Filed under “development”

DonorsChoose Contest Update: Consolation Prize Edition

 DonorsChoose announced the winners for their Hacking Education contest today and unfortunately Print & Share, the app I developed with my coworker Billy, didn’t win. The consolation prize is all of the positive feedback I’ve received from teachers who are using Print & Share: Now this is probably just sour-grapes writing, but I am disappointed by [...]

Competitive Collaboration or Collaborative Competition

 Howard Fisher in the Transmission Project’s newly released report “Back to the Source: How Collaboration Can Transform Online Engagement”: In 2010, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation pioneered the use of open commenting on its Knight News Challenge. The Challenge aims to spur innovation around providing information to communities using digital, open-source technology. [...]

Print & Share: not everyone is a social media ninja (nor need they be)

DonorsChoose Print and Share
 Today is the deadline for DonorsChoose’s Hacking Education Contest, and fortunately I have completed and submitted Print and Share (with no small effort by Billy on the design). I previously wrote about the details. Billy wrote my favorite part of the front-page copy: “Not everyone is a social media ninja.” There is also a awkward screencast by [...]

Developing intent

 A comment by the author, Tony Roberts, on his Laptop Burns post “Why apps can’t transform society”: The point I was trying to make is that people are the agents of change and not technology. Technology can play a role but it cannot instigate anything – only amplify existing momentum and direction. People without sophisticated [...]

Irrefutable gerunds

 Gerunds were referenced in yesterday’s post. Below is from William Easterly’s “Foreign Aid for Scoundrels”, published in the New York Review of Books: The concept of development helps rationalize the position of autocrats by postulating an unstoppable transition toward a bright future. This is why donors call all poor countries “developing.” Once the donors started [...]

Minimal Mass

 I was searching for something else in Google Reader, but it seemed timely to resurface this note: A great example of why I’m skeptical of [app-centric RFPs]. Rather than focusing on critical mass, I’d rather see a requirement of “minimal mass” : Who do you need participating in order to demonstrate a proof of concept of [...]

Data-driven, content-first design

DonorsChoose-TextLengths
 I’m working on an app for the DonorChoose.org Hacking Education Contest. DonorsChoose works by having teachers submit classroom project/supply needs that people can then donate to pay for through the internet. Right now the only way to “share” those projects is through the usual email, Facebook and Twitter; my idea for am app is to create [...]

Apps off the approved vendor list

 I ran across a year-old article I had bookmarked from GovTech entitled “Do Apps for Democracy and Other Contests Create Sustainable Applications?” (via Justin Massa) For the past two years, innovation contests have swept the country in a contagious craze, from Washington, D.C., to New York City, from San Francisco to Portland. Even first lady [...]

Accessible leisure through technology

 I always talk about technology as a multiplier of action; here is someone with better credentials than me making the same point: Kentaro Toyama writing in the Boston Review on “Can Technology End Poverty? [No]” The following excerpt touches upon how technology enables the developing world to experience the same leisure activities the developed world [...]

Write first, outline later

 Peter Elbow on free writing, from the book Writing without teachers (1973): There is a paradox about control which this kind of writing brings into the open. The common model of writing I grew up with preaches control. It tells me to think first, make up my mind what I really mean, figure out ahead [...]

Introducing Panlexicon.com

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 I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational. Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to: First Albino Farm full , perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms. Second, view synonyms [...]