So why is this a problem?

For starters, there is discrimination. The Internet is as an open medium, where every feature and service is treated equally. For example, search engines provide you with sites that are the closest match to your request, not the highest paying content providers.

Next, there is double payment on a service. Currently, net users are charged for access. Opponents to Net Neutrality also want to have users pay for content, by charging the service providers who will then pass on these costs to users. Currently we pay for the pipes, not the type of content that comes through the pipes.

Most importantly is the oppression of innovation. The net as it stands allows start-ups and entrepreneurs to enter the marketplace competitively. A tiered Internet will be dictated by who can afford to dominate the content supply market through massive financing.

On December 21, 2010, the FCC will vote on a net neutrality proposal plan. Outlined by Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan includes five key points: transparency; a ban blocking lawful apps and services; a ban on unreasonable network management; allowance some ISP network management; and rules governing wireless that calls for the above. Another notable feature is that the plan does not reclassify broadband as a telecom service, and holds it to the same rules and regulations.

Net Neutrality is absolutely necessary for the future of the Internet as we know it, and although many in the U.S. have an inherent mistrust for government regulation, it is the only way we will achieve equity for all users:

“In the end, network neutrality rules are not the only way government can try to lower the costs of market entry in the national economy. However, it is one of the simplest, and it has proven very effective over the last decade.”

Tim Wu, Professor of Law, Columbia University.

1. Apple supports open standards for the web and has adopted HTML5 which is open and controlled by a standards committee. Adobe’s Flash is 100% proprietary, with Adobe having sole authority over its development, and thus if is a “closed system”.
2. The majority of web video is now encoded in the H.264 format, which is viewable on all Apple devices.
3. Flash compromises security, performs poorly on mobile devices and “is the number one reason Macs crash”.
4. The older video encoding used by the majority of Flash websites requires software rather than hardware decoding, and halves battery life.
5. Flash was not designed for touch screens, and relies on mice and rollovers, which have no place on the iPad, iPhone or iPod.
6. Flash is a cross platform development tool, with a bad track record in adoption times of enhancements to Apple’s platform. Enhancements will only be adopted when they are available on all supported platforms (PCs, Andriod phones, etc.). This results in developers having access to a low level set of features.

While this letter puts a grim light on Adobe’s app development future, on September 9, 2010 Apple announced they would be “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps”. This means that developers can now use Adobe’s Flash CS5 to create iPhone apps.

Google was happy about this too, as  developers can now use Google’s advertising solutions in Apple apps.

So, what can we take away from this? When Apple relaxes, many breathe a sigh of relief.

To underscore the importance of student crisis mapping, Craig Fugate, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator publicly stated that the student led crisis map during the earthquakes in Haiti “was the most comprehensive and up-to-date map available to the humanitarian community.”

SIPA has been ahead of the curve when it comes to crisis mapping and was very involved with Ushahidi during disasters in Chile and Pakistan over the last year.  After their Chile initiative ended, the core members of the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team met with Patrick Meier, Director of Crisis Mapping and Strategic Partnerships at Ushahidi, to discuss lessons learned.  It was at this meeting that Meier first began to discuss the initial U4U idea with the SIPA team to gain their input and support.

In the early stages of planning, the model for U4U was a team of students from universities around the world who are trained and ready to become crisis mappers the moment a disaster strikes.  Teams from different universities would rotate as first responders and take on all mapping activities during the first 48 hours of a crisis.  After the initial response, the university team would pass responsibility to either local or UN organizations.

“How it was originally presented to the SIPA team is much different that it is now,” says Jaclyn Carlsen, SIPA Student and Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force, which leads crisis mapping at SIPA.

For starters, U4U’s focus will primarily be universities in developing countries instead of the original model with schools from around the world as first responders.  U4U will bring students from developing countries to the U.S. to be trained on Ushahidi and related platforms.  These students will also work with peacebuilding experts from USIP to identify specific ways to use information collection and crowd sourcing technologies in their home countries.

