Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Openness or How Do You Design for the Loss of Control? | by @timleberecht | design mind – Quite brilliant!!! CLIP: "Openness is no longer just a nice stunt but a fundamental requirement for any business that wants to thrive in the new “pull economy. ……..The loss of control enables the creation of more weak ties in a company’s network (inside and outside of the organization), and, as social network research has shown, weak ties are more conducive to transporting foreign ideas, knowledge, and skills – because they move faster from one node to the other as the network becomes more accessible and nimble on its fringes. ………….. You could argue that designers have been designing creation spaces, feedback mechanisms, and other participatory experiences for some time now. ………….It seems like the time is ripe to understand these efforts as part of a broader shift and consolidate them into a series of formats that, going forward, shall serve as blueprints for “design for the loss of control,” across different corporate functions and disciplines."

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Research in the Wild: Making Research Work in Industry | blog@CACM – CLIP: "Even so, there are many in industry that consider researchers an expensive luxury that the company can ill afford. Part of this comes from the historically common organizational structure of having a separate and independent research lab, which sometimes looks to be a gilded ivory tower to those who feel they are locked outside……. Many companies appear to be trying other ways of organizing researchers into the company. For example, Google is well known for integrating many of its researchers into product groups and shifting them among product groups, working side-by-side with different development teams. While on a particular project, a researcher might focus on the part of the problem that requires esoteric knowledge of particular algorithms, but they are exposed to and work on many problems in the product. When this group comes together, everyone shares knowledge, and then people move to another group, sharing again…."
• A Blackberry addict discovers grassroots enterprise in India | @Shekharkapur shares his jugaad experience! – CLIP: "But in exactly six minutes this kid handed my blackberry back. He had changed the part and cleaned and serviced the the whole phone. Taken it apart, and put it together. As I turned the phone on there was a horrific 2 minutes where the phone would not come on. I looked at him with such hostility that he stepped back. ‘you have more than thousand phone numbers ?” ‘yes’. ‘backed up ?’‘no’‘Must back up. I do it for you. Never open phone before backing up’‘You tell me that now ?’ But then the phone came on and my data was still there. Everyone watching laughed and clapped. This was becoming a show. A six minute show. I asked him how much.‘ 500 rupees’ He ventured uncertainly . People around watched in glee expecting a negotiation. …………….‘do you have an Iphone ? Even the new ‘4′ one ?‘no, why”‘I break the code for you and load any ‘app’ or film you want. I give you 10 film on your memory stick on this one, and change every week for small fee’

And still, it’s Independence Day in India tomorrow. (Today is Pakistan’s Independence Day – reaching out to all those devastated by the Pakistan floods.). Our media is full of the obligatory ‘cliched’ thoughts on freedom – corruption, poor governance, terrorism, naxalism, separatism, communalism, overpopulation, poverty etc et etc – ably supported by commercialization of the weekend, with obese pages of Independence Day retail ads, deals and discounts – each one cashing in on the the ‘liberated consumer’. I’d like to share some interesting reads this Saturday, on the brink of our 64th year of Independence. What I like about this selection of articles is that they are talking about specific notions of freedom – migration and free speech – not very much new content, but nicely written thought and thematic pieces that force me to look outside my urban elitist wired window.

Migration and Freedom:

I began with the Outlook Independence Day issue – The Mobile Republic – which is devoted to the challenges  migrants face, and the  faultlines of migration in India. Underlying this issue is the theme of an unequal India, one that pretends to be inclusive, but the cracks are many. This map reveals how much migration there actually is – making sense of mobility – metadata:

Nandan Nilekani, in his column We, The Innumerable talks of the ‘dual track’ in our development (sometimes I feel we are quite schizophrenic as a country, esp. when I travel to rural areas), and the need for a sense of ‘personhood’:

Nevertheless, growth in India is still, visibly, ‘dual track’, with the rapid transformation of urban India and the income growth of the middle class contrasting sharply with the rural country, where growth still remains an attractive but uncertain promise, and people’s aspirations are often cheek to cheek with their frustrations. Here, among the dust of the village and the faded wheat fields, it is difficult to comprehend the momentum of the Indian city.

