Laura Uva Going to Rwanda on Mission July 14, 2008

The route I drive to work takes me down a long sloping hill, past houses, a church and a playground. Cars drive upwards of 45 mph, sometimes faster, through this area. Not far from the playground is a blinking yellow light at an intersection with a side street. Sometime in the first couple of years after moving to the area, I learned that there had been a child hit and killed on this road and that the warning light was one of the steps the city or county took to try to prevent further casualties. Every day I pass the area, I think of slowing down and being extra careful even though I rarely see a child within a hundred feet of that blinking light. It’s a reminder I am thankful for, however, because I value so much the thought of children playing carefree, something I enjoyed so much as a child growing up.

I told that story because I’ve been trying to come up with a personal analogy for a serious global concern. Each time another case of genocide occurs somewhere in the world, our universal reaction, reflected in mass media, appears to be shock that this has happened AGAIN. Didn’t we learn from the Armenian, Jewish, Cambodian, Bosnian and Rwandan genocides? My own personal reaction is a mix of this disgust and amazement and something deeper which I will call the blinking yellow light.

Another slight diversion to explain what the warning light has meant to me. Although I had read and heard about the Holocaust in high-school history class, a singular moment when it really hit home was reading Maus, a memoir by Art Spiegelman about his father’s Holocaust survival, written in two volumes as graphic novels. It was like re-living Art’s father’s personal horror. Even though my kids were no more than ten years old, I remember encouraging them to read those books. It was my Aha moment about the importance of being reminded of a tragedy, and our need to be aware of a repetition, no matter how long ago it may have occurred.

I’ve held onto my belief in the power of education to create a strong ethical foundation for children. Whether it is taught in school or, more powerfully, at home, what is right and wrong and when to act against injustice, are important values to convey to younger generations.

It is, then, with great pride, that I am seeing my daughter, Laura, embarking on a personal and professional journey to Rwanda, scene of the most recent, and one of the 20th century’s worst, genocide. Laura will be the international music supervisor for Africa Mission Alliance, a non-profit organization that runs programs in Africa to improve the lives of the poorest of the poor. Beginning in late December of this year, she will be living in a house in Rwanda with twenty-six children between the ages of 8 and 12 and three Rwandan adults. As the chorus will be performing both traditional Rwandan music and western Gospel music, both Rwandan and western teachers are necessary. Laura will use her music and singing experience to teach the children to sing as a chorus and to teach the Rwandan adults to lead and conduct the chorus. She will also be joining with Rwandan staff to encourage the children in Christian devotion and discipleship,  and will be teaching the children to speak English in anticipation of the second part of this incredible global adventure. After nine months living with and teaching in Rwanda, Laura will accompany the Rwandan children and adults on a nine-month concert tour of the US and Canada where she will be home-schooling the children, improving on the chorus’ performance and helping with the technicalities of the lighting and audio production.

As if that were not enough, Laura, a devout Christian, is taking on this awesome responsibility without receiving a penny of compensation. Instead, and in line with the goal of all of the Africa Mission Alliance missions, she will be raising money to pay for her expenses while on this eighteen-month journey. From our conversations since she was accepted for this position, I can tell that Laura is extremely happy, has a mature and humble attitude toward the experience she will have, and is motivated through her strong faith to raise the funds and complete this mission.  Wow! I love you, Laura!

I just finished reading A Thousand Hills, Rwanda’s Rebirth and the Man Who Dreamed It, by Stephen Kinzer, which tells the story of Paul Kagame, Rwanda’s current President and the architect of the new reconciliation going on in that country. Last week, I read chapters that described the hundred-day genocide in the spring of 1994. I felt at one point that if I did nothing else, I should dedicate myself to educating people, especially younger generations, of the realities that led to genocides throughout the twentieth century, so that they will feel equally motivated to act rather than letting it happen again. With my beloved daughter Laura preparing to embark on a life-changing experience to help in her way to heal the people who suffered such a mind-numbing genocide experience, I am reminded that that yellow blinking light will never go out as long as I am alive.