Further, the scope of U4U will be broader than disaster response alone.  While the original model was centered on disasters, U4U as it exists now will encompass a range of issues.  Its management has been consulting widely with international and community based organizations about how the tools can be used and the issues surrounding them.

“It goes to show how Ushahidi was first used primarily in disasters but they are realizing that this tool is so versatile. It can be for conflict resolution; it can be used for peacemaking.  I think that’s why it became more holistic,” reflects Sawako Sonoyama, the other Co-Director of the SIPA New Media Task Force.

Carlsen agrees that U4U has taken on “much more of a peace tone than a disaster tone.”  This is very likely due to U4U’s partnership with USIP who is providing funding for the initiative.

Despite its evolution, U4U’s focus remains on the students.  Carlsen believes it is logical for Ushahidi to want students to adopt its platform.

“These issues are very relevant to developing countries right now.  I think they recognize that and that’s why they are trying to draw students to learn these different skills and the different systems around it,” she says.

Sonoyama also pointed out the unique position that students are in. “Even during midterms, graduate students are able to briefly put school on the backburner in order to prioritize their time for crisis mapping.  However, people working full-time are less able to put their professional obligations on hold.  Graduate school is a huge new space to mobilize for humanitarian response.”

However, on U4U’s shift from U.S. universities to their developing country counterparts, Carlsen strongly believes, “SIPA students have skills and experience to contribute to this program.”

“We have an institutionalized crisis mapping initiative at SIPA and participated in two deployments.  We have some lessons learned to share with U4U,” Sonoyama continued.

And they are right.  During the Chile initiative, the Ushahidi-Chile @ SIPA team trained almost 200 volunteers and mapped 1215 incidents.  Several members of the team, including Sonoyama, also traveled to Chile to implement the platform on the ground.

Rather, these SIPA crisis mapping leaders would like to see U4U work more with both developed and developing country students.  Carlsen advocates for all students to be empowered to use crisis mapping tools.

“What I’d like to see from the U4U side is students going back to whatever institutions they’re from and setting up systems before disasters happen, before elections happen, instead of outside organizations coming in and calling the shots,” she says.

At the end of the day, the U4U initiative is wise to capitalize on students for their passion, dedication and willingness to learn new tools.  However, it seems that by turning its focus toward developing country universities, it might lose out on the knowledge and experience of students at schools like SIPA and Tufts whose initial work inspired the initiative’s creation.

“My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, pubic participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.”

As well as tracking the government’s use of economic stimulus funds with public websites such as recovery.gov, USASpending.gov, and IT.usaspending.gov, the Administration is empowering citizens to influence policy decisions.

The Open Government Initiative was rolled out in three phases. First, The White House invited citizens to brainstorm ideas online for a more transparent, collaborative and participatory government, and then vote on these suggestions. For three weeks, which started on June 15, 2009, the public collaborated on recommendations through a wiki. After this brainstorm period, the White House reviewed the collated concepts and developed integration strategies.

Then, On December 8, 2009, the White House issued the Open Government Directive requiring federal agencies to take immediate steps to achieve milestones in transparency, participation, and collaboration. The Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer were called to create an Open Government Dashboard to assess the state of open government in the Executive Branch. On April 7th, 2010, all Federal departments published an Open Government Plan that outlined how they would make their operations and data more transparent, and allow for further citizen collaboration.

In its first year year, the Dashboard revealed that 45 projects were critically over budget, behind schedule or both. These projects were halted or terminated, resulting in cost savings of $54 million.

Diaspora, a new open-source social network, is addressing these issues. Conceived in the summer of 2010 and developed by a group of four New York University students — Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, and Raphael Sofaer — it’s self-deemed as “Diaspora: the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.” It is designed to give the control of personal information to the individual users without the subjection of third-party sell out or privacy policy adjustment. Disapora allows people to do similar activities as Facebook — uploading photos and videos, posting comments, searching for friends.