The risk of being left behind

In the period when India experienced slow, near-stagnant growth rates, one humorous remark was that in India ‘everything proceeds at the rate of the slowest member’. The challenge today may be the opposite: that India’s breathtaking growth, combined with high rates of inequality, will leave too many behind and make the problem of our ‘slowest members’—lagging sectors and regions—an especially urgent one. In fact, in our rapidly expanding economy, inclusive growth thus becomes an even larger priority—else inequity left unaddressed means that the people left behind find themselves falling further behind every year, as the differences become too significant to overcome.

Neelabh Mishra talks of the Pardesi’s Perils - in this case, its not about migrating abroad but from state to state within the country:

Land sharks, labour contractors, businesses that need labourers in large numbers, politicians—they all feed the middle-class anxiety such a situation creates to make the migrants even more vulnerable. For instance, in Jaipur and Ajmer, a perverse reduction is being deployed: all migrants are Bengali speakers, all Bengali speakers are in fact illegal Bangladeshi Muslims, all crime and terrorist activity is their work. Whipping up communal frenzy in this way makes it easy both to deliver up slum clusters as real estate to builders and constituencies to politicians of a certain hue. Similar processes—not confined to Jaipur or Ajmer, and which other political parties are certainly not above using—create volatile situations exploited to the hilt by the predators who create them.

There is also another kind of faultline, created when powerful migrants arrive to prey upon weaker locals. The tribals of Jharkhand have long resented the Diku, or the outsider, first British, then Bengali, and later Marwari or Bihari, who exploited them. The tribals of Dantewada and Bastar too have similar terms to express their resentment for migrant communities that have long exploited them. Reduced to a minority in their own land, Jharkhand tribals first sought a separate state; now they are entwined in the Maoist insurgency. In Dantewada, many tribals are fighting a near civil war against the State, again under Maoist leadership.

And there are many other articles on migrants and their stories of success and pain as they strive for different dimensions of freedom in the ‘new’.

Free Speech

On, to Livemint Lounge – an issue dedicated to Free Speech. Well done @priyaramani and team – some great articles there. From Sunil Khilnani’s ‘A case for offence’ (he’s the author of The Idea of India):

All beliefs command a certain political respect—they should be heard. But let’s be equally clear that not all beliefs are equal, nor should they all be shown equal respect in intellectual or moral terms. Some beliefs are correct, others are false; some are better, others are worse. To think that the belief that widows should be burned on their husband’s funeral pyres stands on a par with the belief that all young girls should be educated, is morally repulsive and intellectually stupid.

But how are we to find this out, how do we come to evaluations that lead us to reject some beliefs—even if they are embedded in religious world views—and to embrace others? Such matters are not to be found out by consulting holy books or scriptural authorities; nor by polling the offended sentiments of religious believers.

We like to think of ourselves as argumentative, as debaters welcoming of diverse views and energized by confrontation. In reality though, what passes for argument is melodrama: shouting past one another, whether in Parliament and state assemblies, in TV studios, or at a railway counters; or else a timid refusal to really engage at all, a cowardly deference to “sentiment”.

The truth is, we’re not very good at tolerating views that question, mock or subvert our accepted beliefs—especially if we happen to be able to describe these as our religious beliefs. This collective chippiness—which makes us boastful and seeking the approval of others, but unwilling to take their criticism or questioning—is not a conducive psychological precondition in favour of free speech.

Salil Tripathi’s essay – We are not Free – on how our laws are restricting our freedom:

And today, those laws restrict Indian freedoms. Argumentative Indians? Maybe—so long as the argument is about cricket, or cinema, or perhaps mangoes. As the injunction says in an Irani restaurant in Mumbai, discussion about religion and politics is out of bounds. But you can talk about cutting chai and bun muska, while the owner’s father’s portrait looks over you, deciding what you can speak and think.

