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A Community Informatics Declaration This document was prepared by a group of Community Informatics activists and endorsed by consensus of the Community Informatics community 21.12.13. Effective use of the Internet will benefit everyone. Currently the benefits of the Internet are distributed unequally: some people gain power, wealth and influence from using the Internet while others […]
January 1, 2014
As the avalanche of Snowden revelations resumes after it’s brief organizational regrouping and holiday hiatus a few learnings and even more direct and pertinent questions are starting to emerge. Evgeny Morozov in an otherwise interesting piece in the Financial Times is surely incorrect in his bald statement that “Snowden now faces a growing wave of […]
November 16, 2013
As those, who have been in and around community-based ICT/Internet access (community informatics) initiatives well know, the primary dilemma for these activities (e.g. Telecentres) is how to ensure sufficient sustainability, organizational stability and programmatic flexibility to allow for survival once the immediate round of funding which helped them launch, runs out.
October 23, 2013
"Rough consensus and running code" as the operational element of MSism would not have allowed for the long term and deeply political, contentious and conflictual processes that overcame child labour, created the public health measures that conquered typhus, allowed for the long term political (and radical) confrontations that gave women the vote, or ended slavery. Whether MSism can ensure an open, transparent, equitable, rule of law based and human rights protecting Internet for all is to my mind a very very open question and certainly something to be discussed rather than assumed.
October 18, 2013
Can we in fact proceed or accept the outcome of any MS process without a very close re-examination and structuring of those processes; that is, to develop a means for providing appropriate safeguards against contamination, subversion, distortion or interest capture by or on behalf of one or another of the significant players whose interests in Internet development may be quite the opposite of the open, inclusive, transparent Internet that is the evident goal for most of those particularly from Civil Society who espouse MSism so passionately?
January 12, 2014
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