Screenshot of the main page

In early 2010, the group of four entrepreneurs publicly requested financial support via the online fundraising platform Kickstarter with an initial goal of raising $10,000 by early June in order to start programming. In less than 2 weeks of posting the request, they raised over $100,000. By mid-May, they had 4,800 backers and a total pledge of $175,000, with figures continually growing. The group worked throughout the summer on developing the alpha version.

In mid-September, the group released the source code for developers and more recently began giving out invites for alpha-version use.

It’s still a bit early to really determine whether or not Diaspora will gain enough users to make it a true Facebook rival and rise as a top social networking website. It has exhibited tremendous support, as many people — much to the chagrin of Zuckerberg — actually value their privacy. Of course, though, the uproar about Facebook’s lack of regard for personal privacy could easily blow over; people may not be happy but people may also not care enough or be too lazy enough to switch over. This is perhaps Diaspora’s biggest challenge and will truly impact whether or not the new network will garner a large enough population for its membership.

However, as the web continues to rapidly evolve and privacy concerns continue to be a major issue for online users, and if Diaspora continues to maintain its pledge to protect the personal information that people value, then it just might have a fighting chance against the behemoth Facebook.

Below is a walk-through in pictures fromhttp://zdnet.com:

The first page you’ll see in setting up — very basic, just inputting information.

You can create “aspects” (or categories) and add your friends and acquaintances to them.

Start the conversation — equivalent to your wall (status updates, uploads, comments, etc.)

Photo upload — I agree with the comment that Diaspora is aesthetically pleasing.

This is what your home page may look like — posts from friends and information sharing.

(More pictures can be seen on Lifehacker.com as well.)

This past month or so has been a big month for platform launches (MakeSense, Jumo, CauseVox, etc) and trying to peruse them all has left me limited time in exploring Diaspora. But so far, it seems pretty navigable, with a clean and easy-to-use feel. There are small dissatisfactions here and there but that’s to be expected of any alpha version. It’ll be interesting to see what lies ahead for this new venture.

You can follow development progress and news updates on http://www.joindiaspora.com.

PS – If anyone would like an invite, just hit me up.

Social innovation, collaboration and transparency are goals of many contemporary projects for both the private and public sectors.  All Our Ideas is an online survey tool that marries social data collection with quantitative and qualitative methods.  The result – democratic, prioritized and open information.

All Our Ideas is an open source research project, with its goals to provide democratic, efficient and prioritized data collection. Described as an “interactive opinion poll”, users are able to contribute their own ideas and suggestions to the issue at hand. When asked if they consider A or B more important, users can say they like both, neither, need more information, or contribute their own alternative, C. Subsequent users are then questioned on the original ideas, as well as the user supplied content.

In essence, All Our Ideas is a tool to create simple, scalable, interactive surveys that gather social data, which is visualized and readily analysed. Because information can be added by respondents, as seen in focus group or interview surveying approaches, a ‘bottom up’ effect is had on the survey and research process.

Lead by Matthew Salganik from the Department of Sociology at Princeton University, All Our Ideas is being used by several prominent projects, including:

• Prioritizing residents’ ideas for the Department of Parks and Recreation’s new master plan for the parks in Northern Manhattan.
• Integrating residents’ ideas into PlaNYC 2030, New York’s citywide sustainability initiative.
• Voting on the name for the Craigslist Foundation’s new knowledge sharing portal – ‘Like Minded’

In many cases the information contributed by users to is more powerful than that provided by the organizations who create the polls. When developing plans for urban development community collaboration and feedback are the types of ‘bottom up’ information flows that are crucial for sustainable and well integrated urban design. With tools like All Our Ideas, clients become collaborators, and the community as a stakeholder. In the world of urban development, this translates to empowered people for tailored design.

So the Scandinavian company Rambøll, which specializes in engineering consultancy, has discovered. Inspired by Facebook, the company has created the online platform Ramlink to let employees share knowledge across subsidiaries. So reports the online technology magazine Version2.