Technology and Freedom

I’ve yet to see much written about the intersection of technology and freedom. The articles made me reflect upon the special blend of relationship between technology & migrants, and technology & free speech. Both are complex issues – with many dichotomies. On the one hand, access to mobile phones and computers is known to empower the disadvantaged and the poor – however access issues and cost create a digital divide.  In research studies we have conducted among migrant workers and technology, we’ve found that the cell phone is often the new calling card and gives migrants a sense of ‘personhood’ (to steal Mr. Nilekani’s term). It’s also a device that brings the city (work, play, relationships, entertainment, services) to them – equal opportunities??? – that’s perhaps pushing it too far. But ironically, the same cell phone and the internet can become divisive tools – when used to arouse feelings of hatred and to mobilize crowds to violate their fundamental rights as human beings and citizens of India, as the vile MNS does in Bombay.

Then there is the whole issue around free speech and censorship. These two polarizations seem to continually blend into each other, amplifying one another, feeding the divisions. Sometimes I feel, the more we change, the more we remain the same .. or even go a few steps back. Doesn’t really make sense, but it would seem that the more we (people) speak and voice our views enabled by technology, (through mainstream media and social media eg. twitter, facebook, sms, BBM, blogs, flickr, youtube etc.), the more the government feels the need to impose on our freedoms and invade our right to privacy, by censoring us and taking away access. First, Blackberry, next Google, Skype?  One may argue that  there is justification with all the terror attacks and threats. Still, these bans only  feed back into us shouting even louder, more viciously and manipulatively and sometimes unreasonably.

None of this is freedom for anyone really.

And it’s not just the government that we incite and who incites us – caste groups, fanatical religious groups, political parties, big corporations and interest lobbies who often hide behind the face of the government, and even just ordinary people like you and me who have different views from ours and feel they have the right to say just about anything to anybody.

So we shout. They try to stifle our voice. We use our social networks and communities to amplify and spread our voice, and our opinions. We shout louder and more viciously for our freedoms, and find ways of attacking back and circumventing bans. One such case was when the Government tried to ban blogs – prompted by some misguided sense of nationalism -inept censorship at its best!  And a few times I’ve been on the other side where I’ve been forced to close or delete comments, invoking my own powers of censorship over my blog.

Sanjukta Sharma writes so aptly, in her introduction to the free speech series:

We celebrate the old and new kinds of free speech in this special issue. It’s a freedom, the lack of which we remember every other day. Our right to freedom of expression in the Constitution has “reasonable restrictions”—the “reasonable” often bordering on the bizarre. Hurt sentiments over calling Billu a barber; outrage over the biography of a national hero; violent attacks on those who commemorate the spirit of a certain fun-loving St Valentine with sweet nothings and oblong-shaped balloons—something irks somebody all the time. If you laugh at Indianness, you are booed. If you have a mind, you are stupid and deserve to be called names.

The free speech issue, not surprisingly, became less about freedom and more about censorship and restriction—in art, movies, erotica and the public sphere.

The question then is, who is really free in all this? Is it possible that the louder we all shout, we stop listening to each other? And when we stop listening, we cannot understand or empathize with the underlying issues and signals beyond all the noise – real issues faced by those who censor and are being censored.

And when we stop listening, we live with fear. Look at the mess the USA is in today – fear seems to have been one of the key operating themes driving many of their decisions in the last decade.

If fear frames our next decade, we will never really be free.

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Digital education resource and library for researchers and students – Cyborg Anthropology – Cool collection of very useful links and resources for understanding the effects of objects and technology on humans and culture. . CLIP – Introduction – "…..Cyborg Anthropology takes the view that most of modern human life is a product of both human and non-human objects. People are surrounded by built objects and networks. So profoundly are humans altering their biological and physical landscapes that some have openly suggested that the proper object of anthropological study should be cyborgs rather than humans, for, as Donna Haraway says, "we are all cyborgs now". How we interact with machines and technology in many ways defines who we are. Cyborg Anthropology is a framework for understanding the effects of objects and technology on humans and culture. This site is designed to be a resource for those tools."
• The 2010 Social Business Landscape « Dachis Group Collaboratory | by @dhinchcliffe – Well worth a careful read if you're a social media strategist. CLIP: "To help with keeping up with the fast moving pace of Social Business, we’ve created a useful new model aimed at helping keep track of the major moving parts of Social Business today. We define Social Business here as the distinct process of applying social media to meet business objectives.The Social Business Power Map, presented above, is an attempt to identify the major social media trends, how they can be mapped generally along consumer/enterprise axes, and where they are in terms of their overall maturity level today. Note that many of the aspects of social media in the consumer Web side is also heavily used in the enterprise side, while the reverse is generally not the case. This map is as exhaustive as space allows but inevitably some items had to be omitted. Any all such omissions are my fault alone. The items on this Power Map are rated on the following scale" Buzz | Experimentation|Adoption|Maturity……."

