The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in partnership with Nike and Microsoft, has launched a new website ninemillion.org as an appeal to help the estimated nine million refugee children around the world. The objectives of the campaign are to: raise awareness about refugee children and youth raise funds for education and sport programs for refugee…
Category: Information Society
New book on human rights in the Information Society
I just found out about a new book on Human Rights in the Global Information Society edited by my friend Rikke Frank Jørgensen. Published by MIT Press, the contributors to this volume examine the links between information technology and human rights from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Scholars, human rights activists, and practitioners discuss such…
New Net Neutrality Video: This Land is Your Land
I just a tip from the Media Policy Blog about a new video on Net Neutrality called "This Land is Your Land" created by Robert Oschler. It’s based on the Woody Guthrie song of the same name, and uses video from a CC-licenced CGI animated short called "Elephant Dreams". Robert’s revised lyrics are hysterical: They’ll…
GAM3R 7H30RY and the future of the book
Just got sent a link to a new book called GAM3R 7H30RY by Mackenzie Wark, the author of the "Hacker Manifesto." The book is exciting for a number of reasons. First, it’s a fanciful and erudite set of musings on two basic questions about computer and online gaming: can we explore games as allegories for…
1 Million Americans urge Congress to save the Internet
The Save the Internet coalition has collected more than 1 million American signatures to their petition urging Congress to "preserve a free and open internet." Mmmmm, freedom. The coalition held an event in DC to officially deliver the petition to the Senate. According to Free Press campaign director Timothy Karr: Our real grassroots Coalition called…
Virtual Net Neutrality Tees available
As my extremely modest contribution to the Save the Internet cause, I just created a “Support Net Neutrality!” tee-shirt in Second Life, which I am giving away to all who desire them. So whether you are a cyborg, flying monkey or fairy princess, you can now proudly show your support for a free and open…
Tell the US Government to democratize the Internet
Milton Mueller of the Internet Governance Project has sent out an alert to internet activists that the US Government’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) has recently asked for public comments about its supervision of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). In response, the IGP has launched a call for emails to…
Organizational Democracy: Linden Labs listens
e-Democracy guru Steven Clift passed along a very helpful set of recommendations for non-profits on how to respond to online criticm, written by Jayne Cravens at Coyote Communications. In a nutshell, what she says is, respond respectfully and promptly to online criticism. I couldn’t agree more. Giving someone with a complaint more than a fortnight…
Food Force: you played it, now blog it
The World Food Programme has really capitalized on its first video game Food Force by creating versions of the game in several languages, most recently Polish, and now launching a blog featuring one of the in-game characters “Joe”. The blog looks like it is going to be a curious mixture of real world examinations of…
Posters in Second Life on organizing effective multi-verse events
As I have blogged about previously, I have started a wiki page on the Second Life Education wiki on the subject of “Best Practices for RL/SL Events” . More ideas have been trickling in, and I’ve been making the page a bit easier to read. Now SL resident Milosun Czervik (that’s him besides me in…