The efforts have been rangy — from the “One Laptop per Child” project to projects where cellular (phone) technologies would be used to bring health education and services to remote communities. (See also OLPC on Wikipedia.) OLPC is a particularly good example of the ICT4D genre because over the years it has brought a large number of its computers to children, but has not achieved the broad success sought for the project by its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder of the M.I.T. Media Lab. i’ve written

Why do we do this? Here’s my story, based on personal experience:

As youngsters we like building things. This leads many of us to learn about technology, and to build careers or central interests in tech endeavors. We want to help people. It is frequently easiest for us to help people by leveraging the things we know best. So we start using technology to help people. In our own way(s).

I know that there have been hundreds of conferences and meetings in the ICT4D area. I’ve been to lots of them. But I also notice them more directly right now, because more of my friends are discovering ICT4D and are thinking of running their own events.

So I’m going to take note of a few of these as they come to light. Typically, my articles will be short, like this one, so please follow links and read more elsewhere — and do some reflection of your own.

The post Tech and Peace appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Rosemary Rawcliffe

In 2005 or 2006 we ran into each other again at the Tibetan settlement in Dharamsala, India, and we were soon talking about ways we might help students learn to use video and film to preserve the stories of the older Tibetan refugees and, for that matter, their own stories!

Now, of course, Rosemary was the pro, and I knew little about film and video. (I had taught beginning video production at one point, using 2-inch Ampex video tape editing and huge video cameras, but that was ancient history, and it certainly wasn’t my profession.)

She has now completed two of the films… and the second film, Women of Tibet: A Quiet Revolution was just awarded a 2009 Emmy^® in the category Historic/Cultural – Program/Special at the 38th annual 2008-2009 Northern California Area Emmy Awards. You can read her story (and see photos) about the awards ceremony at the Women of Tibet web site.

Rosemary had built a career in film and television in Britain, but in 1989 she sold her business and took a break from the profession. As she said “you wake up one morning and you have 35 people working for you…” and your ability to choose which creative tasks you want to take on is greatly reduced.

But because of the breadth of trades she had plied while in the business, she knew everything from audio to video, and knew how to finance and build a team, and ten years later she was so moved by the plight of, and the courage of, Tibetan refugee women, that she began filming to tell their story. Two films later (with one more to go), she now has an Emmy, which is both a recognition of her own efforts and a statement of respect for the stories and the lives of the women she is chronicling. And she is thrilled to be recognized in this way by her peers. You’ll recognize what this means to her when you listen to the interview.

Audio player:

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Dot Maver and Mike Abkin visited the Foundation shortly thereafter, and they described, on camera, the Academy and some of the aspects of its founding. We have integrated these interviews into our Many Paths to Peace learning modules at The Dalai Lama Foundation’s online Learning Zone. [View the interviews online. If you’re not registered for the Learning Zone, you can click guest when asked to log in.]

The Academy will focus on four cornerstones: 1) peace education; 2) peace research; 3) peace policy; and 4) peace action. According to Dot Maver, “It will be self-organizing rathern than an organization. It will be a learning institution, as well as an institution of learning.” In three video segments, Dot and Mike describe the Academy and the process that will be used in developing its activities.

Just to get you started, here’s the interview with Dot Maver about the National Peace Academy.

[youtube FI7jivdEuSQ]

The post A National Peace Academy appeared first on Sky's Blog.

WiserEarth is another example of online technology being used to support the greater good. WiserEarth was inspired by Paul Hawken, Executive Director of the Natural Capital Institute, which sponsors the project. In their words:

What has been missing is a map and directory of our network that includes the resources for communication and cooperation; in essence, an infrastructure through which to coordinate our efforts. WiserEarth…provides a way for us to become better connected and more effective at working together.

Now two years old, WiserEarth has amassed over 110,000 profiles of progressive organizations — and you can search their database to find organizations and causes that you might want to support. They’ve nicely created interactive searchs that you can slice by organizations, people, groups, events, jobs, resources, solutions and areas of focus. They also have an interactive map (of the world – using Google maps) so you can zoom in and locate organizations in space as well as conceptually. So you can explore in whatever way suits you best.

