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	CTA \| ICT Update

	DG \| ICT

	iConnect online \| News

	IAALD \| News

	Information Policy \| web log

	DG \| E-Government



	Eldis \| ICT for development

	Thoughts About K4D \| Web log

	Digital Communities \| Magazine \| International News

	AllAfrica \| ICT and Telecom \| News

	InfoDev \| Highlights

	R4D \| ICTs

	MobileActive.org \| News

	TechSoup \| Articles

	Web2forDev: Web 2.0 for Development


	Related Newsletters:
	Mobile Phones

	Connectivity

	Information society

CTA / ICT Update


A current awareness bulletin for ACP agriculture

Remote control
30 08 2010 Managers of the Office du Niger irrigation scheme in Mali are using remote sensing data to analyse the efficiency of the system without having to physically check the infrastructure. The information will help them prepare for future expansion.

A balanced delivery
30 08 2010 Irrisat-SMS combines satellite data, information from local weather stations and feedback from farmers to deliver daily, detailed irrigation scheduling advice via SMS.

A plan for the future
30 08 2010 Tanzania’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation has developed an ICT strategy, which includes using GIS, radio and cell phones, to deliver irrigation and water services.

DG / ICT


dgCommunities is both a place to find knowledge resources focused on development issues and an interactive space to share knowledge, participate in discussions and find people with similar interests.

mHealth Summit
03 09 2010 Washington, D.C., USAThe 2010 mHealth Summit is the key opportunity for leaders in government, private sector/industry, academia and not-for-profit organizations to share information and experiences related to the intersection of mobile technology, health research, and policy. The Summit will emphasize cross-sector dialogue, including industry and government leaders and visionaries who will provide their perspectives on the future of mHealth. The mHealth Summit will:Highlight cutting-edge biome

Cell Phones May Have Potential in Global Health Arena
02 09 2010 "The potential use of cell phones as innovative, cheap and efficient tools for public health was a primary theme in a Mobile Health Summit convened by the MHS last December that included the Combatant Command surgeons and experts from multiple federal agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and the WHO. "Over half the world (or about 4 billion people) own a cell phone and only 400 million own a computer, so it's only a matter of time before everyone uses a cell phone for all their computing nee

e-Health in Peru: A Country Case Study
02 09 2010 "The rapid growth rate of mobile telephony could be a great opportunity for the deployment of mobile health applications, not only for health care workers but also for the general public. Under the current disease monitoring system, it can take up to one month (or more) for a notification from a remote area to reach the central level. A disease monitoring system used by the Navy leverages the already existing telephony infrastructure (fixed, mobile, or satellite) to increase the reach of its sys

iConnect online / News


Information on the application of knowledge and ICTs in sustainable development.

IT agency outlines OSS progress made in SA government
04 09 2009 The South African government’s State IT Agency (Sita) Free and Open Source Programme has released its second public newsletter outlining the progress of open source software in government.

Disease maps can turn a crisis around
04 09 2009 AID workers in Zimbabwe need all the help that they can get, so a website that enables them to share information could be a big boost.

Africa's EASSY project delayed by a year
04 09 2009 The East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSY) will be operational in June 2010 instead of June this year, according to a project official.

IAALD / News


Agricultural Information News from IAALD, the International Association of Agricultural Information Specialists.

L3 Farmers expands in Jamaica, Uganda and PNG
04 09 2010 2010/06 - Commonwealth of Learning [COL’s Lifelong Learning for Farmers (L3 Farmers) programme]

ICT- technologies, equipment and know-how for integrated and sustainable land- and farm-management
04 09 2010 Entebbe, Uganda, 16-17 November 2010

First intercontinental meeting of the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services and The 16th Annual Meeting of the Neuchâtel Initiative
04 09 2010 Chile, 3-5 November 2010

Information Policy / web log

Editor of opposition Belarusian website found dead
04 09 2010 MINSK, Belarus -- A popular opposition website in authoritarian Belarus says its editor was found dead amid an ongoing crackdown on government critics and independent media. Natalya Radina of the Charter97 website said 36-year-old Oleg Bebenin's body was found Friday...

The first website dedicated to IGF in Romania - www.igf.ro
03 09 2010 by Adela Danciu A new website focusing on Internet Governance is online since yesterday - http://www.igf.ro. It is the first website entirely dedicated to this topic in Romania and it aims at informing and raising awareness among the Romanian Internet...

