Social struggle technology social change 2 728. #TechForGood: Show How You Use Technology for Social Good. “Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.” ~ Steve Jobs If we are to listen to Jobs, technology is just the medium — what matters most is what you do with it.
Sure, you can use cool gadgets to track fitness, keep up with friends and discover an infinite amount of things. But how are you using technology to better the lives of others? How is your product or organization leveraging technology for social good? Or have an idea for how technology can help better the world? Join our #TechForGood campaign and share how you or your organization is using technology to bring social change and help others.
Some examples: Here’s how a telecenter was used to empowered citizens in rural Chile. Ushahidi, an open source software for collecting information, visualization and interactive mapping, has helped monitor everything from elections to natural disasters. On the difference between innovation and technology in development. I am in Tromsø, Norway for a workshop on gender and adaptation. The conversation has been very interesting, with a lot of different people bringing different ideas/concerns to the table. As you might imagine, a lot of it has been fodder for thought. But today a comment by Torjer Andreas Olsen , of the Centre for Sami Studies (SESAM) at the University of Tromsø, really stuck with me. In a conversation about business and innovation, he suggested that we face a challenge in the use of the term “innovation” when we talk about indigenous peoples such as the Sami.
Because most business discussions of innovation are focused on technological change, they fail to see the development of new forms of knowledge and information as innovation. I think Torjer is dead right, and I think I can extend his argument a bit here. This is a major problem for development, especially as major donor start embracing the idea of innovation. Development and Complexity - Owen Barder. Way Beyond Facebook: Welcome to the Hybrid Age. So Facebook's IPO fizzled. So its growth is slowing. So nobody's really sure what to make of the so-called second bubble in Silicon Valley, and you're sick of seeing Jamie Dimon on Capitol Hill, and have we mentioned that the job numbers aren't looking so great? But still, there's good news ahead: The world of trillion-dollar companies is still around the corner.
The first to cross that elusive threshold could be Apple or Exxon, sure, though more than likely it'll be a company you haven't heard of yet. We are entering the post-Information "Hybrid Age," an era when IT combines with and accelerates a host of other technology areas we've been ignoring amidst all the employment talk over green booms and Wall Street busts.
Why is all of this happening all of a sudden? Trillions in investment, trillions of sensors, and trillion-dollar companies. EARLIER: Khanna on the Indian Diaspora >> Transforming innovation for sustainable development and poverty reduction. A radical new approach to science and innovation is urgently needed to steer us within planetary boundaries and secure human wellbeing, fostering diverse types of innovation and empowering the grassroots creativity of poorer people, say researchers from the Institute of Development Studies-based ESRC STEPS Centre.
As the world gears up for the Rio + 20 Earth summit, many are pinning hopes on a set of sustainable development goals (SDGs) that, by 2015, will be succeed the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in thinking and action on environment and development. Safe operating space New research by the STEPS Centre, the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the Tellus Institute argues that SDGs that keep human societies within a 'safe operating space' requires an approach to innovation that gives far greater recognition and power to grassroots actors and processes, involving them within an inclusive, multi-scale innovation politics. Direction The specific Direction of change. Diversity Distribution. How The Future of Mobile Lies in the Developing World. Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Erica Kochi, the co-lead of Tech Innovation at UNICEF.
Her team started UNICEF’s open source RapidSMS platform which has been adopted in developing countries worldwide. She co-teaches a class ”Design for Unicef” in NYU’s ITP Program, and has lectured at Harvard, Yale, and Columbia University on leveraging technology and design to improve international development. All these views are her own. In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin.
Developing Countries are Powering the Growth China and India account for the majority of new mobile connections, and in developing countries mobile saturation hasn’t yet hit and is still experiencing double-digit growth. 1. 2. 3.