Great Happy Hour Space for Non-Profits June 27, 2008

Last night I attended a Happy Hour for DonorsResource.org, the creators of the Virtual Warehouse which brings together donors and non-profit organizations in need to items (clothing, kitchen items, computers, furniture, you name it). The Happy Hour was held in the showroom space of California Closets at 1225 SE Grand Avenue in Portland. There were I’d guess fifty people who came from non-profits interested in receiving item donations, donors (such as myself), board members and other supporters of this unique service for nps.

I met some interesting people, including Jeanne Ann Van Krevelen, owner of Escalation Business Consulting, blogger at The Edgy Entrepreneur and on Twitter at JeanAnnVK. Jeanne’s blog has got some great, targeted advice for new and small business owners and non-profits. I recommend checking it out.

I also met Brenda Lee, VP of Business Development at Pavelcomm, an IT service and consultancy located in NW Portland. Pavelcomm has been providing IT services to non-profits in the area for years. Some of their clients are Cancer Care Resources and the Franciscan Spiritual Center.  They are also active with Trillium Family Services and the Doernbecher Children’s Hospital. Brenda understands the IT business. If you are looking for outsourcing IT or getting some IT help, I recommend you give them a call.

Ok, so you’ve read this far and I haven’t mentioned anything about the venue, California Closets showroom.  I was pleasantly surprised at the elegance and simplicity of this space for small happy-hour-style gatherings. California Closets provides this showroom to non-profits for such events and given its central location and relatively-easy street parking in the area, I think it is a great spot for non-profits to gather their friends and supporters for an early evening happy hour. The location was perfect for a happy hour that is very interactive. This is different from some of the events I attend where geeks get together around laptops, such as BeerAndBlog. I didn’t ask if they have WiFi but the setting is not really targeted toward the technical community.

Thanks to Kiyoshi Terada, Marketing extraordinaire for DonorsResource.org, for the invitation.

Great Resources for Non-Profits June 26, 2008

Last night I attended the monthly Portland Net Tuesdays meetup, which meets at the AboutUs headquarters in SE Portland. This meetup brings together people interested in the use of technology in non-profits. I’ve been going since February, when the second Pdx Net Tuesdays meeting was held. The topics last night were Connec+pedia and Squarepeg. Bram Pitoyo has written a comprehensive review of the two presentations here. These are great resources for non-profits.

Giving Children a Chance in Cambodia June 25, 2008

As my personal business card reads ‘Technology for a Better World’ I try to use technology to further good causes. I just blogged about donating items instead of dollars through a Virtual Warehouse and now I’d like to ask you to consider donating dollars to a cause that is so important to the future of our planet: fighting human trafficking. Yes, we have to slow down global warming and live more sustainably, but if we don’t fight the battle against greed and outright criminal abuse that the human traffickers are carrying out, we are forgetting about the children of this world who depend on us to provide a decent future for them.

James and Athena Pond are Oregonians who dedicate themselves to empowering young girls who are victims of human trafficking by providing them with opportunities to live a normal life and to heal their wounds. They founded Transitions Cambodia, have a transitional care home in Cambodia and consult worldwide to advise on setting up similar homes. But ultimately they rely on donations to get their work done. Transitions Cambodia, Inc (TCI) is trying to raise $1,000. on a Facebook cause by July 4th.

Please consider donating even as little as $10. to help them reach their goal by Independence Day.

Spring/Summer Cleaning and Donating June 24, 2008

I don’t use my home office as much as I used to, primarily because I love sitting anywhere in my house with a laptop on my lap, and I also love sitting in coffee shops with WiFi. The home office has accumulated a lot of computer equipment that is unused and I finally got around to unloading the older gear. I had, and have, many options for unloading computer equipment and furniture: my young-adult kids, Craigslist, FreeGeek.

