Campaign funding

Thanks to Bob, I got exposed to the “GOOD Magazine” (site) - an online outlet dedicated to social issues with an interesting funding model and young approach to content.  Here is an example of what they create (a few months outdated, but still interesting):

What do you think?

Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) at Berkman Center for Internet and Society (Harvard) just launched an interesting, and hopefully helpful, project called Citizen Media Legal Guide. Here is an excerpt from their official press release:

The free guide, which is intended for use by bloggers, website operators, and other citizen media creators, focuses on the legal issues that non-traditional and traditional journalists are likely to encounter as they gather information and publish their work online.

“We’ve created the legal guide to address the myriad legal issues faced by online publishers, whether they are bloggers, citizen journalists, or established journalism organizations.  Because many online publishers don’t have a background in media law, we have tried to make the guide as approachable as possible and included dozens of practical tips for avoiding legal liability,” said David Ardia, director and co-founder of the CMLP, an initiative to provide legal assistance, education, and resources for citizen media and to study the impact of law on online journalism.

The guide is covering six major sections:

1. Forming a Business and Getting Online
2. Dealing with Online Legal Risks
3. Newsgathering and Privacy
4. Access to Government Information
5. Intellectual Property
6. Risks Associated with Publication

The website of the project provides a fully searchable version of the guide, which only limitation is that it covers US only.  It would be great to have also some international perspectives as well.

Hope you will find it useful!

Recently i blogged about some number of mobile penetration in Africa.  Now i came across this rather old article (HE) about an Israeli company that develops under $25 mobile phones.  The great part of this story is that these seem to be not just simpler (and thus cheaper) phones, but handhelds that have internet and multimedia capabilities.  Neat…

Since the first time I participated in the ITU Youth Forum in 2002, I’ve been lucky enough to help organizing a number of other ITU Youth Forums.  When I say “lucky”, part of it is because I get to read essays that the young people from various parts of the world submit as part of the selection process.  The essays usually deal with a question of how ICT can help solving socioeconomic problems.  After reading those essays for a few years, you start noticing patterns and this is where it is getting really interesting.

After having a chance to look at the latest batch of essays from the Asia-Pacific region, I have a couple of observations:

• There is more similarity in the way young people describe social, political, and economic problems, and more so the information and communication technology.  In previous years, there was less unity in the way people addressed the question of the essay.
• In the past, when young people wrote about ICT, they always wrote about the internet and sometimes about mobile communication (a more recent trend).  In the current batch a noticeable amount of people placed TV and radio in the same basket as the internet and the mobile.

Of course, these are very preliminary observations and in order to derive more robust or generalizable conclusions, one needs a more systematic analysis.  I haven’t done that (yet), but do I find those early observations interesting.  What do you think?

Although creating or reading these very lines is a result of technical and policy decisions made by third parties along the way, sometimes it seems to me that Net Neutrality is not discussed enough. Here is one viral video I got recently via FB. It presents the topic maybe not in the best, but rather creative way:

I wonder if the other side of the argument has its viral component on the web?