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Jugaad: mobile phone innovation from Santosh Ostwal | @TheEconomist – Interesting case of grassroots innovation CLIPS: "SANTOSH OSTWAL, husband and father of two, lost his apartment in 2001 after quitting his job in Pune to solve an engineering problem he’d been thinking about for twenty years. Today his solution – a mobile-phone adaptation that triggers irrigation pumps remotely – is saving water in India and helping more than 10,000 farmers avoid several taxing, dangerous long walks a day. I talked to Mr Santosh for a podcast earlier this year, but it’s worth digging back into the transcript now to help explain the Indian concept of jugaad, an inspired kind of duct-taped ingenuity that employs only the tools at hand." "One reason why he cracked this problem, says Mr Ostwal, is that his own family farms, and he’s spent more than a decade observing farmers and their routines. Perhaps the urban engineers didn’t see this problem because they didn’t face it themselves in their walks of life….
• Supernova Forum 2010: Privacy & Publicness with @jeffjarvis & @zephoria (via @kwerb) – CLIP: At Supernova Forum 2010, danah boyd (Microsoft Research) and Jeff Jarvis (BuzzMachine) discuss privacy and publicness in a connected world.
• Art of noise: Mobile social media and attention | Berkman Center – CLIPS: "How do we manage the increasing demands of network connectivity, from mobiles, email, and social media? Debates are raging about reduced attention spans and information overload – with particular focus on young people being at risk. Sharing early findings from a large, three-year study of mobile media use in Australia, this talk will bring an historical context to the idea of noise, and give a snapshot of how 'mobile social spheres' are developing – particularly for 18-30 year olds.
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• 6 Ways Eye Tracking Is Changing the Web @rww | love the web-connected contact lens design – CLIP: “Tracking eye movement is more than just a great way to test website usability. It’s also a way to help the disabled, to remotely drive cars and to reinvent multimedia reading. From open-source software that runs on hardware built of old webcams to expensive contact lenses and glasses, a new era of eye-controlled tools are developing at a rapid rate. What follows is a summary of some of the ways that these new designs are going to make it easier to read and write not just on the Web but also when it comes to controlling objects in real life.”

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• POV – caste politics of a different kind? Lahore Bombings & the Future of Pakistan – CLIP: "And the provincial government has consistently failed to provide security for likely targets, starting with Ahmedi mosques and Sufi shrines. The political calculation is simple: the PML-N's view appears to be that ………." "Perhaps there is a tipping point. Violent attacks in Peshawar is one thing. Attacks on Punjabi teachers in Balochistan, well, you know what the tribes are like and besides, India is behind it all. (There may, in fact, be Indian involvement in support for Baloch separatist groups, but that's another story.) Terrorism against Ahmedis? One of my students here in Lahore — during a meeting of a class on Democratic Theory, no less — explained that while the attacks were deplorable "as a good Muslim I would never say hello to an Ahmedi or respond if he said a'salaam." But attacks in the heart of Lahore on an ancient Sufi shrine that is both a tourist attraction and one of the identifying monuments of the city?"

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• The jugaad myth (via @manipande – on why ‘jugaad’ is not necessarily innovation)) – CLIP: "Earthen pots and other types of jugaad may make good documentary film subjects, but we should remember that these are typically low productivity solutions with a below-par user experience. They should not be romanticised. India cannot become a world-beating economic force by under-investing in fundamental scientific research and celebrating the stop-gap survival mechanisms as path-breaking innovation. …. The state should commit itself to turning India into a magnet for top scientific talent from around the world, increasing investment in fundamental science and engineering and creating infrastructure ……. When such an environment is created, storytellers will find inspiration from life to imagine and create more on the lines of the recent Hollywood blockbuster series on high-technology superhero Iron Man, showcasing cutting-edge technology that can inspire real innovators."

