If you like the idea of a quilting bee but prefer your bits electronic instead of fabric, you might be interested in a "ladies mapping party." 70 Kenyan women were, and showed up to a Google-sponsored ladies mapping party at Nairobi's iHub in February.
The women used Google Map Maker, and their specific local knowledge, to fill in schools, health centers, market centers, community development projects, restaurants and roads in a country too often neglected by cartographers.
Egypt casts a tall shadow and this last week's protests have captured the world's attention. But it is far from the only country to take heart from Tunisia's revolution and go out into the streets. Yemen has called for tomorrow, February 3, to be its own "Day of Rage."
In conjunction with local online news site YemenPortal, polymath activist group MidEast Youth, probably best known for the Free Kareem campaign (they did, eventually), has launched an English and an Arabic version of its Crowdvoice software and website to capture information about tomorrow's protests in Yemen.
The shortcomings of the so-called mainstream media have become something of a stale trope. Traditional media does some things well, other things poorly, vice-versa for blogging and other social media. But the neglect of the situation in Tunisia by the media in general, and American media in particular, is beyond the pale.
Since a young Tunisian, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire on December 17 to protest conditions in his North African country, and the country went up in flames, most Western, and all American media, has been unearthly silent.
As we mentioned before, "Wikileaks was not a story, but an ongoing continuum of stories... It's a story that is destined to keep on giving." In that short time since that post, it has indeed done just that.
WikiLeaks -- its actions and the reactions to them, the implications of what has happened around the whistle-blowing site -- has given birth to an extremely complex and ever-changing situation. In lieu of summing up a situation that has not come to a tidy conclusion, we have put together a full timeline of WikiLeaks news and analysis from our site. Read through from our earliest coverage (February, 2008) to our most recent (today) and you should have a reasonably complete sense of why WikiLeaks is important.
It's no Pambazuka News, but CNN's four-year-old citizen journalism site iReport, does have a fairly high profile. Attached as it is to the pioneer in 24 hour cable news channels with a global reach, it shouldn't surprise that it also has a global reach.
As of two days ago, iReports had been filed from every single country in the world except one: Nauru. Neither Nauruan nor visitor had ever sent in a story or photo or video from that South Pacific nation.
Human-powered search site Mahalo, created by notable entrepreneur, investor and blogger Jason Calacanis, may soon be involved in a class-action lawsuit, the result of a change to its Terms and Conditions that may have affected the pay of its contractors and employees.
Meanwhile, as Mahalo's legal troubles begin, CEO Calacanis is preparing to launch a new project, itself called "Launch," which aims to be a direct challenger to TechCrunch.
Forcing those who would rather not to recognize you is the ultimate in revolution, a revolution from non-existence to being. And that's just what the residents of Kibera, the second largest slum in Africa, have done. Under a project they've called Map Kibera, they've publicly mapped a home the government previously depicted as wild forest (the meaning of the slum's name) and put it online.
Using OpenStreetMap (that thing is fast becoming the phlogiston of social entrepreneurship), the 170,070 inhabitants of this slum adjacent to Kenya's capital Nairobi have rewritten the nation's official maps and in doing so, have made their own recognition a fait accompli.
Wikileaks came to prominence after it released 91,000 documents related to the Afghanistan War. Now, officials inside the organization have begun leaving in protest over its founder's insistence on releasing nearly 400,000 similar documents from the Iraq War.
Part of the whistle-blower site's notoriety has always been negative. In the wake of the Afghanistan document release even some activist organizations indicted the group for irresponsible treatment of information. That information included the identities of military personnel and Afghan civilian workers. Former Wikileak workers fear the same thing will happen, but on a larger scale, with the Iraq information.
YouTube and the Arabic-language television network Al-Arabiya have teamed up for "Iraq Looks Forward."
Much like past direct-to-candidate experiments, users are invited to submit videos of their questions for any of Iraq's leaders.
Quora, the real-time question-and-answer site started by early Facebook employees and valued by investors at at amazing $86 million, opened its walled garden to the general Internet public six weeks ago.
Opening the gates has not resulted in a flood of registrations. It appears that Quora's user base grew 27% in the six weeks after the change, down from an increase of almost 43% over four weeks prior to the change.