But the first place I think about now is DonorsResource.org, a Lake Oswego-based non-profit. Online cash donation has been common but what if we can donate goods online?   Della Rosenthal, Director and founder of DonorsResource, has been organizing the giving of needed items to low-income families for years. She collected and distributed more than 20,000 items to families in need in Portland in only 18 months, manually, and offline.  Now her new dedication is to connecting donors and nonprofits in need or goods and resources. DonorsResource created Virtual Warehouse that enables donating and receiving items online

So I got started by putting two CRT monitors, a printer and two desks into a “box” in the Virtual Warehouse. How easy is that? I just had to name the items, optionally providing additional description and pictures, and the site stores a virtual box in the Virtual Warehouse, ready for the taking by a Portland-area non-profit. When an organization shows interest in receiving my donated items, we, the donor and the non-profit, make arrangements for delivery or pickup. That’s why the storage is called a Virtual Warehouse. Clever.

You can also give to a specific organization, even search for organizations by category of donated items such as computer equipment, men’s clothing, cell phones, office furniture, etc. The DonorsResource.org site is cleanly designed and easy to use. Currently, there are hundreds of non-profits in the area looking for donated items to help them with their mission. If you have unused computer equipment, furniture, clothes, kitchen items or virtually any other home or office stuff, consider donating to a needy non-profit in the Portland area.

Fight Sex Trafficking by seeing the Holly film this weekend May 21, 2008

I have just pledged on PledgeBank.com to go to the Saturday night viewing of the acclaimed film, Holly, at the Hollywood Theater if twenty more people will agree to go. I have seen this film before and it is a gripping story of an American expat, played by Ron Livingston of Office Space fame, who is disgusted by being propositioned by a very young girl while in Cambodia. The same reaction he had was also what James Pond, founder of Transitions Cambodia, had when he was in Cambodia years ago. Along with his entire family, he decided to do something and the result is a wonderful organization that rehabilitates girls who had fallen victim to sex trafficking in southeast Asia.

This is a big weekend for Transitions Cambodia in Portland! They are holding a silent auction at the Burdigala Wine Shop in SE Portland on Thursday night. Details here. Then on Friday and Saturday nights, Holly will be screened at the Hollywood Theater in NE Portland, followed by Q&A with James and Athena Pond, founders of Transitions Cambodia, Victor Jaya Sry, In-Country Director from Cambodia, Keith Bickford, head of the Oregon Human Trafficking Task Force, Wendy Freed, noted trauma therapist, and Guy Jacobson, writer and producer of Holly. Tickets for the movie can be purchased at here.

The Hollywood Theater can hold a lot more than twenty people. I’m pledging to encourage people to be part of a special evening and to learn about an important problem that affects both developing and developed nations.

Pledge, won’t you please? Hope to see you Saturday night (or if you make it Friday night).

Game Programming Competition & Making Learning Fun May 20, 2008

As a former high-school teacher and parent of two children, I have always had an interest in seeing how education can be made to be fun. I’ve seen a lot of different styles and even experimented with some of my own unique approaches, but still the statistics ranking students in the United States indicate that there are many kids falling through the cracks. I don’t need to bore you with those numbers. Instead I want to reflect on a great experience I had this weekend as a judge of the Oregon Game Project Challenge where about twenty teams of high school students presented and demonstrated the computer game they created over the last month or two. For specifics on the competition and the top grand prize winner, see fellow judge (and fellow Corillian-CheckFree-Fiserv-ian) Stuart’s post here.

What most intrigued me about the experience were two things: 1) the students showed a lot of positive team-building skills as they regularly commended each other’s work, accepted a degree of specialization and were proud of their contribution, and in some cases exhibited a synchronicity in their story-telling presentation to the judges. The second thing that intrigued me was that the competition had a theme: energy, which each team was to incorporate in some way into their game. Since I was judging in the category of Game R&D, it was important to me to see how the students obtained information on energy and how they applied it in the game. Just having a theme (that was something other than killing all of the zombies or another worn-out game idea) gave team participants who were not the jedi programmers on the team a chance to apply themselves to research and to creatively incorporate their ideas into the game design.  It was so cool to hear stories about “ethical decisions” that a player had to make in a game, and about “monitoring the pollution level” as different actions were taken in a game.

