Five Factors in Good Software Game Design for the Developing World

"...that you have found this message means that it is your destiny to join us"

Games for the developing world try to bring about positive behavioural changes among developing populations. Game design for this space comes involves working with a number of unique constraints and nuances. The following are some factors that merit consideration in designing better game-based ICTD solutions for the developing world....


Read more at ICTWorks

How to engage the disengaged

About Inanimate Alice:

What I've learned from dipping my toe into the world of digital literacy this year is that it may not be a panacea for all but in my never-ending quest to engage the disengaged it has been amazing. It is not and should never be a replacement for reading quality literature – I still feel it is my duty to open this world up to them – but as an aid to writing I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

Read more at Teacher Network Blog | Guardian Professional

Building mobile applications for social good

A PDF of the Building mobile applications for social good article is available at the kiwanja website (2 Mb)

Using iPads for Kiosks

To run in a kiosk mode, we want to set up the iPad to do a few things such as automatically starting our specific application and to keep it running if someone tries to quit the app or restart the app if it crashes for some reason. You can get part of the way there by getting an enclosure that restricts access to the hardware buttons. However, because iOS is unix-based, you can go further.

Read more at Studio Blog | Art, Technology, Design | Second Story

Alternatively, see KioskPro app for iPad

For hardware, see also: Gallery pedestal for iPad

Launch of ‘living’ books breaks barriers between humanities and science

The books present recent research on these subjects in a palatable way using interactive maps, podcasts and audio-visual materials. The result, which can be shared freely amongst both academic and non-academic individuals alike, is an engaging and diverse resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities.

By embracing the age of open information and the increasing prominence of crowdsourcing, the project leaders ensured each volume in the Living Books About Life series is a ‘living’ medium itself, able to be updated by readers through ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, remixing and commenting.

Read more at JISC View the books here

Joe Gebbia: The Power Of Story

Some highlights from the talk:

• The first step is curiosity – get your audience hooked and interacting with the product or idea
• You must have and own a story. The story is everything.
• Once the story goes beyond your community, it must be re-localized in the culture and dialogue of other communities in order to have global success.
• Tips and the progression of distribution, and how to let the product or idea do the work for you.
• How to get the story into the media without spending a lot – or any – money.

Joe Gebbia: The Power Of Story [Video] @PSFK

iPads for Museums report

Thinking about iPads to deliver your interpretation? Want to check out some crafty ideas for mounting iPads in galleries?  Download the report at Australian Museum

Smartphone Accessories for Digital Storytelling

The links below all take you to TrendHunter: be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to check out related items.

• iPhone SLR lense mount

• Smartphone Audio Recorders

• Quick connect lense

See also the OWLE iPhone housing and the Makayama iPad video housing

Public Sector Innovation Toolkit

Dear NT Government ICT mob. Get over yourself with this handy website

Public Sector Innovation Toolkit | Empowering change in the public sector

The Industrial Age Has Finally Run Out of Gas

“Throughout the 20th century, we created wealth through vertically integrated corporations. Now, we create wealth through networks. We are at a turning point in human history, where the industrial age has finally run out of gas.”– Don Tapscott

The thesis of his work lies in the nature of how people are now participating in mass collaborations within or across the boundaries of the organization. InWikinomics, he described seven different approaches to these new platforms for participation. Occasionally referred to as crowdsourcing, but more accurately ascollective intelligence, these are specific models of how to organize tasks, draw participation and collating results that really only happen because of the structure of the method utilized.


For example, the model of social brainstorming, also referred to as ideagoras or idea management, you create an open online system to involve all the people that you may like to draw from a specific target population, provide some topics to structure discussion and then allow them to debate, rate and rank the best ideas. This can be done within organizations or with customers, partners and communities to develop new products, teach and adapt business transformation initiatives, or even partnerships to support projects in regional, environmental and civic responsibility.

