As I’ve been hinting over the past weeks, I am now working on media reform issues on a full-time basis. The Social Science Research Council, a distinguished non-profit that supports social science research in the public interest, has hired me as the program coordinator of their "Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere" program. The…
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NY Times Editorial on AT&T / Bell South Merger
The New York Times has an editorial in today’s edition entitled "The Call of the Wild Web" on the proposed $67 billion merger between AT&T and BellSouth. They argue that this deal has enormous potential impact on the Internet in general as an open communications platform: The health and future of the economy depend on…
APC: the Unsung Hero of the WSIS
I just finished reading a "reflection" report of the Association for Progressive Communications on the World Summit on the Information Society. It’s a nice flyover of the main issues faced by civil society and how APC navigated through a difficult international policy space. Entitled "Pushing and Prodding, Goading and Hand-holding," the report issued last month…
Kofi releases new UN management reform report
The United Nations reports that Secretary-General Kofi Annan presented to Member States his proposals for a fundamental overhaul of the United Nations Secretariat called “Investing in the UN”. He states that the organization’s rules, systems and culture need significant retooling and investment if the UN is to fulfill growing expectations and demands placed on it…
Trouble in River City: Ma Bell is Back
Reuters reports that AT&T plans on acquiring BellSouth of Atlanta, one of its only rivals in the long-distance telephone and DSL business. At a price of $67 billion, AT&T will have “residential customers stretching from Florida to California and business customers comprising more than half of the Fortune 1000.” This is an alarming trend for…
New/Old Look to Rikomatic.com
I decided to upgrade the look of this site to something a bit more personalized than the standard Typepad template I was using. Shoot me a comment or email if you find this design eye-straining or broken in any way. The picture of the radio I use in the new logo was taken at a…
New Design for $100 Laptop?
I was getting pretty attached to the mean green machine (left image) I thought was the approved designed for MIT’s “One Laptop Per Child” initiative. But Gizmologia shows a couple of other winning concept designs (right) that look quite different from the green model debuted at the WSIS by Nicholas Negroponte. Most notable is the…
1,600 Tunisian dissidents released from jail, groups call for others to be freed
Sounds like there are some rays of hope in Tunisia, as well as need for further reforms as more than 1,600 prisoners of conscience were released from prison recently, while others remain incarcerated. The US Government, Amnesty International, and Tunisian Monitoring Group of the International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX) welcomed the release of the…
My Talk on NGOs and New Media for NYU Class
My friend Jeff Huffines of the Bahai United Nations Office invited me to address the class he is teaching on the operations of NGOs at New York University. Here’s my notes on my lecture. It was quite a treat talking with students looking in a more academic and robust way at the functioning and structure…
NPR on the Human Rights Council
National Public Radio’s program “Morning Edition” today featured a story on the efforts to get the proposed UN Human Rights Council approved: The United States has argued strongly for the creation of a new human rights council at the United Nations. But U.N. ambassador John Bolton doesn’t like the new version that’s being proposed. Bolton…