…. was one of the main conclusions of Ethan Zuckerman’s ‘killer’ presentation at the Web2forDev conference. "One thing all geeks love is developing software. Give a geek a free minute and he will start writing software" he says, although he himself is a geek and enthusiastic software developer. "Your task is to stop them!", he added.
…. was one of the main conclusions of Ethan Zuckerman’s ‘killer’ presentation at the Web2forDev conference. “One thing all geeks love is developing software. Give a geek a free minute and he will start writing software” he says, although he himself is a geek and enthusiastic software developer. “Your task is to stop them!”, he added.
“There are thousands of tools around and large companies are developing new ones. Let them pay for it and find your creative ways for using them”. According to Ethan people in ICT4D field shouldn’t waste time and resources to develop highly customized ‘tools for development’. “People should network and work collaboratively using Facebook and YouTube because they do it anyway!”. Ethan also provided a great overview of web2.0 technology as a set of tools that have been basically around for a long time and now they just received a new face-lift.
”Marry a blogger”
As an example of the power of blogging Ethan mentioned Alaa Al Fatah and his wife Manal, friends who are well known to many APC people. Alaa was detained because he challenged the violation of the freedom of speech in Egypt. His blog post were written on a sheet of paper, taken out of the prison by Manal, scanned and uploaded to their blog. As a result, by the time of Alaa’s release 50 days after he started his blogs from the prison, his story represented a big news even for mainstream media.
Ethan Zuckerman’s speech was fun and inspiring. Watch it at http://wurtv.wur.nl/wurtv/viewer.html?path=Web2ForDev/2007/09/27/1/ (unfortunately viewable only in Internet Explorer)