[update: there's a great new post on worldchanging.com about this. -cb ]
I spent some time today searching for sailboats in satellite imagery, looking for signs of computer scientist Jim Gray. The story is covered here.
The significance of using this technology to do this work is obvious. Using satellite imagery to find a particular lost person [...]

moulin, the brainchild of Geekcorps volunteers Frederic Renet and Renaud Gaudin, started off as a side project of Geekcorps’ Last Mile Initiative. Frederic and Renaud quickly developed an initial prototype of the system to run on a Nokia 770. Excited by the potential of making Wikipedia more widely accessible, Renaud volunteered for a second [...]

Ethan Zuckerman has a great post about the recent newsines (trendiness?) about “conflict” diamonds, pointing to a parody site realdiamondfacts.org. It’s a sendup of DeBeers and Co. (It’s an exact parody of their PR-campaign website, diamondfacts.org.)

The bigger issue, Zuckerman points out, is that there are any number of products that the Rich Folks of [...]

John Maeda writes thoughtfully about simplicity and design at his MIT-based blog. He just posted a great bit about Paul Polak’s design for a low-resouce flashlight. Design under difficult conditions can lead to the same creative insight as design on a limitless budget.
“… this prototype flashlight that is completely solar powered (recharged in sunlight), easily [...]

I’m looking forward to getting this in the mail. I am excited to see a publication that is addressing this type of issue from a nonpolitical stance (or rather, I think, it is implicitly political. If you subscribe now you can still get the first issue from the Need Magazine website.

NEED magazine is an [...]

It seems somehow appropriate that the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is being held in Tunis. What to do with a government widely criticized for its repressive watchfulness in the public sphere? Let them host a mega-conference designed to make progress toward a more equitable, open vision of the [...]

Here’s this:

“An emergency power kit can help you keep important communications equipment running in the midst of a crisis. Read about how to put together your own kit.
[Read more in Technology Planning.]“

Read it: Keeping Communications Equipment Powered in an Emergency
(Found on:Today in TechSoup.)

A recent article in the New York Times discusses a report that computers are being “improperly recycled” (read: dumped) on developing countries as a way to avoid the expense of refurbishing them before redistribution.
“The report, titled “The Digital Dump: Exporting Reuse and Abuse to Africa,” says that the unusable equipment is being donated or sold [...]

Here’s another update on the laptop debate/idea from Ethan Zuckerman, the ICT-blogger-fellow at Harvard. He usefully recounts the point of the new prototypical $100 laptop as being a radical step toward computer-aided learning in developing countries. I appreciate his skepticism about the project, especially his explicit reference to the late, not-so-great simputer idea, which bombed [...]

ICT is Information Communication Technology, literally.
More generally, ICT is at the core of a movement that seeks to provide access to technology for people who would normally not have access to it. This, in turn, is part of a larger movement against poverty and inequality.
A great introduction comes from the (via the Digital [...]

Paul Farmer is an amazing member of the “nonprofit community,” famous in his own circles of public health and international development. The Standford Social Innovation Review, (an excellent magazine) has a lovely extended interview with him about his work and his perspective. If you have not read about his work, this is a good introduction. [...]