Discovered this eBook on Ideo’s Method Cards at the Healthcare Innovation by Design Blog.

From the Ideo website:

IDEO Method Cards is a collection of 51 cards representing diverse ways that design teams can understand the people they are designing for. They are used to make a number of different methods accessible to all members of a design team, to explain how and when the methods are best used, and to demonstrate how they have been applied to real design projects.

IDEO’s human factors specialists conceived the deck as a design research tool for its staff and clients, to be used by researchers, designers, and engineers to evaluate and select the empathic research methods that best inform specific design initiatives. The tool can be used in various ways—sorted, browsed, searched, spread out, pinned up—as both information and inspiration to human-centered design teams and individuals at various stages to support planning and execution of design programs.

Inspired by playing cards, the cards are classified as four suits—Ask, Watch, Learn, Try—that define the types of activities involved in using each method”

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• Shedding light on the invisible workforce – livemint.com | Indian women contribute more than the official 23% in GDP – CLIP: Women officially contribute 23% of India’s gross domestic product. But their actual contribution is much larger, and goes unnoticed, says the ILO study authored by G. Raveendran, former additional director general of Central Statistical Organisation and consultant to the National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganized Sector. Traditional occupations such as sewing, embroidering and even grinding and de-husking of rice—defined as economic activities by the United Nations System of National Accounts—do not figure in official records, it adds. The work of nearly 85 million women is not counted, and the incorrect data hobbles policy decisions, says Raveendran.
• Ethnography in Industry: Objectives? | UX Magazine – CLIP: “Ethnography adapted for industry. In today’s hard-nosed and often economically trying times, ethnography can be seen as a tactical weapon enabling companies to gather new insights and thus gain advantage over their competition.Traditional ethnographic studies were conducted at a relatively leisurely pace ……….. Out of the academic Garden of Eden, modern ethnographers have been driven to move and produce compelling results faster, while operating within a number of budgetary constraints and oft-conflicting business demands. Ethnographers’ data collection and analysis methods have therefore been condensed, recombined, adapted—both systematically and as-needed—to meet these business demands.”

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• What a great sensory anchor or imprint for a brand! The Scent of Memory: Design, Experience & Perfume | via @futurescape – CLIP: “Scent design. Scent is place and memory—it is experience recalled. Every scent, in the microscopic particulate nature of its diffusion, is distinctive, unforgettable to those who are mindful, informing a significant part of our experience. The memory is a story, and to designers, the idea of linking story and experience through formed visualization—from container to packaged expression, from word to identity, from photography to patterning—reaches deep into the darker, psychic place of scent embedded in our recollections forever. Sensing, scent and sentience—all come from the same Latin root: sentire, to feel. As designers, that’s where we live: generating the (e)motion of feeling in the signals of message, form, place and storied visuals.”
• Internet Hindus and Madrasa Muslims – @amitvarma explores group polarization [via @prempanicker] – CLIPS: “Here’s how Sunstein summarised the results in his book: “In almost every group, members ended up holding more extreme positions after they spoke with one another. [...] Aside from increasing extremism, the experiment had an independent effect: it made both liberal and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous — and thus squelched diversity. [...] Moreover, the rift between liberals and conservatives widened as a result of discussing. This phenomenon is called Group Polarization. Sunstein defines it thus: “When like-minded people deliberate, they typically end up adopting a more extreme position in line with their pre-deliberation inclinations.This explains why the internet is such a polarised space. And he ends with humour – “Also, I would request anyone who wishes to coin more such terms to at least alliterate. Blogging Buddhists and Joomla Jains sound far more musical than Internet Hindus, if a little more niche. No?”
• Colour me purple! Colour & Gender – results of a survey [via @hiteshmehta] – This is funny!!! CLIP: “I decided to calculate the ‘most masculine’ and ‘most feminine’ colors. I was looking for the color names most disproportionately popular among each group; that is, the names that the most women came up with compared to the fewest men (or vice versa). Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women: Dusty Teal, Blush Pink, Dusty Lavender, Butter Yellow, Dusky Rose, Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list. Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men: Penis Gay, WTF, Dunno, Baige ! … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”. And keep in mind, this is based on the number of unique people who answered the color, not the number of times they typed it. This isn’t just the effect of a couple spammers. In fact, this is after the spamfilter. I weep for my gender”
• What Are You Going to Do When the Internet’s Gone? asks @davepollard – CLIPS: “What are you going to do when the Internet’s gone? That is the question that no one dares ask. I’m not talking about Net Neutrality and the takeover of the web by corporate interests. I’m talking about its simple disappearance, as infrastructure that’s simply unaffordable and unsustainable in a world of economic, energy and ecological collapse, stops working and falls apart.” …. “How well will you be prepared to adapt to the end of the Internet? Are you dependent on it, now, for critical information you need, for connection with those you love and those you seek to love, to work with, to partner with, and for what brings you joy or blessed escape? The biggest uses of the Internet today are music, porn, health information, games, and amateur photo/video sharing. To the extent you use the Internet for any of these things, do you have a way of doing them, with no or low technology, when the Internet’s gone?”