With 9,000 employees in more than 20 countries the platform makes up a central knowledge base, through which employees can easily tap into the expertise of their colleagues and thus gain the insights necessary to complete a task.

“On the intranet every department had its own site, which made it hard to access information across the organization. As a result, Rambøll started looking in to new ways to promote internal knowledge sharing,” the magazine writes.

A big challenge in the organization was to reach people with just the right competence for a project so the system was designed to revolve around the employees, giving them each a profile to fill out and update on a regular basis – just like on Facebook.

Apart from sharing ideas, employees can use the site to find out what their colleagues are working on and, through Facebook-like status updates, search for assistance on projects.  In addition, the platform functions as a personal marketing platform where employees can promote themselves in order to be assigned a project.

With Ramlink Rambøll has brought the intranet into the social age. It shall be interesting to see how many Danish companies will realize that the traditional intranet has done its duty and follow suit.

However, the growth of mobile phone use Africa is leading the world.  A recent study commissioned by Vodafone showed that 97% of people surveyed in Tanzania could access a mobile phone, while only 28% could access a land line.

This is where RapidSMS and FrontlineSMS come into play, and major social challenges are tackled head on.

RapidSMS is a SMS-based framework that manages data collection, complex workflows, and group coordination using basic mobile phones, and is able to present information gathered, in real time, on the internet. The Tuberculosis (TB) Initiative of the Millennium Villages Project (MVP) is using RapidSMS in several African sites to develop a robust TB detection, monitoring, and treatment management system.

The primary objective of the TB MVP is to assist local teams of health workers   reduce the impact of TB. By improving case detection and increasing treatment success rates the initiative is decreasing TB transmission and fatalities.

Using RapidSMS, community health care workers quickly report patient information via their mobile phones and interact with the TB system using simple SMS messages. The system is then able to monitor and track treatment of patients, sending automated SMS alerts to the patient and their assigned community health care worker. Further, if a patient fails treatment and is suspected of having multidrug-resistant TB (MDR-TB), a specimen is collected for drug susceptibility testing by liquid culture. The specimen is shipped, via regular mail, to the National Reference Laboratory (NRL) for further testing.

Yanis Ben Amor of the Earth Institute, has played an active role in instigating the use of RapidSMS in the TB initiative:

“Traditionally these patients are tested and processed via a paper trail. By replacing some of these steps by SMS, we see no loss of information. Further, when we are dealing with live specimen for liquid culture of TB, time is key. If the shipment doesn’t reach the NRL within a set timeframe, or if the turnaround time for the results is too long, an alert will be sent to health workers to take another specimen. Similarly, other delays will send an alert reporting failures in the work flow, for example if a specimen goes missing.”

The data collected is displayed in a web dashboard, and provides real time monitoring of all specimens collected, their shipment status and their drug susceptibility profile. RapidSMS also generates reports that are fed into the National Healthcare Information Systems to inform local and national policy makers, as well as international groups such as the WHO.

FrontlineSMS is free award-winning, open source program that also turns a laptop and a mobile phone into a communications hub.  Through their mobile phones users can send and receive group text messages, with no internet connection required. All information exchanged is stored on the user’s central computer, with developers able to access the source code to add their own tailored features. Also freely available is FrontlineSMS credit, for SMS based microfinance, and FrontlineSMS Medic, which is used to implement healthcare.

Marco Puccia, founder of International Transparency Solutions, has coordinated the use of FrontlineSMS to combat corruption in international micro-financing projects. The battlefield in the fight against corruption looks different in every country, Puccia explains:

“What we consider corruption is considered gift giving in some countries. Corruption is somewhat cultural, and there is some corruption that is driven by need and not greed.”

Puccia was tasked to eradicate corruption in an undisclosed international microfinance group, which we will refer to as MG. MG works with partner organizations in India, Africa and Mexico to distribute small loans to local recipients. Although the financial books were balancing, there had been several media exposes revealing corruption in MG funds distribution system.

