Today my colleagues Martin Konzett, Martin Tomitsch and Anders Bolin left to Southern Africa for their big film project on mobile phone usage in Africa.

First they will attend the conference MobileActive08, then travel through various southern African countries to gather material.

Subsequently, the material will be put online under a CC license, reviewed, and in the end the resulting film will be promoted by Anders and his UZI-magazine.

So I hope in the next 6 weeks we will get more or less frequent updates on their experiences and also some pictures.

Wish you all the best and a great experience!

OneWorld is an

open digital space for questions of international development, democracy and social justice

It offers news and information on dates and actions on various topics in the context of the above and is supported by a large number of Austrian organizations including ATTAC, Fairtrade Austria, Horizont3000 and SOS Kinderdorf.
OneWorld is organized like an online newspaper and provides a search-tool for events which are quite numerous and up to date obviously uploaded be their member organizations. Furthermore job offers of the member organisations are announced.

OneWorld is the first Austrian platform for news in development assistance and related dates and actions I stumbled upon, regrettably there exists no RSS feed and commenting on posts s not possible.
Still I am happy to find some site with a more modern approach to internet than just having a static homepage. Also their events calendar seems to work quite well, so if you’re interested - that’s the link to their site.

By the way - this is the 100th post on this blog! Hooray!!

Lift Asia 08 took place again in Korea this September and features an excellent program. I was waiting for the video of Jan Chipchase’s talk on nomadic work/life enabled by mobile technologies to go online, but so far only a few videos are available. However, as a matter of fact, the first video featuring Bruce Sterling’s talk is highly relevant for the ICT4D movement.

Bruce Sterling is a brilliant writer, blogger, and futurist. At Lift Asia 08 he talked about the implications of cell phones for the poor. He says that in earlier times the poor people were peasants, living in the country, but now the poor are urban, and own a cell phone. He makes the point that, while there certainly is a computer divide, there is no cell phone divide, meaning even people, who are illiterate are using cell phones. People, who never really owned money, now have sudden access to electronic money thanks to cell phone based payment systems.

In the last part of his talk he talks about the “electronic contrast” between North and South Korea. He predicts a fall of the North Korean regime and that South Korea will eventually own it together with all its problems. The North Korean, who never owned cell phones, will get cell phones and move into the cities. Bruce Sterling argues that giving them money won’t be a solution and encourages South Korea to work on an “electronic Korean solution for poverty”.

The talk is brilliant. It also strikes me that he didn’t use any slides, which I only noticed after watching the talk half-way through. I’ve seen other speakers doing this and failing. This talk is therefore really inspiring.

Watch the talk on Google Video.

I just came backfrom Barcamp Vienna 2008 and it was a great experience.

Heard some very interesting sessions, for example from Christoph Chorherr about the usage of Web 2.0 in this elections, Helga Fahrnberger and Christian Spanring about OpenStreetMap revolutionalising online map services and Stefan Derkits about Couchsurfing - a great platform for frequent travellers.

Martin, Karola, Martin and me also presented ICT4D.at and I think we had success in making some people curious about this topic.

On this wiki page further information from the talk and suggestions of attendees can be found. For photos, visit Karola’s facebook account or Flickr set or or check out the links on the event page.

Also the idea for a BarCamp in Vienna focusing on Africa was pushed forward - check out barcamp.at for news on that.

Everybody new to our page: join our xing, facebook and linkedin groups, subscribe to our twitter account or rss-feed to stay updated! We appreciate every comment and remark, regrettably our wiki is not yet completely adjusted, so feedback on this page is limited to comments to our posts.

Furthermore - as you may have noticed, the new design of ict4d.at is online. Of course there are still some adjustments needed but for now I think it looks great!

This Saturday and Sunday in Vienna the BarCamp Vienna 2008 will take place.

A Barcamp is

an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants — often focusing on early-stage web applications, and related open source technologies, social protocols, and open data formats. [from Wikipedia]

As a matter of fact, we will be there to get to know interesting people, present our work with ict4d.at and our projects and get to know the community.

Regrettably I’m just there on Sunday, maybe already for the afterparty on Saturday.

If you have time and are interested - just come by, here is more information.