newspeak

Full article:

Neelu Jain, Pamela Chawla. Future outflows of toxic material from end-of-life computers in India. International Journal of Environmental Technology and Management, 2014; 17 (2/3/4): 237 DOI: 10.1504/IJETM.2014.061796

The point is that there is a lot of e-waste now and more to come, and it’s toxic. So far, little to nothing has really been done to address the problem that is and is to be.

One vector in the solution matrix: tablets and other lower-impact devices that also last a little longer.

Toxic computer waste in the developing world — ScienceDaily.

di-wp59 | School of Environment, Education and Development | The University of Manchester.

ICT4D stands for information and communication technology for development. It obviously encompasses a vast swath of work and includes, or can, open source and open standards technology. (Neither of those is necessarily linked to or used by developmental agencies or organizations. But I like to think that they offer tools and the means of making them that lead to sustainable communities.)

The document Richard Heeks has made available is useful as an annotated compendium:

This paper undertakes a comparative analysis of the post-2015 development agenda versus the current content and future direction of ICT4D policy and practice, as exemplified by WSIS+10 documentation.  These latter documents bring together nearly 1,000 pages of text that review the current state of ICT4D ten years after the foundational World Summits on the Information Society; and that seek to set out a vision of WSIS and of ICT4D beyond 2015.

 

David Bollier: Reclaiming the Commons.

Interesting. I wonder how this relates to open-source communities? Those that are productive in nature–and need not be, in important ways, at all nonprofit, though the organizing (or coordinating) foundation, if there is one, may well be and usually is.

Home – NTEN.

Event Description – NTEN.

Interesting, and I’m curious as to what is meant by “community.” My focus is the participatory community. That can include consumer communities, where the consumers will trade tips, ideas and freely give advice (some of it even accepted gracefully) but it usually means the more difficult and complex productive communities, such as open-source networks, but also cooperatives. These tend to be more complex because the participants have an economically identifiable stake not only in the day-to-day proceedings, as well as the overall strategy (will it survive? and who benefits from the work?) but also in the fabric of licensing and copyright, of ownership. Forming a community among sometime rivals has some resemblance to forming one around a commodity or its plurals, but has more congruence to establishing a modern, horizontal startup. (Needless to say, among my many models I include Steam.)

The five most popular end-user Linux distributions | ZDNet.

I am sure everyone who cares about this sort of thing has already seen this article, but if not, it’s fairly interesting, if unsurprising. However, isn’t the point about open source (however framed, developed) that it implies a collaborative community, or should? And the virtue of such a community–a commons-based peer network–is that is able efficiently to build, innovate, and maintain the project? All by tying up less capital and resources and thus by expanding the arc of wealth?

Creating an “Open Planning Checklist” – your feedback wanted | Subfictional Studios.

Women Have a Long Way to Go in Open Source – Dice News.

Community Data Science Workshops at UW | Network Collectives.

These workshops could be used elsewhere–and ought to be. And I’d see it as a positive use of online resources.

New platform to evaluate open source software | Joinup.