To eradicate corrupt communication from partner organizations when relaying the success of fund distribution to recipients, Puccia worked with MG to modify the recipients’ booking keeping process to include FrontlineSMS. All received funds and expenditure is reported by SMS directly to MG, and when numbers don’t balance an SMS alert is sent to a key MG task member. This eradicates the reliance on partner organizations for financial reporting, and gives MG a direct communication channel with the loan recipients.

Technology comes in all shapes and sizes, and sometimes the simplest solutions are the most elegant. By taking advantage of mobile phone use in Africa, the daunting tasks of eradicating corrupt systems and fighting disease can be successfully tackled. By working with a technology that the people already have and have enthusiastically adopted, these solutions are readily engaged with, and become part of the social and political landscape.

Betaville is an open-source multiplayer environment that offers a new approach to the urban design review process. Betaville integrates design proposals for real city spaces into a Google map platform where it can be shared, reviewed, tagged, discussed and further developed. Models can be accepted from Google Sketchup, as well as from more intense 3D rendering programs such as Autodesk Maya. Currently focused on New York, the environment can be used for design competitions, consultation, community review, and as a teaching aid for the presentation of students’ work.  In fact, anyone with web access can contribute to Betaville, and every contribution is open for review.

Described by urban designer Giles Thomson as an “architectural conversation”, the dynamic interface of Betaville creates a far more interactive and collaborative environment for planners, designers, and the community at large. Design proposals are typically available for the community to review for a limited amount of time in government institutions, with feedback taking the form of letters to the city council. Thomson goes on to say that Betavillle provides a “democratization of the planning process, taking it out from the closed doors of the bureaucracy.”

The Betaville development team consists of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center and the Media 2 Culture program of the Hochschule Bremen, Germany, and is funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s Cultural Innovation Fund.

With a goal to transform the working relationships between planners, designers and the communities they develop, Betaville’s use of open-source strategies provides the opportunity and incentive for public project participation from anyone with the interest, inclination and internet access.

Then, some of friends and colleagues (the most emphatic ones), will try to give a more scientific response in order to delete from my face that annoying expression of somebody who is totally disappointed with their answer. They would argue something like: “These are platforms in the Internet where people can communicate, connect with other people, find friends, participate in debates etcetera… By the way Marta, are you kiddin´?” (This can be considered level 1 of social media knowledge – he or she really believes he knows what he is talking about).

To what I argue that No, I am not kidding, I want just to understand how social media is being used as a tool by for profit and non-profit organizations”. In this moment, she or he looks at me with visionary eyes. “Let me explain you, Marta: many businesses are now using this social media as a way to connect with their customers, to have feedback from them…Many NGOs and advocacy groups are also using these new web-based tools to increase their outreach, fundraising, followers… It is the new era of communication!”. This answer might be assigned a level 2 or 3 of knowledge, according to the degree of excitement in the exclamative proposition.

Depending on the level of “on the loop” that he or she is, they might start talking about crowd-fundraising websites as Kiva.org, mass collaboration as Wikipedia or InnoCentive for R&D. Somebody that even took a course about social media could tell me some success stories of businesses and NGOs using this new media: “Didn’t you know that Obama used the social media in the electoral campaigns? Didn’t you hear about how successful his team was in reaching votes and crowd fundraising?”. Levels 4 and 5 of potential “knowldege”. This might be actually my current status: it seems I am on the loop by my real knowledge is still quite empty.

Ok, I surrender. I still don’t know how this social media really makes the advantage.  Probably it is my fault as I am not being very clear in my question. Let’s try again: How did these social media success stories actually work out? How can I go to an NGO and assure them that I will develop a social media strategy that will bring them thousands of fans, followers, and crowd fundraising?

This is going to be my personal goal for the rest of the semester.  I´m gonna explore best practices in the field and learn how to implement them. I am eager to learn the real content and dynamics of the social media.