Africa’s Gift to Silicon Valley: How to Track a Crisis

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/weekinreview/14giridharadas.html?sudsredirect=true

Ushahidi also represents a new frontier of innovation. Silicon Valley has been the reigning paradigm of innovation, with its universities, financiers, mentors, immigrants and robust patents. Ushahidi comes from another world, in which entrepreneurship is born of hardship and innovators focus on doing more with less, rather than on selling you new and improved stuff.

Photovoice event 4 Dec 08

Sale of PhotoVoice Photographs

London International Development Centre, 36 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

Thursday 4 December 2008

5pm-with wine and nibbles
You are invited to attend a sale of photographs by UK NGO, PhotoVoice currently exhibited at LIDC. Representatives from PhotoVoice will explain more about how their award-winning international charity (www.photovoice.org) empowers some of the most disadvantaged groups in the world with photographic skills and equipment. Through establishing in-field photojournalism workshops, its projects enable those who are traditionally the subjects of photography to become its creator. Through photography these individuals find confidence in their voices and are enabled to speak out about their challenges, concerns, hopes and fears.

PhotoVoice projects span four continents, assisting refugees, street children, orphans, HIV/ AIDS sufferers and special needs groups. Internationally the organisation provides the platform for these photographers to exhibit and market their work . It also provides long-term support for individuals to pursue careers in their local photographic industries.

Raffle prize
A 12"x 16" print of your choice from one of the images online at http://picasaweb.google.com/projectsphotovoice/LIDCFinalEdit?authkey=PEvRtWMchSs# will be raffled off at the event (tickets £1 each).

Discounted photos
PhotoVoice will be selling heavily discounted copies of the pictures exhibited inside LIDC's building at 36 Gordon Square (pictures online at http://picasaweb.google.com/projectsphotovoice/LIDCFinalEdit?authkey=PEvRtWMchSs# ). A couple of the pictures are also attached.
8" x 10": £25
12" x 16": £50 (usual price £125)
Framed 12"x 16" (as per exhibition): £85

PhotoVoice have guaranteed delivery in time for Christmas so we hope that these pictures may make good Christmas presents!

I hope you are able to join us.

Best wishes
Abby

Human Centered Design toolkit

In collaboration with Gates Foundation and IDE, IDEO created a Human Centered Design toolkit. This resource was created to help organizations working with smallholder farmers better understand the needs of the farmers and design appropriate tools, technologies, programs, or services for and with them.

Please feel free to download the toolkit and share your comments about it here.

Mobile environmental monitoring

Goes both ways: In London you can receive air quality info by SMS. Or sensors embedded in mobiles can detect and send radiation or pollen levels. "Grassroots citizen science" work by Eric Paulos in Ghana attached sensors to taxi drivers' phones in Ghana to measure pollution levels. Details here.

See also Urban sensing: Out of the woods: "Services such as Google Earth have driven to nearly zero the cost of this visualization measured in terms of dollars, time-to-deploy, and technical sophistication required." (See an example of the scientific use of Google Earth here.)

AfricanClimate@home

The mission of AfricanClimate@Home is to develop more accurate climate models of specific regions in Africa. This will serve as a basis for understanding how the climate will change in the future so that measures designed to alleviate the adverse effects of climate change can be implemented. World Community Grid's tremendous computing power will be used to understand and reduce the uncertainty with which climate processes are simulated over Africa.

See also Africa@home

Workshop on Ubiquitous Sustainability: Technologies for Green Values

Workshop in Conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp 2007)

Second Workshop on Speech in Mobile and Pervasive Environments

Matt Jones from VeSeL partner project StoryBank will be the invited speaker at this workshop in Singapore, September 9, 2007, part of ACM Mobile HCI 07.

Traditionally, voice-based applications have been accessed using unintelligent telephone devices through Voice Browsers that reside on the server. The proliferation of pervasive devices and the increase in their processing capabilities, client-side speech processing is emerging as a viable alternative. As in SiMPE 2006, we will further explore the various possibilities and issues that arise while enabling speech processing on resource-constrained, possibly mobile devices.

In particular, this year's theme will be SiMPE for developing regions.

Participatory Methods in Development

Just some links to literature about participatory development projects and other relevant areas:

International Institute for Environment and Development - Journals about participation, The Gatekeeper - "highlight key topics in the field of sustainable agriculture and resource management" - e.g. Demystifying Facilitation in Participatory Development

Research Information Ltd - Appropriate Technology, International Pest Control, Outlooks on Pest Management, Participatory Learning and Action journals.

Village Information Centres, Pondicherry (India) beep report
Measures of Impact of Science and Technology in India: Agriculture and Rural Development from M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF)

School Linking & Lessons learnt & materials from ICT & Education projects linking UK & Ghana

Global Gateway helps link UK schools with schools around the world. Some funding is available to support linking activities. There are many schools in Kenya listed. The British Council in Kenya have more information.

Fiankoma "The Fiankoma Project has been working with teachers, schools and communities in Ghana and the UK using digital technologies to facilitate cultural exchange and discussion of development issues in both countries." Although not work done in Kenya this has potentially useful examples of educational materials, lessons learnt etc...

Project Understandings of Education in an African Village: the Impact of Information and Communication Technologies "a case study centred on one village and involving collaboration between researchers from Africa and Europe using participatory and ethnographic methods. It investigated students’, teachers’, parents’ and other community members’ understandings of schooling in a rural village in Ghana (‘Akurase’). " Also, not work done in Kenya.