North America
LaborTech 2008 Conference Call For Papers
LaborTech which holds a semi-annual international labor communication conference has issued a call for paper for the conference which will be held on December 4,5,6&7 at the University of San Francisco in San Francisco.
Free Geek has been keeping the needy nerdy for seven full years
Contribute your work, and get a computer! That’s the option offered by the Portland,Oregon-based Free Geek. They have been "helping the needy get nerdy since the beginning of the third millennium”. In recognition of their work – made possible with GNU/Linux and free software – this not-for-profit community organisation was jointly awarded the first APC Chris Nicol FOSS Prize. Journalist and BytesForAll co-founder Frederick Noronha (FN) interviewed Elizabeth Swager of Free Geek, to find out more about the project, its challenges and how it can be replicated.
National Literacy Award for Canadian APC member Web Networks
APC member in Canada Web Networks announced that its "Tusaalanga" Inuktitut language online learning platform (developed using the open source Drupal system) has received the prestigious national literacy award. Inuktitut is an indigenous language spoken in Candada and other northern territories.
We killed the previous business models that tried to charge for WiFi
With about 90 active volunteers over the years, Île Sans Fil now has managed to install some 130 hotspots all around town, using a nice piece of software. Wifidog is an open source solution designed primarily for wireless community groups, it is now in use in more than 36 locations, including at the municipality of Rosario (Argentina), the Tegucigalpa technical university (Honduras) or the Hull libraries (United Kingdom). Can Wifidog work in the developing world? Interview with the key figure of the group, Michael Lenczner.
What are US broadcasters afraid of showing their public?
On the media lists from the US that i am on people are more than aware of al-jazeera's new channel and the alert to the fact that media channels are opting NOT to distribute it. HOWEVER then i went to progressive media sites www.fair.org, www.thenation.org and www.alternet.org and i did not find ANYTHING on the al-jazeera launch. What’s going on?
PROJECT MANAGEMENT TRAINING: Working in triangles to get projects moving
From September 3-8, APC people descended on Pruhonice, a small town just outside Prague for the annual board and management meeting. While the first focused on APC governance issues, the management part of the meeting got under way with a warm-up training. Rob Purdie from iMPORTANT PROJECTS joined the APC folk from as far as Cambodia, the USA and South Africa for two very specific reasons: tp explain the different project management concepts out there, and apply some of them to APC’s reality.
Canadian institute for the blind gets accessible news
The Canadian National Institute for the Blind (www.cnib.ca) today launched an innovative service for its members, allowing them to access articles from daily newspapers on the day of publication. The CNIB chose APC member in Toronto, Web Networks, to produce and host their site to ensure newsfeeds were automatically fed to a private website page, and that visually-impaired users could easily convert the text to voice using standard software. Find out more about Web Networks.
