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…
Category: Information Society
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…
Scam Spam from the “National Conference Against Racism Discrimination and Safety”
Oh fun, got a scam email today from the "National Conference Against Racism Discrimination and Safety." First off, how can you be against safety? LOL. It’s got the typical weirdness: bad English, a phone number that doesn’t correspond to the address, and an offer too-good-to-be-true-because-it-isn’t. In this case, an all-expense-paid trip to Dubai. The only…
“An Inconvenient Truth”: the most important slide show you will see all year
Cindy and I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” last night. As someone who should be fairly well informed on these issues, with frequent contact with environmental activists and experts, I was surprised and appalled by the urgency of the ecological crisis facing our planet. It is indeed terribly “inconvenient” to face the reality that within our…
Negroponte’s $130 laptop versus Intel’s $400 laptop
According to ZDNET, John Negroponte announced a couple of days ago that the first iteration of the “$100 laptop” from the One Laptop Per Child initiative will be closer to $130 to $140 dollars. Even at $130, this computer still comes in at a pricepoint that governments like China, Brazil and South Africa could consider…
Defending human dignity with a cell phone
I was honored to be invited to a one day strategic discussion today on a new human rights video hub being created by the non-profit WITNESS. Started at the initiative of Peter Gabriel, in 1992, WITNESS uses the power of video to open the eyes of the world to human rights abuses. Traditionally their work…
Down with reactionary bloggers!
For the 40th anniversary of the Chinese Cultural Revolution Ah Q Weekly’s chinese blog re-designed an old poster from the Cultural Revolution to comment on Chinese government censorship of the internet, and bloggers in particular. According to Oi wan Lam of Global Voices, "The original poster depicts a worker using Mao’s tiny red book to…
Convenient simulation of an Inconvenient Truth?
Just checked out the Second Life island of Svarga, lovingly designed by Laukosargas Svarog with its own virtual ecosystem. Laukosargas not only created virtual flowers and trees that grow, she also populated the island with bees that pollinate the flowers, clouds that bring rain, and sun-lit and shady areas with different growth patterns. It’s the…