Ken Banks’s podcast for his interview at Tech Tuesday in San Fran on 13th March is
now out. It is available via:

http://netsquared.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=195601

Ken Banks has been invited to speak at the W3C workshop in Banff. More information about the workshop can be found here. The talk there will be about keeping users in mind when developing mobile applications for developing countries, so is very much an anthropological approach. This is the same presentation as he gave in Bangalore last December (if you want to remind yourself about that then it’s on the www.kiwanja.net/news.htm page).

Ken Banks has just returned from a three-day Amnesty International workshop held in New Delhi, India. The short workshop was designed to train and educate a number of young Control Arms campaigners from the region. Thousands of people are killed, injured, raped and forced to flee from their homes as a result of the unregulated global arms trade. The Control Arms campaign is calling for an international, legally-binding Arms Trade Treaty to ease the suffering caused by irresponsible weapons transfers. Read the rest of this entry »

Farsi Teach Net (FTN) project has started to communicate more closely with academic institutions in North America . On March 23rd 2007 Hedieh Najafi and Mitra Fathollahpour shared the upcoming pilot study of FTN at the Graduate Student Research Conference at Ontario Institute for Studies in Education ( Canada ) where it was received with overwhelming enthusiasm and recognized as a ground breaking step to promote social justice. Attendees in the session, mostly PhD Candidates, provided valuable feedback on the design of the pilot study. FTN also made its way to the Canadian Society for Studies of Education 2007 where it will be presented in a poster session.

Nita Goyal ‘06 recently launched the SocialWay website with environmental and social goals that targets sharing and reuse.

SocialWay is a global website that makes it easy for people to share items and thereby gets more usage from things. This simple idea addresses socio-economic and environmental issues; (a) environmental - since increased reuse reduces carbon emissions and saves natural resources, and (b) socio-economic - since an individual gets access to community resources thus multiplying everyone’s available pool. This is of particular significance in developing countries, for instance, where good libraries are hard to come by even for the middle class.