Daily updates on what I’m reading. Links with my notes. I also just tweet links and things that interest me @dina

• A Social Publishing Strategy by @gkjohn at @kanter covers education/publishing. love the skype reading sessions esp. -

“Our strategy has relied upon being part of a larger mission, providing meaningful and valuable content, curating information and content for the community, using a legal framework that allows for a participatory culture and lastly, in time, providing a space for the community to assist in the mission by creating content themselves. The last part, a community publishing platform, is something we are working on with the Connexions Project and a brief video about it is here. It’s still a journey we are on and we’ve had many success till date  - Skype reading sessions across countries, helping us get books to children across the country, audio books created for the blind, iPad apps being made of our content and so much more.  Here’s some details about some of social tactics:

Skype reading sessions: This project started after a few tweets were exchanged between a librarian from Central Manor, Pennsylvania. We started off by people from our organization having Skype reading sessions with a few children and then moved onto having sessions with entire classes. On 20th March, 2009, we managed to hold a Skype storytelling session between kids from Akshara Foundation’s community library and a class from Central Manor.The purpose is to go beyond being just a publisher. Through these activities we are encouraging reading, learning and connecting children from different communities and backgrounds. Channels used: Twitter, Skype, Blog

Inviting people to remix/repurpose our content: As a publisher, we have a lot of content available which we want people to access as easily as possible. In our attempt to do so, we have managed to license some of our books under Creative Commons licenses. Now, if we can’t publish a book in Assamese, but a teacher in Assam wants to do so, she doesn’t have to worry about copyright infringement. We have also put up some of the illustrations of our books so that people can remix or repurpose them. Channels used : Scribd, Blog, Flickr

Facilitators/connecting organisations and people: @Anorakmagazine found us on Twitter and asked if they could send us some back issues of their magazines to share with kids in India. Once the books arrived, they were sent to the community libraries run by Akshara Foundation. We also helped coordinate a drawing project that Anorak Magazine wanted to involve the children with. Now, some of the kids have their work published in an international children’s magazine.Channels used: Twitter

Audio books for the National Association of Blind : This project started off because of another blog post (on the Helen Keller Talking Library project) that got automatically updated to our Twitter account. @owos then messaged us to tell us about a similar intiative Radio Mirchi had started. Then another tweep (@barkhad) told us that she had registered with Radio Mirchi but they didn’t get back to her. So, we got in touch with Radio Mirchi to talk about a blog post and while we were talking, she asked if we would be interested in having our books recorded by Radio Mirchi for the National Association of the Blind. We also requested if @barkhad could record one of our books and they agreed. So, our Twitter friend went offline and recorded a book in their Delhi studio! Channels used: Blog, Twitter

Passing it on – the book edition: We read about about a bunch of kids in Kolkata who went around with a van full of books to reach kids who didn’t have access to books and even went on to teach the kids how to read. After reading about this initiative, one of our trustees volunteered to sponsor some Bengali books if we could find these kids. We mailed the news bureau which published the article, but were unable to get a response. So, we decided to see if the Twitter community could help us. Within half an hour of sending out a tweet, we had a volunteer who said he would get us the information and by the next day we had an address and contact number. Within a few days, Bengali books were sent by us to these kids.From this story, we decided to start an initiative which would allow our online community to participate…to help these kids as well as other kids. Channels used: Twitter, Blog, Facebook

What we’ve found is that honestly, transparency and accountability are the three most important elements of any social media strategy.   A longer case study that we had written up is available on the IndiaSocial site.

