Technology hubs and innovation spaces for development: Why are libraries special?

Tomorrow I’m speaking at the Technology Salon, about  technology hubs and innovation spaces for development. Here are my initial notes. First, here’s what I mean when I use the term “innovation space”: Innovation spaces are physical environments that promote community, learning, and making. They come in different flavors: Hubs, labs, libraries, hackerspaces, makerspaces, telecentres, coworking [...]

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Sukey and gamifying protests: At the cutting edge of civic media

Sukey 3.0 launched on 21 November 2012 at the student demonstrations in London. As part of the implementation post-mortem, Sam has been thinking and talking to others about how to better organize the work of online volunteers. Sukey volunteers form a virtual support team for people on the ground. They verify information coming out of [...]

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Want to make a difference? Stop formatting for print and start structuring content for all media!

Here are my notes from FailFaireDC, held November 16, 2012, at the World Bank. I’ve been really busy lately, so I wasn’t able to prepare a snazzy-hip-funny presentation. I needed time to start distilling down the argument. I think of this as my first draft. Liam informs my that my presentation was the most technical. [...]

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Fail Faire DC

No learning or innovation without failure. Of course it’s not so simple, as in “That $5 million you gave us, well half of it we spent on things that didn’t quite work out. But here’s what we learned, and here’s what we’ll do next time you give us money…” Now imagine the donor going back [...]

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Assessing the impact of innovation spaces: iHub Kenya

In May 2012 Nairobi’s *iHub released a report detailing the impact of the Hub on Kenyan entrepreneurs. You can read the launch post and  download the report from the iHub website. Here’s the abstract. This research aimed to understand the impact of the ICT Hubs to entrepreneurs. An ICT hub is a space where technologists [...]

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How is the Open Government Partnership is leveraging libraries?

Libraries are democracy machines. How is the OGP leveraging them? Examples I can find so far… IREX & Beyond Access IREX is listed as an OGP Supplier; they refer (less directly than I’d like) to the Beyond Access: Libraries Powering Development initiative: IREX is currently working on a global initiative to partner with governments on [...]

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