After four months break since Stammtisch #3 took place, we would like to go on with this kind of informal meeting format and therefore would like to invite you to our 4th Stammtisch.

A lot has happened and we have even grown in numbers – so come by to meet us, find out about how our projects go, tell us what you are currently working on or what you’d be interested to do and spend a nice evening with like-minded people.

What: ICT4D.at Stammtisch

Where: Cafe Benno, Alser Straße 67, Wien

When: Thursday, 11. February 2009, 19:00

If you intend to come it would be great if you could notify us via mail or RSVP on

Notes of the Global ICT Department event IT for Climate-Smart Development: “Not Your Grandfather’s Bank” at the Social Development Forum on January 20.

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We don’t have solutions for climate change and as there are very many stakeholders it is hard to agree on a solution

Global ICT department addresses this issue from the policy angle, but there have to be business models for private investments as well

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Frank Rijsberman, Director Program of Google.org

Managing climate risk in the cloud

“Innovating for good” – 1% equity spent to innovation

Climate change is impacting people in poor countries

• Sea level rise in Holland and Bangladesh is the same
• But Bangladesh is impacted quite more

Information scarcity increases climate change vulnerability

• acquiring information
• disseminating information
• enabling

Examples where Google.org is involved:

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In the course of our partnership with the eDevelopment Thematic Group we are happy to announce an upcoming event of our partner: IT for Climate-Smart Development: “Not Your Grandfather’s Bank”.

From the IT for Climate-Smart Development event page:

The session will aim to raise staff understanding of how ICT can be used to achieve better results in climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) promise to be important enablers of climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts in several sectors. Examples may include the use of ICTs in:

• Climate monitoring for weather forecasting and predicting, detecting and mitigating the effects of natural disasters, monitoring analysis and control of industrial processes, among others;
• Lowering energy consumption and GHG in the power networks (e.g. through smart grids);
• IT applications in smart buildings and smart motor systems;
• “Dematerialization” via e-government applications
• Adapting agriculture and water resource management systems to evolving weather patterns using satellite-based information and simple mobile phone applications, smart irrigation and logistics.

An important theme will be the rapidly growing reach of mobile phone networks (more than 3bn phones in use in developing countries) and the potential to leverage these networks for climate change efforts.

Another important theme is investing in and growing the ‘clean’ technology sectors of developing countries, so that the economic opportunities presented by clean technologies are realized.

Speakers are

• Jatin Singh, CEO SkyMet (India)
• Frank Rijsberman, Director Program of Google.org
• Monique Meche, Director, Environment Policy and Sustainability, Cisco Systems

So make sure you’ll be online on January 20 from 9:00 to 10:30 a.m. Washington time.

We’ll cover it here on the blog and tweet about it – the hashtag is #it4dev.

Bamboo, Tin and Callabashes is an exhibition currently being held in the Leopold museum in Vienna. It’s just a small exhibition, but still very interesting, fascinating objects and great pictures.

The exhibition features children’s toys from different regions. From the description on the Leopold museum official page

In this exhibition, the Leopold Museum will be showing over 250 items from the one-of-a-kind toy collection of Austrian ethnologist Dr. Fritz Trupp. The items come from Africa, Asia and Latin America, and they were created from everyday materials by children for their own use.

One thing particularly interesting is how skilled the children get in creating their toys. Often they are made from scrap material which the children just find on the streets – or they even search these materials on waste-yards.

Several of the objects reminded me innovation of the Afrigadget kind of innovations. The picture below shows movie projectors which actually work – with a candle or flash light.

Another interesting aspect is what actually moves and inspired the children to create their toys. The picture below is pretty sad – children building toy weapons, helicopters or chainsaws.

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