Category: Work in progress
Work in progress, results
Rolf Kleef 
“A Case For Open Data”
Yesterday, Adam DuVander wrote on ProgrammableWeb about “A Case For Open Data In Transit”, a 6-minute film about public transit agencies opening up their data. The Streetfilm production provides some excellent examples and quotes to also make the case for (more) open data in international development aid. As Tim O’Reilly puts it: government should be a platform for society to build on.
NABUUR volunteer opportunities in Social Actions
NABUUR in Social ActionsI think I first met Peter Deitz at Web of Change, talking about his work as micro-philanthropy consultant, and his idea to mash up the actionable opportunities on all the platforms for social change. That became Social Actions, a platform where you can find things to do: join an event, sign a petition, donate to a cause, give out a loan, volunteer.
Those things you can do come from a variety of sources, like Care2, GlobalGiving, Kiva, Idealist.org, and starting this week, also from NABUUR, the online volunteer network.
Going Open! Thursday at the Transnational Institute
First post here after a long silence… maybe too busy with twitter, Nabuur, WebEnq, Ecampaigning Forum, NetSquared. And now preparing my short intro into "open everything" to set the stage for Thursday’s meetup of the E-collaboration group.
Within a smaller group, we had some discussions about "open", and about how choosing technology for your campaign or organisation is also a political, cultural, and ethical choice. Features and price often dominate, and lots of stuff on the internet is for free. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch: there are many lessons we learned in development aid that equally apply when your organisation gets such "free" web development aid. Lets not spend decades to learn them again.
So while on the one hand, people are trail-blazing the concept of "open everything", there are, on the other hand, many people working in international cooperation who are just starting to look at why all this "open" matters, and how it can help them achieve their mission.