Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

Internet freedom has become a critical component of functional democracies. Global events like the election in Iran highlight the important role that both Internet freedom and press freedom play in maintaining the balance of power between people and politics. 

Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote in his book Globalization and its discontents :

“We have come to take it for granted the important role that an informed and free press has in reining in even our democratically elected governments: any mischief, any minor indiscretion, any favoritism, is subject to scrutiny, and public pressure works powerfully.”

And, should that book be published today, no doubt Stiglitz would note that “an informed and free press” is threatened in all countries, not just Iran, when Internet freedom is undermined.  read more »

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

While asking for input on the New Internationalist redesign process the other day, one of my friends replied (in jest) “Is ‘crowdsourcing’ the new ‘design by committee’?”

It got me thinking about why I’m excited by open and transparent design processes, and how concepts like crowdsourcing are exactly the opposite of design by committee. (Well, sometimes.)

For me, the excitement stems from a passion for learning. I like to “see inside the tent” and to learn about how others approach the same challenges I face in my work, for example: How to build successful online advocacy campaigns, How to produce compelling Web properties, and How to develop impact-filled, sustainable, Web strategies. read more »

(Cross-posted from Phillip Smith’s personal blog)

Okay, maybe stopping greedy capitalism cold is a bit ambitious. But I’m hoping you can spare some time this week to help one of the world’s most recognized social justice publications (outside of the US!) reinvent itself online.

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably one of the “smartest people in the room,” as far as I’m concerned (cough) and New Internationalist needs all the (free) help it can get to save the world from greedy capitalists.

In pursuit of the Wisdom of Crowds, and similar bottom-up ideas that are redefining how people approach networks, events, campaigns and democracy, New Internationalist is opening the redesign process up to readers, supporters, enthusiasts and — I hope — smart people just like you.

I’ll cut to the chase. The brave person leading the design — CSS evangelist Andy Clarke — is blogging the entire process and I’d be forever indebted if you could check out some of his recent posts and provide thoughtful and critical feedback.

The New Internationalist home page challenge, 23/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/249

Designing New Internationalist magazine pages, 24/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/252

Did a greedy capitalist steal that page? 25/05/09
http://forabeautifulweb.com/s/253

(Cross-posted from Phillip Smith’s personal blog)

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

A couple of years ago I started looking at options to deliver common “front end” functionality for sites using Bricolage, the content-management system that is used at New Internationalist

Initially, what I had in mind to provide this front-end functionality was a “swarm” of micro-applications, where each little application provided one simple, specific, function, e.g., user registration, comments on content, voting and rating, sharing content, etc. There were other people thinking along these lines too, and – eventually – I came across the MicroApps project, which stated its philosophy as: 

MicroApps are small REST applications that are designed from the ground up to be integrated with other applications. Usually, they are not directly useful on their own, but must be integrated into other applications (this is what differentiates a MicroApp from a regular REST application).

Unfortunately, the project appeared to be at a standstill, and my experience with Python was pretty limited. Most of my experience is with Perl, so my investigation headed in that direction, and eventually lead to the topic of this post: Perl Web frameworks.  read more »

About two months ago, I was contacted by my colleague Leif Utne. He and Jon Warnow – both Web of Change alumni – have started an experiment in crowd-sourced funding for an incredibly important technology project: WiserEarth. I signed on immediately.

Here’s an e-mail from Leif about the project:

WiserEarth is an amazing resource, a global index of over 110,000 NGOs (and growing). But it sorely needs an API so we can all develop apps to display and interact with that data through our own sites.

That’s why Jon Warnow (of 350.org), myself, and nearly 2 dozen other progressive technology and activist leaders have launched this effort to crowd-source the $10,000 WiserEarth needs to finish developing their API. Just 1 day into this campaign we have $875 from 18 donors.

Can you or your organization make a donation today at http://openwiser.org? Give whatever you can, even if it’s small. And spread the word.

A WiserEarth API would benefit the entire progressive movement. Let’s help make it happen!

cheers,
Leif

p.s. Neither Jon or I work for WiserEarth. We’re just big fans who want to see the site succeed. And we believe a robust API is key to that success.

I hope you might take a moment to join me in supporting the initiative.

Returning to the high tech MaRS Centre June 10 - 12 2009, the Social Tech Training is designed to train the next generation of strategic + execution leaders inside social change orgs. Led by senior trainers from the 8 year old Web of Change community, the STT is an intimate event that combines inspiring stories from leading web campaigns, our unique "create, test, and learn" education model, and is designed to connect participants to a powerful community of peers. A learning event this relevant, holistic, and fun does not happen very often.

Visit Social Tech Training site for more information or to register. Please pass this along!

Originally posted on the New Internationalist Tech blog

Over the past several years, I’ve worked with many organizations and campaigns that have seen their e-mail subscriber lists grow dramatically. As these e-mail lists grow past the thousands of subscribers mark and head into the tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, new strategies for list management are often required.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about Avoiding e-mail list data corruption and – continuing on that theme – I’ll attempt to start documenting some of the approaches that I have explored to keep large lists growing, manageable, and insightful.

This week I’ll focus on making them more manageable.  read more »

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

After a good banter back-and-forth with my colleague here on the New Internationalist Web Team about CSS frameworks, I thought it would be helpful to jot down the key themes of the debate and possible solutions. Hopefully this will benefit other teams that are managing large collections of inter-linked sites that evolve over long periods of time.

Many of the leading minds of the “semantic Web” movement, like Jeffrey Zeldman and Andy Clarke (full disclosure: Andy is leading the upcoming New Internationalist online re-design), have recently compared CSS frameworks like Blueprint CSS to Dreamweaver. For those Web producers that develop skillfully handcrafted sites, tools like Dreamweaver are akin to training wheels on a bike, or a “colouring between the lines.”

That is argument number one against CSS frameworks: they are too prescriptive in their approach, and limit creativity.

The second argument is that they are not purely “semantic,” that is that their markup contains both semantic class names, and names that are purely for presentation or layout purposes.

I think that both of these arguments are mostly (cough) malarkey, and only serve to divert the debate from where it should really be: manageability (And this is an area that really needs some creative, and innovative, thinking). read more »

Re-posted from the New Internationalist Tech Blog

A few weeks ago, I started a major upgrade to New Internationalist’s broadcast e-mail infrastructure. In the process of the upgrade, I noticed that a small number of e-mail subscriber records had been maliciously injected with arbitrary data (in this case, URLs to some other site).  read more »

Cross-posted from www.phillipadsmith.com.

My inbox. "The Walrus is now following you on Twitter!." My immediate reaction: oh gawd, please spare me. Another publication joining the micro-blogging fray only to shovel their RSS feeds into Twitter and to provide no real value...

Thankfully, I was completely *wrong*. And wrong enough that I felt I should comment on how *right* The Walrus is approaching the exercise.

Their approach? Simple. Witty, upbeat, and personal. Fun banter with other publications on Twitter, like @thismagazine, @spacing, and @blogto. Engaging with the community, not broadcasting. Check out @walrusmagazine on Twitter and take notes: twitter.com/walrusmagazine

Encore.  read more »