Beyond that, you can connect with others to share ideas and build your network, and can create a group for your own community of action. We can’t speak from personal experience about how well the organizing aspects work, but the database of organizations is quite complete and is truly impressive.

[Note: WiserEarth has just recently (April 2009) begun an effort to open its database so that search results and data from WiserEarth could be embedded on other websites. This would allow you to build a search box on your blog or website that would search WiserEarth’s data and display it on your site. We provide a similar search mechanism for our DLF knowledgebase of ethics and peace-related resources. This effort, OpenWiser, is soliciting donations to complete the software that will support this open API – they need to raise (USD)$10,000 to carry out the work.]

This is one article in a series that features organizations that work in the areas of ethics and peace.

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One of Sam’s recent projects (it’s a couple of years old now) involves a group of Chinese-speaking (reading and writing as well) Tibetans who live in Dharamsala and spend their time chatting with people inside China. About what it is to be a part of the Tibetan culture and how it relates to the rest of China. It’s an actual project with financial supporters and employees, and you can contact me if you’re interested in helping support it. Sam also spends a lot of time in the Tibetan exile settlements in the rest of India, but that’s another story.

The post Chatting our way to World Peace appeared first on Sky's Blog.

Nice to see even 49 videos submitted! At Project Happiness we’ve shot a lot of our own videos as well, which you can see in our Moments of Happiness video project. Our initial thought was that lots of people would produce video segments, but we’ve found over time that this is a tough sell. Peace Support Network is offering a $1,000 cash prize for the winning video, and maybe that makes the difference. What do you think? What would motivate you enough to make your own video about peace, or happiness, or whatever…?

The post Peace Support Network Video Contest appeared first on Sky's Blog.

The Dalai Lama Scholars program was envisioned by Vice Chancellor Manuel Gomez of the University of California at Irvine, and formed as an honorarium to His Holiness in conjunction with his appearance there in 2004. The Dalai Lama does not receive any payment for his appearances – instead, all net proceeds from tickets and other sales (after expenses) go to benefit appropriate causes and organizations. [UCI Juniors Rajiv Ramdeo and Aswathi Sreedharan, recipients of the inaugural scholarship 2006, are pictured here with the Dalai Lama.]

Lori Warmington was instrumental in the creation of the scholarships, and in this interview, she describes for us how they came about as well as what they’re about.

The Dalai Lama Foundation featured the scholars in its March 2007 newsletter. The University describes the endowed scholarships on its web site. His Holiness gave two talks at the University of California Irvine, both of which are archived online (video/RealPlayer).

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Brenes described the Earth Charter in a 30-minute monologue which you may play (below).

University for Peace (UPEACE) is a UN initiative which operates independent of, but was mandated by the UN. “Headquartered in Costa Rica, the United Nations-mandated University for Peace was established in December 1980 as a Treaty Organization by the UN General Assembly. As determined in the Charter of the University and endorsed by the UPEACE Council, the mission of the University for Peace is: “to provide humanity with an international institution of higher education for peace with the aim of promoting among all human beings the spirit of understanding, tolerance and peaceful coexistence, to stimulate cooperation among peoples and to help lessen obstacles and threats to world peace and progress, in keeping with the noble aspirations proclaimed in the Charter of the United Nations.”

In a 2003 online “paper,” Brenes describes (in Spanish) the initiative.

And in a 2003 print interview, as well (on irenees.net, A Website of Resources for Peace).

UPDATE: Abelardo Brenes faculty page at University for Peace

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EFNV is holding its second summer teacher conference on Friday and Saturday, 20-21 July, 2007 on the University of California campus in Berkeley CA.

The coordinator of Metta Center’s volunteers as well as coordinator of the planning activities for the EFNV conference is Jordan Pearlstein at the Metta Center.

Michael Nagler is founder of the Peace Studies program at Berkeley, and leader of EFNV. I had a Skype conversation this morning with him where we discussed the conference and the organizations.