The Economist: A virtual counter-revolution
03 09 2010 The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it THE first internet boom, a decade and a half ago, resembled a religious movement. Omnipresent cyber-gurus, often framed by colourful...

DG / E-Government


dgCommunities is both a place to find knowledge resources focused on development issues and an interactive space to share knowledge, participate in discussions and find people with similar interests.

Education Network trial to connect NZ schools
20 08 2010 More New Zealand schools will have the opportunity to participate in a trial investigating the viability of a National Education Network (NEN). A NEN offers online access to a range of education-related content and services to schools via ultra-fast broadband..

HK govt puts cloud to the test
20 08 2010 Hong Kong’s Office of the Government Chief Information Officer has said that while cloud computing could have “profound implications” for how government procures IT, “major issues” stand in the way of adoption..

Is Facebook suitable for govt transactions?
20 08 2010 Last week, an airline in the United States became the first company to allow customers to book directly through its Facebook page. Will citizens soon be able to transact directly with government on social media? In interviews with FutureGov, officials in Indonesia, Australia and Singapore say that despite data security concerns, some government transactions on Facebook or Twitter will very soon be possible..

Eldis / ICT for development


Information strategic, policy or practical interest for development practitioners based in both the North and South.

Internet users are under threat in Sri Lanka
17 08 2010 This paper deems that the post-war outlook for freedom of expression on the internet in Sri Lanka is not bright. It argues that online journalists ...

Threats to internet freedom
11 08 2010 The study evaluates the level of internet and mobile phone freedom experienced by average users and activists in a sample of 15 countries across 6 regions. ...

E-learning resources for agricultural information
18 06 2010 IMARK is an e-learning initiative in agricultural information management. It has been developed by FAO and partner organisations. IMARK is being ...

Thoughts About K4D / Web log


Dealing with Knowledge and Understanding for Development (K4D), especially in donor assistance policies and projects seeking to enhance knowledge systems in developing countries. Science and technology is a key concern as well as ICT in developing nations. From John A. Daly

Classification and Technology
22 07 2010 Classification is the basis of science. There are two kinds of classification errors, classifying dissimilar things in the same category and classifying similar things in different categories. Think about mosquitoes. They are small and hard to see. Modern use of DNA analysis has demonstrated that what had been previously classed as single species by visual inspection were actually multiple,

The Nature of Technology
20 07 2010 I have just started to reading Brian Arthurxx_apos_xxs The Nature of Technology: What it is and How it Evolves. I suspect the book will trigger a number of postings on this blog.Arthur understands xx_quotation_xxtechnologyxx_quotation_xx as xx_quotation_xxmeans to accomplish purposesxx_quotation_xx. Some of those purposes are quite narrow, as the technology of a hammer. Some are quite broad and diffuse as the technology for a super computer.Technology as

A Thought About Technology and Music
20 07 2010 Before Edison invented the phonograph in 1877 the only way to hear music was to directly hear a person making the music. (The player piano and mechanical music box being minor exceptions to this point.) When my parents were children a century ago, people still made music in the home as a major form of entertainment, but the phonograph switched people from making music in the home to listening to

Digital Communities / Magazine / International News


Information technology (IT) case studies, applications, news and best practices by and for international, state, city and county government.

What Makes an Intelligent Community Work?
07 07 2010 Suwon, South Korea; Eindhoven, Netherlands; Ottawa, Canada; and Dublin, Ohio, show how it's done.

UN Report Stresses the Need to Provide Access to Clean Energy to the World's Poor
08 05 2010 According to the new report from the UN, the lack of access to modern energy is a significant barrier to economic development.

Banks & Intelligence's Failure to Detect Al Qaeda's Financing
07 05 2010 A study conducted at the University of Granada revealed that the measures established by the Security Council of the United Nations – based on asset freeze orders – failed to disrupt Al Qaeda’s financing.

AllAfrica / ICT and Telecom / News

Kenya: Safaricom Bets on Value Addition
03 09 2010 Safaricom is betting on value addition as opposed to a reduction in prices to protect its market share and grow revenues as rivals aggressively poach its clientele.

Kenya: Telcos Must Be More Innovative to Stop Customer Flight
03 09 2010 Over the past couple of days there has been a lot of coverage of the price wars that local telcos are engaged in following the reduction of interconnection rates set up by the industry regulator.

Uganda: Expensive Infrastructure Limiting Internet Usage - Expert
03 09 2010 Access-related barriers such as inadequate local content and the expensive infrastructure are among the factors hampering Uganda's internet penetration, a Google official has said.

