Lev Rickards's blog

Dan Atkins

We would not be here if not for the ~22 million dollars that the W.K. Kellogg Foundation put forth. They wanted to combine the burdgeoning digital revolution with the sensibilities and commitments in public librarianship. service has become -> societal engagement. not reaching down from the tower to disseminate knowledge and resources to the community, but rather to have a reciprocal relationship with other parties.

Cost Structures:

as email gets easiest, it becomes least effective way to influence someone.

Coordination+Provision Problems

http://www.pledgebank.com/Electric http://fundable.org/

Neighborhood Informatics:

ThinkNOLA.org Neighborhood Knowledge LA ineighbors.org daviswiki.org

txt-ing:

Sara's experience in Benin: new candidate entered presidential election late in the game. People started txting to get friends to register to vote, then organized buses with music and eye-catching behavior to get people to vote.

Introduction

where the specific IT system might not be doing something especially exciting, but it's in the service of doing something that you care a great deal about. Information support for public interest work Natural outgrowth of difference in technology infrastructure. Canada calls it 'the third sector.' Not profits, Non government. Private action in the public interest. Some group of people who have no official governmental mandate. Unofficially, they decide that "X would be good." "We think it would be better if there were more plays put on in Ann Arbor." NGOs abroad tend to focus on high-need missions. Not arts and theater NGOs in general. (???)

Structure of how Community Information orgs behave in the US nonprofit landscape.

For Profit gives goods and $$ both to Founndations and to Non Profits. Foundations give goods and $ to Non profits Non profits give goods and $$ to other non profits Individuals give to Non profits. Social Enterprise doesn't fit into the 'donate money give money spend money' cycle. Usually involved with each of these three circles.

Background:

US has had many years of relative economic prosperity. Deregulated markets in telecommunications. Crazy boom where everyone was digging up the streets laying fiber. Lots of infrastructure (though not universal). Much of hte developed world is actually ahead of the US. Korea, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe actually all have denser high speed internet access. But down the scale, Rwanda has satellite terminals, but no domestic fiber infrastructure. No land lines because copper is valuable and expensive. Country racked by war so investments don't go to infrastructure because people are focused on staying alive. Public policy there and throughout parts of world where phone system is run by government and therefore runs in a way that doesn't always aim at providing mass uncontrolled access to all interested parties. These differences show up in how internet accvess looks. Network access can be very expensive because infrastructure isn't there to get bandwidth in and out of the country.