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 [...]

Last week a 2004 article turned up on Eldis: a consideration of how to measure the impact of ICTs in women’s lives. The article begins with a great discussion of what a gender perspective means for people working with technologies of communication. (It cites the United Nations as finding that ICT access is the third [...]

Here’s an interesting feature from a nonprofit organization called the gov3 Network, which appears to be a kind of ICT government consultancy. They have a interesting feature on their website that dynamically draws data comparing a country (of your choice) to other countries with regard to their ICT-sector growth.
Put a country and comparison region [...]

Woo Hoo! Wind-powered wireless!:

“A University of Texas professor creates tiny windmills to tilt at providing electricity: The prof has developed a system with his group that uses piezoelectric crystals which, when flexed by the small pressures provided by a 10-centimeter windmill running as slow as 17 kilometers per hour, can produce 7.5 milliwatts of electricity. [...]

While poking around on stuff related to the WSIS in Tunis, I found this excellent document about wireless internet in Africa, which was used at the first meeting of the WSIS in 2003. I only wish that there was an updated copy somewhere …
“The most intriguing application [of wireless technology] in developing nations is the [...]

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.)

Here’s this from global-minded site about broadband technologies:

“And now for the fun part….
Did you know that Iceland is only behind South Korea, Netherlands and Denmark in Internet penetration, and 84% of its households have Internet connection?
Australia adds 40,000 broadband connections every month.
In Spain, you can get a 20 megabit/second connection for $36 a month and [...]

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 [...]

The Scottish government has an excellent collection of resources regarding the use of Information Communication Technology in classrooms. They have multi-part articles grouped by subject (Biology, Drama, Physics), and examples of how, for example, you can show students living cells using microscope and digital camera, or how to use th einternet to teach French. Most [...]

Kathyn Cramer, based in New York, is doing great work with Google maps. The following information is quoted from her blog.
Step 1: Go to Google Maps and enter the address. Click on the button that says “Hybrid” on the upper right. You will get an image with a speech ballon pointing to a thumbtack [...]

Ever since the first Vatican broadcast of a sermon on the radio in 1931, there has been little doubt about the power of broadcast media as a part of religious practice.
Contemporary “church-theatres” (typically the kind with the lights and music shows) are taking the role of media much more seriously, and it appears that [...]

Educational Testing Services — they’re the folks that make the SAT and GRE — has a new test for ICT literacy. Despite a humorously useless Flash intro, the test appears to be fully baked. The sample questions on the ETS website look at the ways a test-taker would represent and evaluate information in an online [...]

As of April, there is a new journal devoted to researching the (primarily sociological) aspects of Technology’s influence. It’s free, how lovely: Human Technology: An interdisciplinary Journal on Humans in ICT Environments

A Major O’Reilly Open Source Convention next week in Portland (OR) is hosting a panel of women developers (Update- It’s even worse; women’s representation in IT generally has gone down 20% since 1994.)

A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh. These are people who otherwise would have no digital communications, and Quadir feels that their new phones are empowering them more than the development strategies of the last 60 years.
The [...]

The Journal of Community Informatics, a new, academic approach to community technology, is now in its third issue.
It has an informative, though often long-winded, selection of peer-reviewed articles. The field is new and often misunderstood or poorly defined — which makes it much more interesting to read the various perspectives that the researcher-authors bring. [...]

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 [...]