InfoDev / Highlights

What Does It Take To Build A Wind Turbine Industry?
01 09 2010 In less than 10 years, firms in China, India and South Korea progressed from no wind turbine manufacturing experience to state-of-the-art wind turbine systems. Consider this: Goldwind from China installed 2,727 MW in 2009, a 140% increase on 2008 that saw its international market share rise to 7.2%. The Indian company Suzlon owns 9% of the global market share. What policies led to such robust domestic wind power development?

Help develop a national Spatial Data Infrastructure for Uganda
23 08 2010 infoDev, a donor-funded agency of the World Bank, Geo-Information Communication (GIC) and ESRI Canada are convening a stakeholder discussion in September 2010 to help develop a national spatial data infrastructure (SDI) for Uganda.

Agri-business incubation helps local communities to protect crops and create jobs
19 08 2010 On 29 April, 2010, infoDev and the Agriculture and Rural Development department of The World Bank held a ‘brown bag lunch’ on business incubation in the US and what lessons might be learnt for other parts of the world. The focus was on agri-business incubators.

R4D / ICTs


Up-to-date information on DFID’s current research portfolio

Investing in the future: Communicating HIV trial results in South Africa.
27 08 2010 Miscellaneous Delany-Moretlwe, S. 2009 Health Insights (2009) issue 78, p. 2.

New publication from Panos London - Research makes the News
27 08 2010 A recent report from Panos London looks at the media's capacity to generate public debate using research to influence policy outcomes

The Cochrane Collaboration responds to Pakistan's floods
25 08 2010 Evidence provided by the Effective Health Care RPC contributes to this special collection of Cochrane Systematic Reviews on water safety and water-related diseases.

MobileActive.org / News


A resource for activists using mobile technology worldwide

If You Build It, They Will Come: SeenReport and Mobile Citizen Journalism in Pakistan
02 09 2010 The devastating floods in Pakistan have been covered by trained reporters and mainstream media outlets around the world. Citizens, often on the front lines of the flood, have also been contributing thousands of reports though mobile phones, in part enabled by the citizen journalism service SeenReport.

SeenReport (from “see ‘n report”) is a citizen journalism service through which users can submit photos, videos, and text accounts of news as it is happening via SMS, MMS, or e-mail. SeenReport won a 2010 mBillionth award, a first-ever contest which recognizes mobile content in South Asia. A YouTube video explains more about the service.

The SeenReport platform is designed to augment stories on online news sites. The platform has been purchased and customized by other media organizations in Pakistan, which helps to both promote citizen journalism in the country and to create a revenue stream for SeenReport.

MobileActive.org talked with Sharjeel Qureshi, a founder of the service. Here is what we learned about SeenReport and citizen journalism in Pakistan.How does SeenReport work? A citizen reporter captures an event on a mobile phone and sends the content to SeenReport. There is no manual intervention at this stage - the content is automatically published on the SeenReport website to better ensure real-time reports which augment larger ongoing events. Further, citizen reporters can register personal information on the site after submitting material.

The system accepts content via SMS, MMS, and e-mail. If images or photos are sent, some basic text is required as far as description and location. The SeenReport platform is intelligent enough to detect this text and suggest related content and news stories. So, if several citizen reporters are submitting reports from the same event on their mobiles - the floods, for instance - the system will make a single thread from the incoming reports.

Some users create detailed online profiles. One freelance journalist, for example, includes his picture, email address, phone number, professional membership affiliation, and has established a subdomain on the SeenReport site with tabs for all of his uploaded content. Qureshi refers to it as a version of LinkedIn for freelance journalists. Others can post anonymously if they choose and are not required to create complete profiles.

The service has been integrated with social network sites so that when stories are published on the website, they are automatically posted on Twitter and Facebook for SeenReport. If a citizen journalist registers personal social media accounts, their reports will be automatically posted in those locations, too.

In general, mobile citizen reports open the door to spam, offensive content, and potentially non-newsworthy posts. SeenReport deals with this through a self-policing or "social censoring" system. Whenever content is posted, readers can comment on it, rate it, and flag it if they find it offensive. SeenReport administrators then remove the flagged content. This topic has been an ongoing discussion for the group behind SeenReport: the idea of how news stories are authenticated, how best to integrate citizen journalism into mainstream media, and what is good journalism.A strong initial boost Qureshi and his team began working on the SeenReport platform in 2007, at a time when there was a media blackout in Pakistan. Heavy censorship was imposed on media organizations at the time. The Internet was the only free medium of information, Qureshi said. During this time, the mobile market in Pakistan had proliferated and “we thought it would be a great idea to empower people to report news right from the cell phone and broadcast to the world in real-time,” he said.

