ICT4D

Emily Shaw wrote a great blog this week about 'Civic Tech', which, in case you have been living in a cave for the last year, is the new lingo for the field of 'citizen technology for social change'. Handily those nice people at the Knight Foundation have produced a jazzy animated visualisation of the whole 'civic tech' field here. Read more about All ICT4D is Political

The post-MDG Lyon Declaration on Access to Information and Development [pdf] is very welcome in that it represents a clear advance over the original Millennium Development Goal on ICT4D, but in my opinion the declaration does not go far enough in giving the most disadvantaged people effective control over their own development, and seems to rest upon some false premises about rights and information in producing development. Read more about Lyon Declaration on ICT4D

Last week I got a call from mobile technology expert, and BBC Technology journalist Dan Simmons asking me to comment on the new keepod, an initiative that recently raised $40,000 on the Indigogo crowd-funding platform for their programme in Mathere, Nairobi. Read more about Keepod: a positive critique

I thought I had died and gone to PV heaven ...

  Read more about Better Participatory Video Practice

In a previous post I pushed back against James BonTempo's claim to have charted “The Slow Death of ICT4D”. Read more about ICT4D is Dead! Long Live ICT4D!

Duncan Edwards posted a great piece last week entitled "The revolution will NOT be Open Data" in which he riffs on Gil Scott-Heron's critically-conscious lyrics. Like Duncan I have 'a lingering sense of unease' that all is not right in the world of open development / open data. Like Gil Scott-Heron I don't think we can just 'plug in, turn on and cop out'.
 
Read more about A Theory of Change for ICT4D