Sunday, November 28, 2010

Where I've been

In the slums people often say Jai-Bim instead of Namaste or Normaskar (which is Urdu not hindi i think), to honor Bhim Rao Ambedker, who is viewed as the hero of the dalit community (at least in agra).

Recently, I've had the rare opportunity to take time to not only ask questions that come up on my mind, but also spend more time looking up their answers on a decent internet connection.

What I've found is a lot of information - the internet is crazy when you think of it being such huge volumes of information but all contained in these enduser-managed 'websites' that are not necessarily linked to other websites beyond a certain point. The impact this has on my searching is that it makes it nearly impossible to ever track how much of the available answers out there I have actually accessed. As I look further, I find more information, search different things, and there is more information, and usually I start finding the same information more frequently but in the back of my head I think this is just because i am searching a certain set of words, and the rest of the answers i am looking for are still contained in other sites that are accessible under different logic and definition.

So essentially, here are a couple of sites that I found interesting over the past week or so that either contain something new and cool or a lot of recent compiled information on a given topic. They are all associated with development tech somehow i assume.

The Netherlands somehow has come to be home to people-centered development (cite me). The organizations I've found online give me the impression that they are focused on things that many approaches suffer from: lack of documentation, lack of time, lack of power-dispersion-and-acknowledgement, lack of facilitation. This is interesting as my discussion a few years ago with a a poet-boxer-btselem volunteer dutch-israeli concluded that the Netherlands is very self-centered and high-concept when it comes to development.

KIT SmartHygieneSolutions 2010 useful documentation by category on low-cost tech approaches - mostly for-profit products and distribution and/or local ownership models.


Obama’s Innovator-Advisor’s Blog (this particular article is very accurate, tho I always question someone like this's on-the-ground experience. they understand well conceptually, but they live a nice articulate posh life talking about it and passionate policymaking but how connected is it with the actual real holistic livelihood effects in the end? - this can he understand?)


Kosovo Unicef Innovation Lab This is the only harvard student who i ever met who i liked right away - he will be a part of amazing things because he communicates outside of himself better than most anyone.

Sanitation Updates a simple blog i keep running into



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