This was the first programming game competition put on by TechStart and I am looking forward to the second OGPC next year. If you know high-school students who might be interested in this type of challenge, or even teachers who could share the idea with their students, please contact TechStart.

A week or two ago I picked up a book at Powell’s Technical entitled How Computer Games Help Children Learn by David Williamson Shaffer, an Associate Professor of Learning Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I just started reading it yesterday and I am very impressed with his approach. The book is intended to show how we can use game technology to teach children and young adults how to think as if they are in the real world of work. That’s not exactly how the author put it but it comes close. This type of thinking is really close to what I envision as necessary in educational thinking. To give you an idea of what I think really works, I’m going to relate an experience I had as a “seminar” leader way back in 1976 when I led a seminar on the topic of Government & Business for the National Junior Achievement Conference held one week in the summer at Indiana University.

I had attended the conference as a student delegate two years earlier after I had graduated from high school, and returned as a counselor the previous summer. In 1976, I decided to lead a seminar and chose that Govt/Biz topic. All of the seminars that I had attended as a student had been really boring: the seminar leader presented slides or gave a talk with notes. There were questions and answers afterward. Sound familiar? My approach was radically different. I devised a simulated scenario where a company had the right, to a degree, to pollute a nearby river (this was the 70’s ok) and recent studies indicated that there were more environmental effects on the ecosystem than originally thought. The company also wanted to ramp up its production to meet a growing demand. After explaining the scenario to the students in a ten-minute lecture-style address, I walked them to a classroom where they were instructed to form teams of 6-8 to a table and discuss the open-ended questions that had been written on the blackboards (remember, it was the 70s). Ultimately, each team was expected to provide a resolution to the government - business conflict that had occurred.

This “game” as I like to think of it, had no single winning team, but the enthusiasm shown by the kids was at a high level. They loved having the ability to discuss amongst themselves these tough problems and to debate solutions. I facilitated, walking around answering questions mostly by pointing the discussion in a direction. This teaching approach is obviously more adaptable to social sciences and humanities than it is to the hard natural sciences but I’m confident that if the topic were the chemical analysis of the environment that we still could have had a roaring good time debating how to go about doing the research and completing a study (ok, yeah I was quite a nerd in hs).

There are a lot of ways to get students engaged in learning. I see another recent interest of mine converging on the motivational education plane. Within the past couple or few years we’ve seen an explosion of APIs (application programmer interfaces) to gazillions of databases of data or services on the web. ProgrammableWeb is a site that follows the evolution of the “programmable web.” In this article, it proudly states that there are over 3000 mashups in its online repository! Each mashup is an application that uses data from one or more web sites to present it or use it in a unique way. Thirty-nine percent of those, it reports, are mashups involving mapping such as Google Maps. On their “Mashups” tab, you can see what the “Mashup of the Day” is. Today it is one called “ResumeDroppr.” There is a popular mashup called “Follow Oil Money” whose description is

An interactive tool that tracks the flow of oil money in U.S. politics, displaying Federal contributions as maps and drillable tables.

Now, getting back to education. Imagine students creating mashups. There are tools for building them (Sprout comes immediately to mind) so teachers/facilitators/educators have a way to focus the less-tech-savvy students by directing them to easy-to-use tools. I’m personally excited about this as an instructional medium that I might even start working on something for teachers and students to use.

What are your thoughts about using games, mashups, other media, as teaching tools and environments?

DataDyne.org and Dr. Joel Selanikio receive Knight Foundation Grant May 14, 2008

Just a day after I posted about the wireless report of the UN Foundation, one of the case study subjects in that report wins a Knight Foundation grant in the second year of the foundation’s news challenge. Dr. Joel Selanikio, a founder of DataDyne.org,  won the $325,000. grant with the ‘News on Cellphones’ idea of delivering news to the poor via text messaging!. DataDyne.org develops open-source mobile technology which is used in developing countries to improve the health care system for the rural poor.

You can see all of the winners of Knight Foundation grants here.