. . . . . . . . . . .

Links we promised during the interview:

• EFNV.ORG and its conference page
• The Metta Center for Nonviolence Education
• Michael Nagler’s UC Berkeley courses PACS164A & PACS164B for web viewing and podcast download
• Eknath Easwaran
• Rachel McNair
• Dr. Joseph Marshall – Omega Boys Club
• Azim Khamisa – The Tariq Khamisa Foundation
• Jack Duvall – A Force More Powerful

The post Educators For NonViolence (EFNV) – Michael Nagler appeared first on Sky's Blog.

FLFP conducts workshops in schools – from grade-school thru college – their workshop lasts 90 minutes, including a video, to capture attention and inspire; it starts with interviews of people the kids can relate to, from sports figures to real people, and continues to Jonathan sharing his stories, including the shark attack he survived at Stinson Beach in 1998; proceeding to then get the kids to share their own stories in small groups of 8 or so – their challenges and conflicts and experiences. To paraphrase Jonathan – It’s amazing how similar their challenges are and yet each one thinks they’re unique – by sharing, they learn how to better approach and overcome adversity in their lives.

Jonathan has also written a children’s book Don’t Fear the Shark – a story of his shark attack, but one in which the shark is a bully mistreating humans because it has been mistreated itself – the story looks at how the cycle of violence arises and can be prevented. As he says, the story ends abruptly and the reader has to figure out how it would or could end.

Jonathan is also a hard-working member of the organizing committee for Educators For NonViolence.

[posted with ecto]

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Jeff Buderer of OneVillage Foundation has summed up some of what we’re doing, plus provided valuable links to others who are using video in their work across Africa. So take a look at what he has to say.

The post Project Happiness – video for happiness appeared first on Sky's Blog.

What interests me about the table is that they’re recording 112 “Free Voices” who will each be answering 100 questions submitted by project staff and individuals all over the world. The video/audio recordings of the answers (comprising over 600 hours of video – 3 minutes per answer, times 112 participants, times 100 questions) will be stored, translated into a number of languages, and then put back online in a system that will allow us “out here” to research them and catalog them in whatever ways we wish. Under a Creative Commons license we will be able to repurpose these recordings as long as we give proper credit and do our distribution free of charge.

The questions, for the most part, will be about social, economic and other pressing human issues. If the project lives up to its publicity, this will be a storehouse of interesting stuff.

Oh – I asked what this has to do with ethics – didn’t I? Well the answer is that we at the Foundation did a pilot program a couple of years ago where we asked some teen-agers to think about ethical “dilemmas” that they had faced. And how they solved or did not solve them. Then we recorded them on video discussing these dilemmas. Where I intend to go with this is to get dozens, then hundreds, of people from many parts of the world, answering our questions about ethics. And get all of this recorded on video. And catalogued. So that you and I can go thru it looking for similarities – listening and watching as people tell their stories about how they faced problems and solved them. Much like the Dropping Knowledge team will record 112 stories all at the same time – all day long on September 9, 2006 – but our stories will be recorded many different places, at many different times, and contributed to the database over time. I’ll keep you posted on how the project goes.

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Take a look here, and then follow links to form your own opinion. More on this later on.

The post Blogs and Ethics appeared first on Sky's Blog.

And there’s a great online example of how a topic within the curriculum might be made available. This example is a Lesson overview where each topic is described, there’s an overview, and there are links (URLs) to handouts, overheads, articles, and even videos (though they don’t have videos online, as we hope to do that for short ones).

It is my hope that we can document our curriculum this well!

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Let me cite two of them here – which you might like to look at.

One of these is Peace Academy which represents a global campaign for peace education. They have assembled a list of courses in peace and conflict resolution.

A second recently-surfaced source is Peace Ed•org which has online lists of peace education programs, and curriculum for children, teens and adults.

Both of these sites use plain HTML (or at least appear to) which requires some human maintenance – neither seems to be database-based. And consequently they both suffer from some number of “404s” in their data (the pages they point to have disappeared). But, they are well worth looking at.

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