ICT in Community Development: Empowering Technologies for the Developing World

Empowering Technologies for the Developing World. Erica Naone. MIT Technology Review. Online September 2007. Helping the developing world isn't as easy as sending money and experts. Local values and customs have to be considered, and ultimately, the community has to become able to guide itself. (An interview with) M. Bernardine Dias … director of Carnegie Mellon University's TechBridgeWorld, a group that partners with developing communities to create sustainable technological solutions to problems within those communities. … about the role that technology can play in the developing world. …

News from IBM: IBM offers free PC software.

IBM offers free PC software. Steve Lohr. IHT.com. Online September 2007. IBM plans ... offering free programs for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. … the desktop software, called IBM Lotus Symphony, … will be available as free downloads from the IBM Web site. … (Note from Ginny: This is good news for many of us without budget for software purchases or upgrades. There is a growing movement to make applications available free for download or for online use. Be sure to check out Google regularly, as they offer many applications online, especially for the education community, and are developing more regularly. Many of Google’s offerings, like Google itself, are available in multiple languages. Another example, called “metaplace”, available in spring 2008, is a tool for inventing virtual spaces on the net without knowledge of programming languages.)

Note from Ginny

Hello, Faithful Blog Supporters--I hope you have been informed and helped by my blogs. I want to do something a bit differently that will allow me to track how many people actually follow up on the blog postings to view the resources I write about. Instead of taking you directly to the resource as usual, clicking the live title will now take you to the online blog where you can click again to get to the actual resource. This means an extra click for you, but it means a great deal to me to be able to trace blog use. Thanks for your understanding. Let me know if this does not work for you or if it gets to be too inconvenient or interruptive. Thanks/Ginny
P.S. Since none of the resources I report are commercial, I don't get any fees for your going there through the blog page, unfortunately. I just want to track usefulness of the blog for my own information.

ICT Support: NGO-in-a-Box:

NGO-in-a-Box: Open Source software toolkit. Base.org. Online September 2007. The Base Edition of NGO-in-a-box is a collection of essential tools for running a small-to-medium sized NGO. You can use this toolkit to set up and coordinate your office, organise and manage projects, collaborate online and support your campaigns. The Box contains a set of peer-reviewed Free and Open Source Software tools, with associated guides and tutorials, giving you the technical foundations to build upon. … (Downloadable CDs available soon)

Quotable Quotes: "The Interaction Economy"

(GW Note: In the business world, more powerful software is being developed to support "the interaction economy." To enable students to survive and thrive in that economy, education reform globally urges more group work, interactivity and problem-solving in teaching and learning.)
"The Interaction Economy". (Quote from IHT article on Scrybe software. September 2007) … A McKinsey study of U.S. economic activity in 2005 said that 40 percent of labor activity, the biggest chunk, came not from making things or from traditional transactions but from what McKinsey called "the interaction economy," the part in which people collaborate, solve problems and design products and such. … One might also call it "the meeting economy.” ...