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Saturday, October 22, 2005 |
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Solar Women engineers in Tilonia, India? Not much needs said about Bunker Roy's Barefoot College - except that he makes me proud to be Indian. He ends with this quote from Mahatma Gandhi : "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." 10:17:39 PM  comment [] trackback []
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Cameron Sinclair, a Worldchanging colleague, is on talking about how to create architecture that helps the world. What can I say except that he is absolutely inspiring. Just go here and you will know why. It is great to hear from someone who isn't just talking but walking the talk, and "Design(ing) Like You Give A Damn" 9:19:48 PM comment [] trackback []
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Nicholas Negroponte, professor at MIT and founder-chairman of the Media Labs on the $100 laptop project. 23 years ago, they tried computerising schools in Senegal - but it didn't work. In Costa Rica (3.5 mn people) however, it has been really successful - the poster child for the MIT Media Lab. He got involved in sending used computers to Cambodia. This stopped ... and instead they started building schools and not just sending used computers. Satellite connections were put in, laptops were set up, generators were set up. Kids started taking their laptops home and parents loved it, because suddenly they had a source of light (no electricity otherwise). The first English word many of them spoke was Google! Today's laptops are so loaded ... he takes us back to the old days when they were so quick, so easy and so reliable to use. His question - do we really need it. Some things to reduce cost - remove colour mode on the LCD screen and use B&W with high resolution, or low res colours. Has to be on a very low power budget - below 2 watts. E-books must be below 1 watt. They needed scale - not as much to take down costs - but to change the strategic plan in companies offering the service --- when he told them he needed 100 million chips - the company making the chips did an about-turn on their initial hesitation that it doesn't meet their business strategy. November 16, 2005 is when it will be shown at the Vatican for the first time. Wow. I hope they have India in their roll-out plans. 3:42:24 AM comment [] trackback []
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Yochai Benkler leads the session on Participation Revolution by talking of the demarcation between producers and consumers in the Industrial Information Economy. And then moves onto the Networked Information Economy. Described as decentralised and widely distributed - in terms of computation and communications resources as well as human creativity, intuition, experience and motivational. What this means is that things people have always done with and for each other, move to commons based productions, can be individual or collective, commercial or non-commercial. A self-feeding contract. The other major development is we are seeing large-scale collaboration - eg. peer production using social cues rather than command and control. And sharing material resources. Examples - Clickworkers for NASA, Wikipedia, Dmoz, Skype, open source software, Craig's List, Technorati. Social sharing and exchange is becoming the modality of economic production. You have stuff flowing out of connected human beings, Your supply and demand chains are different now - they are determined by "Surfers". And they input back. He then talked about the Politics of it - of autonomy, of freedom and justice, of democracy. As a result - new business challenges and opportunities, and new ways of being free and equal human beings. A rousing "you can't stop us" end to the presentation. A good paper by Yochai Benkler - "Sharing Nicely" .[link posted in the chatroom by Greg Elin]. Nothing so new, but useful to the audience here. I was talking to someone during one of the breaks and describing how we have used tools like blogs and wikis and VOIP in disasters and for research projects - and they seemed to want to hear more about how these systems are changing the way we transact today.3:18:52 AM comment [] trackback []
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Copyright 2009 Dina Mehta
