I had the honor of making very brief opening remarks at the State Departments Tech@State twitter Civil Society 2.0 unconference on Friday hosted by the World Bank. The room was full of people using tech to help others around the world. Heres roughly = I dont have my notes what I said:

For no obvious reason, over the past couple of weeks, two things keep coming to mind.

First, Ive found myself thinking about the first time I touched the keyboard of my own computer. It was a Kay Pro II, so it must have been in the early 1980s. I was a humanities major, but as soon as I saw a green letter show up on the tiny screen, I was fascinated. I knew it wasnt mechanical, of course, so I knew that between the key press and the glowing letter, there was logic. I was fascinated by how logic could make things happen in the real world.

Second, a question has come up a couple of times [most recently in correspondence with AKMA]: Is the Net showing us something new about ourselves, or something old? After all, the world of the Net is very weird when compared to what were used to. We think of it as a space, but its geography is bizarre: e.g., a link is a door that lets you enter a room and then vanishes behind you. If this new world is so bizarre, why have we embraced it so quickly and thoroughly?

Now, Im going to guess that we in this room believe that the Net is something new and important on the order of the printing press, or maybe fire. It works by lowering hurdles. First, it lowers the hurdles to creating new things, because we can turn logic into reality. You could do that with computers, but with the Net, we can build things together, and what we build is more easily public. Second, the Net lowers the hurdles to connecting with one another.

And, what is it that we each want to do when we wake up in the morning? Create and connect.

The Net, at its best, liberates us from old restrictions so that we can more easily do that which we have always longed to do, and that which is the best of being human: creating and connecting. Thats why this very new technology feels so familiar.

2 Comments »

The World Bank has done an admirable job of opening its data for public access. The World Bank has lots of data, much of it at the national level, and throwing it into the public arena — which it did in April — was a gutsy and right move.

They now have a contest, with $45K in prizes, to encourage the development of apps that make use of that data via its APIs. Here’s more about the data:

The World Bank Indicators API lets you programmatically access more than 3,000 indicators and query the data in several ways, using parameters to specify your request. Many data series date back 50 years, and can be used to create interesting applications. You can read more about the data itself in the API Sources section. The projects API provides access to all World Bank projects, including closed projects, active projects, and those in the pipeline. The dataset includes pilot geocode data on project locations; note that these data are collected through a desk study of existing project documents and are being released as a test database — further work is required for data validation and quality enhancements…

Releasing all this data must have required a lot of cultural transformation work. Wow.

1 Comment »

I’ve signed onto a filing to the FCC that encourages it to continue to distinguish the Internet from the special services carriers want to offer. The Internet is only the Internet if it is open and does not prefer some applications, sites, or content.

David Reed brilliantly articulates his reasons for signing. Here is a chunk:

the Internet was created to solve a very specific design challenge – creating a way to allow all computer-mediated communication to interoperate in any way that made sense, no matter what type of computer or what medium of communications (even homing pigeons have been discussed as potential transport media). The Open Internet was designed as the one communications framework to rule them all. Very much as vocalizations evolved into a universal human communications framework, or ink on paper evolved into a universal repository for human knowledge. That’s what we tried to create when we designed the Internet protocols and the resulting thing we call the Internet. The Internet is not the fiber, not the copper, not the switches and not the cellular networks that bear its signals. It is universal, and in order to be universal, it must be open.

However, the FCC historically organizes itself around “services”, which are tightly bound to particular technologies. Satellite systems are not “radio” and telephony over radio is not the same service as telephony over wires. While this structure has been made to work, it cannot work for the Internet, because the Internet is the first communications framework defined deliberately without reference to a particular technological medium or low-level transport.

6 Comments »

I’ll skip explaining exactly why Citibank is impossible to deal with and how they are screwing up my credit by having created a fictitious account for me [see second comment for an update] and then sending it to a collection agency without ever having sent me a bill, and how multiple calls and escalations have not fixed this because Citibank’s various parts don’t communicate with one another, so getting it resolved with, say, the Customer Service folks remains invisible to the Personal Credit Destruction people.

So, last night, I spent another 20 minutes with Citi on the phone, talking with people who simply could not help me. They are fine folks doing their job as best they can, but they can’t see the computer files they need, and they can’t change the ones they can see. Citibank is broken.

Today I got a robocall from Citi asking me to complete a telephonic survey about my satisfaction. Hahahaha. But, in typical fashion, the questions pertain to the customer support person. How satisfied am I with her? Fine. She did what she could. But she couldn’t do anything because Citibank as a system sucks so bad. I’m not going to trash her because Citibank makes it structurally impossible for her to do her job.

If Citibank asked the right questions, it might find out just how broken it is.

6 Comments »

Lokman Tsui has posted his dissertation. I like it for a few reasons. First, it’s Lokman’s :) Second, it takes hospitality seriously as a virtue; this used to be definitive of cultures but in modernity has gotten associated with the offering of cupcakes. Third, it applies hospitality to journalism as a way of framing the discussion of why American media don’t well represent the non-Western world. Fourth, it presents an insightful view of what makes GlobalVoices special.

2 Comments »

Election Day + 1, 2010

3 Comments »