Privacy and Surveillance are the Elephant in the Room at OGP Summit
Privacy, surveillance and the closing of political space for openness and transparency activists in many countries was the hot issue at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Summit in London that was left largely unaddressed by the OGP member countries present.
Can Patrick Meier's New App MicroMappers Completely Change The Way We Think About Clicktivism?
Imagine 20, 30, or even 50 thousand volunteers helping a community, whether on the other side of the country or the other side of the world, in the aftermath of a disaster, and all with just a few swipes on a smartphone. Patrick Meier's new platform MicroMappers makes that possible, and anyone with an Internet connection and five minutes to spare can contribute to disaster relief.Patrick Meier is the Director of Social Innovation at the Qatar Foundation's Computing Research Institute (QCRI) and before that he was Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi. He announced the launch of MicroMappers on his blog yesterday, and techPresident reached him by phone to learn a bit more about the soon-to-launch platform, which he says is ready to mobilize thousands of volunteers if disaster struck tomorrow.
One-Size-Fits-All Toolkit For Gathering Information In A Crisis
The thing about crises is that they can take you by surprise. Although governments and humanitarian organizations do their best to prepare, it's nice to have something to fall back on in any situation, something like an emergency first aid kit for NGOs. The nonprofit media support organization Internews thought so too, which is why they partnered with Columbia University's Modi Research Group and Captricity to create the Humanitarian Data Toolkit.
Is Facebook's New Connectivity Platform a Product of Benevolence or Greed?
Facebook announced last week the launch of internet.org, an initiative to connect “the next five billion people,” according to a white paper by Mark Zuckerberg. In it he contends that connectivity is a human right, at least basic services like messaging, social networks, and search engines. Some are sure to be skeptical of Zuckerberg's benevolence, since he has already been accused of trying to take over the world wide web. Even more damning, the day following Facebook's announcement, a piece published in The Guardian suggested that Facebook's monopoly in Burma is hindering the progress of media.
Can a New Tool Help Contain the Deadly MERS Virus?
Every year, millions of Muslims from around the world embark on the Hajj, a spiritual rite through the dusty granite hills of Mecca in Saudi Arabia that forms one of Islam's five pillars of faith. This year, the fatal Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) looms over the pilgrimage, which will take place in mid-October, leaving public health officials worried they may see another pandemic, as foreign pilgrims now account for more than half of Hajj participants and could bring the virus back home.
The BioMosaic tool. (image: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
New Platform Aims to Reduce High Failure Rate of Communications Initiatives in Emerging Economies
At a U.N. meeting in Geneva earlier this month, Amjad Umar told SciDevNet, an NGO that analyzes the impact of science on solutions for developing countries, that failure rates for Information and Communications Technology (ICT) projects in developing countries hovers around 85 percent. His company, NGE (Next Generation Enterprises) Solutions, has launched a beta platform that can cut failure rates and costs of ICT projects, and reduce the planning time to a few hours.