• iSay, you say, we all say, to Nokia – neat post by @rashmibansal who’s got herself an iPhone – Rashmi Bansal shares why she will never go back to a Nokia phone, and gives Nokia some good advice!!

CLIPs: “Nokia is still a market leader in the lower end handsets. But there too companies like Micromax are coming in aggressively with high end features at very competitive rates.” It’s time for Nokia to go back into the laboratory and come up with something that make you want to chuck what you have and buy a new one. Imagine a stunningly good-looking girl with an IQ of 180 – but in the form of a phone.”

“… Just a few crazy ideas. I am sure there are designers and engineers out there can come up with much better. Because product lifecycles are getting shorter and shorter. If you’re not dreaming ‘what next’, ‘what more’, your brand is one step closer to the grave. Nokia still enjoys tremendous goodwill, and marketshare. But it needs some stardust to sprinkle on consumers. To work its magic spell, to mesmerise us into saying “lena to Nokia hi hai, question is ‘which model’!”

This is a post that’s long overdue, since the time the film was released! I was spurred to write it this morning, as I’m quite excited to be on a panel discussion at the screening of Tactical Tech’s film called 10 Tactics – Turning Information into Action.

The screening is at the Conference Room of National College, Bandra today and is being hosted by Point of View.  I’m often asked what Info-Activism is, and this film is a must-see for all those who are curious about, interested in and work in the area. I’m also often asked whether I’m a rights activist or a digital activist – and I say no, I’m an ethnographer and researcher who is sometimes an accidental information activist. I’d also broaden the scope of the relevance of these 10 Tactics to those who are working in the social media area, and to those in the corporate world, who’s focus of work is in developing products, services and strategies in a world where customers, users, consumers are already exchanging information, having conversations, and learning often much faster than organizations are. Or simply, it’s for those who care and already use these tools – how can you get more involved in making a difference?

From the 10 Tactics website:

What is 10 Tactics?

10 tactics provides original and artful ways for rights advocates to capture attention and communicate a cause. It includes a 50-minute film documenting inspiring info-activism stories from around the world and a set of cards; with tools tips and advice, for you to work through as you plan your own info-activism

The film features 35 info-activism stories told from the point of view of advocates in 24 different countries including Lebanon, India, Tunisia, Egypt, Kenya, Indonesia, South Africa and the UK.

The film is shared at the website as 10 Tactics, along with Tactics cards that cover a case study, a video story, suggestions and tips, and a featured tool. The 10 Tactics are:

1. Mobilizing people
2. Witness and record
3. Visualize your message
4. Amplify personal stories
5. Just add humour
6. Manage your contacts
7. How to use complex data
8. Use collective intelligence
9. Let people ask the questions
10. Investigate and expose

(I’m featured in Tactic 8 – Use Collective Intelligence – here’s the gist of what I said – “We have communities that we have developed over time in several spaces on the web – on blogs, Facebook, Twitter. What these tools allow you to do is network with all of your online communities, to operate as hubs of connected people. So when something happens and you need to respond, it’s about the spontaneous mobilisation of a community that already exists online, through the multiple nodes and hubs that you have created as you leave your footprints on the web.”

Tactic 8 – Use collective intelligence from Tactical Technology Collective on Vimeo.)

The project came about at the Info-Activism camp held in February 2009, which I was very privileged to have attended.

We’ve also used collective intelligence and swarming way back in 2004 when the Tsunamis had devastated parts of Asia and then again in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina – each of these on a different scale, and using other technologies like blogs and wikis and Skype.

If you’re interested in this area, make sure you view the whole film, all 10 tactics! And there are screenings all over the world, so do go for them, and participate in the discussions.