January 30, 2007
ICT4Peace, OLPC and Technology for Social Change - A conversation with Sanjana Hattotuwa
This morning I recorded my first podcast, as part of a series of dialogues hosted by Sanjana Hattotuwa. We had a wide-ranging discussion, mainly thanks to Sanjana - I tend to repeat the same three things over and over again.
There was one topic I wanted to discuss here: the role of the private sector. I’ve worked with some amazing people from some incredible companies, and I’m convinced that there’s an untapped wealth of knowledge and expertise that is having a real impact in improving people’s lives.
At the same time, I also believe that there are serious problems. Private companies are subject to different pressures than public organisations, and have very different practices and processes. This is not to say that we close the discussion off - we need to discuss this openly if we’re going to get anywhere.
You can read the relevant post on Sanjana’s blog or listen to the podcast on VOR. Go listen to it and let me know if I’ve accidentally libelled anybody. My anti-OLPC bias is loud and clear, but I’d be interested to read comments from people who have a more positive view of the OLPC.
Thanks for arranging the podcast, Sanjana - and I’m looking forward to the next one!
Filed under ICT4Peace, Media by Paul Currion
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Comments on ICT4Peace, OLPC and Technology for Social Change - A conversation with Sanjana Hattotuwa »
Michael Howden @ 5:17 am
Thanks for the podcast Paul! I think that they are a great medium for absorbing new information and very convenient to listen to while traveling. Do you know of any good sources of humanitarian/aid podcasts? Particularly with any with an IT focus.
I was interested by you criticism of the OLPC project, I have my own doubts, particularly on a more technical level. I’ll have to blog about that sometime.
I agree with your argument about the online Signal to Noise ratio being too low. It would be great if there was a forum to rate good websites/blogs/podcasts for aid workers. Maybe a humanitarian Slashdot of sorts?
Paul Currion @ 1:10 pm
I like Slashdot but I think it built up momentum early on and has been cruising on that critical mass. The experience of Aidworkers Network has been that it’s really hard to engage aid workers in the same way - we’ve tried three different approaches now, none of which have been fully successful. There’s no list of podcasts as far as I know - aid work is a bit niche - although the blog aggregator on AWN has been very successful.
I have been converted to podcasts as a great communication medium that we should use more. The question is, what’s the audience? What’s the message? I think given the connectivity problems in many parts of the world, we’re looking at podcasts as part of the dialogue between aid workers, and from aid workers to the public.
Don’t get me started on the OLPC again, or we’ll be here all day.
Tom L @ 1:59 pm
Our forum sort of performs a Slashdot task in that a common type of post is a link to an interested resource of some sort. AidBlogs makes interesting reading, and it’d be interesting to scrape the urls listed in the incoming AidBlogs feeds and make an automated “What aid blogger are reading” list.
Don’t forgot the humanitarian drive cooperative search which you put together makes use of PageRank - a weak but net-ubiquitous determinant of value. I was also thinking to experiment a little with Yahoo Pipes and humanitarian/development websites, although I can’t quite see the benefit …
Paul Currion @ 10:42 am
In the end, it comes back to that question - is it worth it? We can do these things as hobbies, or experiments, but it’s up to the audience to decide if it’s worth pursuing. Because none of these have commercial potential (open to question), there’s precious few metrics to work out if the audience actually care or not about the service. Having said that, there might be scope to create an audience, particularly an internal audience, as they have done at Christian Aid.