Such a model is empowered not only by the willingness to debate in an open platform with advocates and detractors alike, but also facilitation to drive constructive debate and results. It requires facilitation, not management, to help people understand the tool, the issues, and the scenarios involved. In this way, the role of leaders becomes to guide and influence others, rather than to give orders and instruction. Simply said, they are not managers any longer but influencers and this takes new skills and a different mindset.

An Interview With Don Tapscott - Forbes

Innovation is cultural design

“To innovate is to change while remaining yourself”

To lead an innovation project, one needs to inspire trust, and have a strong faith in the first place. In “the knowledge creating company”, Nonaka recommends to find a metaphor and an analogy: metaphor is a symbol which drives imagination and starts creative processes, analogy is the next step which clarifies distinctions and solves unconsistency. Simon Sinek speaks of belief: “People dont’ buy what you do, they buy why you do it: they buy what you believe”.

Read more at Rapid innovation in digital time

The Personality Of Community Managers: A Few Tips

Community managers should be hired because their personality suits the audience they’re trying to reach. They should be allowed (and encouraged) to unleash the full-force of their personality upon the community.

Read more at The Online Community Guide

The Future of Publishing - Transmedia, Independent, Open source

The future of books and publishing will change fundamentally in the coming years. We will see a rise in books that are a mixture of tweets, videos, Facebook updates, blog posts and pictures. A new set of authors, unconventional, independent and not averse to collaboration will be behind these books. And the authoring and content of these books will take pretty much open source – with creators not being averse to sharing, reuse or modification of their stories or story material.

Read more at StartUp Central.

To prove the point, check out the TED talk below

Content Marketing Hubs Deliver ROI

Pre & post event social media checklist.

Lots more detail at Business 2 Community

25 Google+ tips and tricks

Handy... via Webdesigner Depot

Storytelling Skills and Technique

This looks good... podcast & text for Episode 9

The Power of Public Art

Join the conversation at OpenIDEO - How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions facing economic decline?

Tutorials on social media: Video & multimedia

From the awesome dudes at Socialbrite

The paradox of sustainable living

It isn't just physical infrastructure which militates against sustainable living. It's institutional and social structures too. It's price signals and performance indicators. It's the ease of borrowing and the paucity of saving. It's the planning and execution of psychological and economic obsolescence. It's the pressure of the media and the structure of finance. It's the high cost of investment capital to ordinary households and the underwriting of private risk by ordinary tax payers. It's the performance pressures on commercial fund managers and the efficiency metrics of public servants. It's the prevalence of commercial advertising and the erosion of public space. It's the relentless drive for increased productivity, in professions that demand care, patience and longevity.

Read more at guardian.co.uk

Mobile Web Mastery

25 Tips on Designing for Mobile Devices here.

Digital Fulldome, Techniques and Technologies

Planetariums and other hemispherical displays are increasingly embracing the exciting possibilities offered by digital fulldome projection. Once the domain of high budget operations, there now exist a wider range of projection technologies suited to small inflatable domes to multi-projector systems in large fixed domes. As a consequence of fulldome projection the opportunities for planetariums as an immersive environment is expanding to more than the traditional astronomy education, for example, education in other science disciplines, pure entertainment, gaming, and artistic endeavours.

This course will introduce and discuss the basics of digital fulldome content creation and the various projection options. It will be targeted towards those who have recently started working in this area or are contemplating doing so. The course will concentrate on the fundamental principles of fisheye generation/projection rather than any one particular software package or technology. Upon completing the course attendees should feel comfortable working and problem solving in the discipline.

Download the course notes here.

More on full domes here

Fulldome101 Ed Lantz Part II

View more presentations from Blooloop

Fulldome 101 Ed Lantz Part I

View more presentations from Blooloop

Curating Content for Social Change

September Net2 Think Tank Round-up: Curating Content | NetSquared, an initiative of TechSoupGlobal.org

Crafting the Perfect Content Curation Strategy

Here’s a three step guide to help you find the right topic via Content Curation Marketing

Social Networks: What Maslow Misses

Needs are not hierarchical. Life is messier than that. Needs are, like most other things in nature, an interactive, dynamic system, but they are anchored in our ability to make social connections.

