Please give us your impression of this 3 minute animation (text of script, animation on Vimeo, YouTube, .mp4 file), which aims to summarize the vision and efforts of the World Wide Web Foundation. Forward the link to your friends and family, too, so we can get a good range of opinions. To illustrate some of the challenges and solutions in reaching our vision, we refer to the work we are doing and planning to do in Africa to empower farmers through the Web – Web-alliance for Regreening in Africa (W4RA) (many, many thanks to our funder and partner, VU University, Amsterdam, and our other partners in W4RA, for their support in this particular initiative!).
Archive for June 2011
Names Not Numbers, New York
I’m on the train from New York City to Boston, after participating in the Names Not Numbers conference on 20 and 21 June. Editorial Intelligence, under the energetic leadership of founder Julia Hobsbawm, has organized these events in the UK for some time, and this was her first event in the US. Most of the largely fascinating sessions focused on individualism in a mass age, looking mainly from the perspectives of the media, business, politics and arts, in the US and UK.
Julia invited me to speak about the “Internet and Power” — a talk made better through the expert facilitation of Derek Wyatt, whose credits range from being a Member of Parliament to Internet visionary. To complement other sessions, I focused on the potential power of the Web in the developing world — where that power is needed most. My goal was that people would leave understanding more about the Web on which much of their creative and business work relies, and that that they must become actively engaged to ensure that the Web is free, open and empowering to everyone on the planet.
Encouraging and Leveraging an Open Data Deluge
Last Tuesday, I spoke at The Economist ‘s Ideas Economy conference, entitled, Information: Making Sense of the Deluge. In the session “The Promise and Perils of Open Government”, I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with the dynamic Lt. Governor of the State of California, Gavin Newsom. While he was mayor of San Francisco, Gavin launched pioneering efforts like DataSF, which continues to provide budget, housing, map, crime, job, etc. data in machine-readable formats. Four minutes of our 20 minute discussion can be found on the fora.tv site and below.