Blending Theory and Practice in Community Informatics

We met in Porto this week. The International Workshop CIBlend was a wonderful writing-sharing experience. We were a mixed group of ten people interested in Community Informatics from several different nationalities: Portuguese, Kenyan, South African, New Zelander, British, Colombian, Netherlander, American and two Australians.

We had never attempted to write together before and we managed to engage in a very inspiring writing process where we drafted two articles to be published in a journal.
We took photos and exchanged lots of ideas around issues related to the work with communities and the use of ICT´s in different environments and places.

I am looking forward to continue meeting these wonderful group of colleagues, most of them academics but also largely engaged in activism and praxis.

Connecting with others, celebrating Blog Day

We could say we are celebrating Blog Day this week. A unique opportunity to link to people and blogs that we seldom connect to, read or know about.

As part of this "linking" celebration and inspired by David Sasaki I want to recommend some blogs to you.

The first one is Bangladesh from our View where a group of girls from the Nari Jibon Project tells about their lives, businesses and dreams while they participate in the Risisng Voices Online Project that aims to give them skills and access to the digital world available via Internet. It is very inspiring to read them and have a peek in their lives and whereabouts.

A similar group or young people in Sierra Leone has began to work together and soon will begin their blogging activities to show the world that this country is much more than blood and diamonds. In their site is possible to get to know who them a little bit.

Building the culture of writing, reading, and critical thinking among youth in Kolkata's social and economic margins in Kalam: Margins Write the tutors talk about this initiative and their experiences with bringing blogging tools and writing skills to the underprivileged of India.

Authentic citizen journalism from Colombia is still alive and well in The Colombian Herald is a new media outlet that uses blogging tools to air an independent view of what happens in a rich and beautiful land facing enormous challenges due to long civil war being fueled by money coming from cocaine trade.

Culture as exchange of ears

In this insightful and prophetic text Eduardo Galeano, the argentinean author and prolific writer defines his and others people´s approach to culturre several decades before the creation of the Internet with all the participative and conversational modes of communication that this technology allows.

"Culture did not end for us in production and consume of books, paintings, symphonies, films or theatre plays. It did not even started there. We understood culture as the creation or any meeting place between human beings, and all the symbols of collective memory and identity: testimonies of what we are, the prophecies of imagination and the denunciation of what stop us from being.

We wanted to talk to people and answer their words. In order not to get mute, we believed culture had to begin by not being deaf. We published our texts about reality but also, and moreover, texts from reality. Words picked up in the street, in fields, in mine caves, stories of life, folk songs."

Food for thought

A new medium: The Colombia Herald

Not without certain irony or sarcasm Carlos Raul van der Weyden has created The Colombia Herald a medium targeting the big English speaking audience searching for information on Colombia. I think I read an oxymoron in the title of this hybrid medium that using the blog format reports with the neutrality and credibility of good journalistic practices.

His promising adventure deserves attention and good sailing winds in its navigation. There is quality on his writing. I encourage him to continue the good work at The Colombia Herald which I warmly recommend.

Comunicacion - Blog de Victor Solano: En cuanto venderas tu blog?

En cuanto venderas tu blog?

Diebold AccuVote-TS Security Demonstration

Princeton researchers demonstrate security flaws in a Diebold electronic voting machine.

Public Discourse in USA since 1960

Today, are we going to have pleasure to listen to Michael Schudson in a Guest lecture at our Department (University of Bergen). He is going to talk about his field of expertise which is Sociology of the American News Media, advertising, popular culture, and cultural memory. He has been recently examining the growing freedom of expression in the United States from 1960 to the present, and its complicated consequences.
The title of his lecture is: "Revealing, Disclosing, and Accounting: Some Features of American Public Discourse Since 1960". I imagine he will be using (and most problably criticizing) Habermas concepts around the Public Sphere in relation to his research on recent Public Discourse in the USA. I am looking forward to it.

If you want to read a sound and original Keynote Lecture delivered by Schudson in 1999 here is the link