paths for Data Leakage from Social Networks to 3rd party Tracking Firms. (4) What can I do to protect myself? Posted: 10/6/09; 5:48:06 PM #

Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009

I almost always link to Project Censored's annual list of ignored stories, because I think they provide a painful context, direct and indirect, for the work that most of us do. (Indeed, for many of us, it's our own missions that have been ignored.) This year is no exception. The Top 25 Censored Stories for 2009 are: (1) US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street. (2) US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s. (3) Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates. (4) Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina. (5) Europe Blocks US Toxic Products. (6) Lobbyists Buy Congress. (7) Obama's Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past. (8) Bailed out Banks and America's Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions. (9) US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza. (10) Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate. (11) Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine. (12) Mysterious Death of Mike Connell-Karl Rove's Election Thief. (13) Katrina's Hidden Race War. (14) Congress Invested in Defense Contracts. (15) World Bank's Carbon Trade Fiasco. (16) US Repression of Haiti Continues. (17) The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan. (18) Ecuador's Constitutional Rights of Nature. (19) Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor. (20) Secret Control of the Presidential Debates. (21) Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare. (22) Obama's Trilateral Commission Team. (23) Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud. (24) Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion. (25) Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon. Posted: 10/6/09; 5:43:52 PM #

ICT for Peacebuilding (ICT4Peace) by Sanjana Hattotuwa
	I've added a new source to the Nonprofit Online News workflow that I want to recommend to you directly: Sanjana Hattotuwa's blog, ICT for Peacebuilding, is full of richly linked posts on the role of information and communication technology on transforming and mediating conflicts. Posted: 10/6/09; 5:36:42 PM #

Nonprofit Journalism: The Journey from Anomaly to a New Paradigm

The role of the nonprofit sector in the future of journalism is a very interesting topic these days. In Nonprofit Journalism: The Journey from Anomaly to a New Paradigm, Jim Barnett at the Nieman Journalism Lab gives us an excellent snapshot of the models that are emerging and the issues and challenges that go along with them. I recommend this (and some of the sites to which he links) to most of my readers. Even if you think your organization has nothing whatsoever to do with journalism, you might well be surprised by the relevance. Posted: 10/6/09; 5:27:40 PM #

Experience Themes: How a Storytelling Method Can Help Unify Teams and Create Better Products

When I teach people how to achieve clarity of communication purpose in my website reinvention workshop, I talk a lot about the "user journey" - the interaction of intent and opportunity that leads to experience and action by a stakeholder. In her article on Experience Themes: How a Storytelling Method Can Help Unify Teams and Create Better Products, Cindy Chastain describes a method for achieving that clarity. She derives her method from the art of narrative and, because we are story-telling creatures, that can be a powerful framework for helping us piece together all the complicated, seemingly unrelated, elements of a user experience. She makes a compelling argument for coming up with a story based "theme" for the experience and then using that as guidance for functional requirements, content strategy, site architecture, and interaction design. Posted: 10/6/09; 11:33:55 AM #