When the site was launched in April 2008, it came on the heels of Pakistan’s Long March, the social unrest following firings of the judiciary. During this time, media coverage was heavily censored. SeenReport, Qureshi said, provided an alternative medium to cover the scale of the event and enable citizens at home to witness the historical moment.

SeenReport allows every mobile user in the crowd to become a reporter. In terms of the Long March, SMS reports provided minute-by-minute and mile-by-mile updates from eyewitnesses. The role of SeenReport in the march was a boost to the fledgling service and was covered by many international news outlets, including Global Voices, the BBC, and CIO Pakistan.SeenReport is more than a single "people powered news" site The SeenReport software, a cloud-based, open-source technology, was created in-house by a small team of engineers. SeenReport also sells this software-as-a-service to other media organizations interested in developing their own citizen journalism initiatives.

This software provision helps to generate income: the monthly recurring license fee model for adopters is the most significant source of revenue for the “modestly funded start-up,” Qureshi said.

SeenReport was designed in such a way that it can be adapted and customized by other users. Several news and media sites have purchased the platform, including Samaa, GeoDost, Aaj, and PlayTv. The first three use the technology for citizen journalism purposes while PlayTv, an entertainment and music channel for youth in Pakistan, uses it to engage young viewers through mobile interaction.

Because organizations have their own policies for driving citizen journalism, adopters can customize the functionality and tweak the editorial control. Some sites, for example, require a thorough review of content before it is published, unlike SeenReport’s system of instant posts and social censorship.

By providing the software to others, SeenReport contributes to citizen journalism in Pakistan. Across the spectrum of organizations using the platform, there have been over 10,000 news reports relating to the floods. GeoDost, for example, has established a unique section on the main page for natural disasters and an "initial flood portal". More than 500,000 citizen reports have been submitted by all users across all organizations, Qureshi said, which gives “an idea of how strong citizen journalism is in Pakistan.”

The HAART Cell phone Adherence Trial (WelTel Kenya1): A Randomized Controlled Trial Protocol
02 09 2010

Community-Level Economic Effects of M-PESA in Kenya: Initial Findings
02 09 2010

TechSoup / Articles


TechSoup.org offers nonprofits a one-stop resource for technology needs by providing free information, resources, and support.

Networked Nonprofits Have Social Cultures
17 07 2010 Advice on revamping the social culture and social media policy at your organization.

SharePoint 2010 for Nonprofits and Libraries
17 07 2010 What's new in Microsoft's latest integrated-management platform?

SharePoint 2010 for Nonprofits and Libraries
22 06 2010 What's new in Microsoft's latest integrated-management platform?

Web2forDev: Web 2.0 for Development


Web2forDev Gateway. Web 2.0 learning and sharing in the context of development work

Ideas for development: The web and its potential role in project innovation
03 09 2010 Image courtesy of Miky (Flikr - C.C)

Image courtesy of Miky (Flikr - C.C)

Linus Pauling, scientist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, once said: “To have a good idea you must first have lots of ideas.” How often do you brainstorm about a solution? When do you really tap on the wide expertise of people and the creative minds of a crowd? Normally it takes a workshop to brainstorm on ideas in a wider circle. The participatory web offers here some new ways to generate ideas and solutions to address development challenges. In a previous post we looked at interesting open collaboration projects, another approach is idea competitions.

The mobile web explosion in Africa: the Facebook factor
03 09 2010 Will the mobile phone be the tool for a wider Internet access in Africa? The latest statistics show a remarkable growth of mobile web users with Facebook being a major incentive to bring people online, however costs for data traffic on mobile phones are still a major obstacle.

Reach your audience on their mobile phones
03 09 2010

A recent TechTip published on ICT Update (issue 55) provides interesting guidelines on how to send out short messages to a large number of preselected recipients using SMS texting. The members of agricultural cooperatives often live far from the organisation’s main offices. It can, therefore, be difficult for farmers to find out about urgent meetings, training courses, market prices and other new developments. To help keep their members up-to-date, cooperatives can use software or web-based applications to send text messages to all or selected members’ cell phones at the same time. One popular service for sending multiple messages is BulkSMS. You can register to use it directly from the website or download a desktop version of the application.

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