Mobile Phones and Wireless Technology streamline social progress May 14, 2008

I just finished reading the Wireless Technology for Social Change: Trends in NGO Mobile Use report issued by MobileActive.org and written by Katrin Verclas and Sheila Kinkade. The report is based on case studies of the use of mobile technology around the globe including Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Ghana, South Africa, Argentina, Syria, Indonesia, Peru, the United Kingdom and the United States. A survey of over five-hundred NGOs was developed by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research as part of the research project.

There is an estimated 3.5 billion mobile phones in use throughout the world and 86% of the NGO employees in the survey use mobile phones as part of their work. Not surprising, mobile phone use at work is more common among NGO employees in Asia and Africa than it is in developed areas with more wired infrastructure.

Reading the individual case studies was fascinating. A few highlights but there are a lot more in the actual report:

Point-of-care access to health information is provided in Kenya and Zambia using EpiSurveyor, a free mobile software application that was developed by DataDyne, a non-profit consultancy founded by a medical doctor and an ex-Red Cross IT consultant. EpiSurveyor not only delivers information to the device, it allows the easy creation of custom forms for download to the mobile device. The user-friendly interface has allowed organizations to collect diagnostic health information from people in the field and improved the monitoring of diseases. One of the challenges facing organizations deploying these field applications is the aggregation and analysis of large amounts of data. This is an area in need of scalable solutions.

In South Africa, an info-line service allows people to text their location to a phone number and receive the location of the nearest clinic testing for HIV.

HeathToys.org lets parents enter the name of a toy and receive back whether lead or other toxins that may have been found in it.

The Open Medical Records System (OpenMRS) is a free and open source electronic medical record application for developing countries.

There is growing evidence that mobile phones can move people to action more effectively than other media. A number of campaigns reported to the authors show a response rate of 20 to 45 percent for text appeals, which is considerably higher than that recorded for email alerts. The report also noted that, in the commercial market, people have an increased likelihood of purchasing a product or service when notified by text message, and that reliable data is not yet available for the non-profit sector.

Greenpeace Argentina created a powerful advocacy system by maintaining a database of 350,000 mobile phone numbers. Other Greenpeace offices are planning on testing the Argentina method of mobile activism of advocacy in 2008. Greenpeace Argentina is planning on expanding its mobile infrastructure with a more robust platform.

The report is available here. Thanks to the authors for this valuable report.

Update on Social Media Community Film April 30, 2008

I had a great meeting with my community media facilitator, Tim Rooney, tonight. I explained my film idea, we looked at Twitter and a little at some social media sites. My original plan was to create a film of 30-45 minutes, integrating interview clips, screencasts, B-roll film of in-person events. Being the master he is at examining a project and identifying what makes a great film, Tim proposed that I break the project into a number of chapters, each chapter being short, ten-minute absolute max length, and each chapter would focus on a particular form of social media or event. The thread through each of the chapters will be interview commentary, some video+audio, some just voice-over. To begin with I am going to tape two separate interview subjects, one technical, one non-technical. These sessions will provide a lot of the commentary that I will use throughout the chapters. If necessary, I’ll add additional interviews.

Here are some possible chapters that will illustrate the idea:

• The Un-conference: BarCamp Portland is an example of an un-conference that comes together through the energies of local people who live and breath using social media apps like Twitter, blogging, Upcoming.org.
• Two people who have met online and how they have used social media to enhance their relationship as well as their communities.
• Technically-savvy person (or people) talking about using social media to its fullest extent.
• Non-technical person discussing how they have learned social media tools from friends and how they put them to good use for a community of people (or built a community using them).

So, the idea of using chapters will allow me to finish a project in a short period of time, get more practice at making community films and will result in each new chapter being better than the last. Given that this would be my first project outside of the friendly confines of an organized class, I really like this progression! Thank you Tim for the great suggestions! You are a Jedi film-maker and storyteller!

My next steps are to identify the first couple of chapters and to start arranging the interviews. More to come soon! I will also start tagging the posts pertaining to this film series as “SocialMediaFilm”.