Maslow's model needs rewiring so it matches our brains. Belongingness is the driving force of human behavior, not a third tier activity. The system of human needs from bottom to top, shelter, safety,sex, leadership, community, competence and trust, are dependent on our ability to connect with others. Belonging to a community provides the sense of security and agency that makes our brains happy and helps keep us safe.

Read more at Psychology Today

Digital Economy

Geographic location and natural resources were once the key determiners of a community's economic potential. In one person's lifetime, they changed seldom if at all. But in the Broadband Economy, it is increasingly the skills of the labor force, and the ability of business and government to adapt and innovate, that power job creation. And these are assets that must be continually replenished.

Read more at Intelligent Community Forum (ICF)

FREE BOOK: Making Open Innovation Work

FREE BOOK: Making Open Innovation Work | 15inno

follow @lindegaard for a stream of open innovation goodness

Democracy drowned out by social media noise: Bigger isn't better online

There’s a relationship between democracy and privacy, and it is changing the nature of the political relationship between the individual and society. One way to understand this is to consider the audio dynamics of cocktail party conversations. As Wired Magazine helpfully pointed out, there is a precise formula for the right number of people in any given party. It depends on the size of the room: no more than one person per 21 square feet. Too many voices, and the decibel level of the conversation next to yours will be such that you have to raise your voices, raising the volume of the noise in the room which requires everyone else to do the same and it gets noisier and noisier.

Take the analogy online. Try holding the attention of an audience online for any length of time when there are so many distractions in the form of other online conversations. One solution is to get louder – upping the rhetorical ante, posting the most scandalous images or outrageous claims. This prompts other online groups vying for the attention of your group to adopt similar tactics and like the party noise a rhetorical chain reaction ensues.

If we think of the internet as a virtual public sphere, and take an approach inspired by Jürgen Habermas which places importance on sustained, civil and rational debate, the prospects for online democracy are not improved by large-scale participation on social media.

Read more here

Local councils need to be more active in NBN development

All around the world economic growth takes place along the infrastructure corridors of roads, rails and waterways, and the NBN will not be any different. Business will grow equally along this new broadband infrastructure.

Why would NBN Co, with its enormous time constraints, waste time talking to communities who are not sure about the NBN – who take a lacklustre approach to this opportunity? It obviously makes sense to work with communities that see the benefits of the NBN, and most of the communities who are now on the rollout list for 2012 fit into that category.

Read more at BuddeBlog

Steve Perlman's Wireless Fix

Silicon Valley’s self-styled Thomas Edison has found a way to increase wireless capacity by a factor of 1,000

Wireless networks all suffer from a basic limitation: interference. Radio signals are waves. If you’re watching Netflix on your iPad via Wi-Fi, the tablet’s antenna is receiving a signal from a transmitter. If no one else is around—and you’re in a room with thick walls that block other radio signals—you’ve got a great connection. If someone else has an iPad in the room, each person ends up with half the maximum data speed. Throw a second Wi-Fi signal into the mix, perhaps from another office or home, and interference becomes an issue. Both signals hit your iPad at the same time, and the device has to try to discern the movie from this noise. People in apartment buildings or at crowded coffee shops know all too well just how shoddy a Wi-Fi connection can be when lots of signals collide.

Cellular operators face similar problems. They would love to put up towers all over the place, but they can’t. Signals from towers bleed into each other, causing interference. One tower covering a certain area works fine until too many nearby users make calls or pull up Web pages at the same time. That’s when data transfer rates fall and calls drop, aka iPhone syndrome.

Perlman had an idea. Interference happens when a device receives multiple signals at once and the wave is muddied. The physics gets very complicated here, but Perlman thought there might be a way to turn interference into a virtue—use that combining property of radio waves to “build” a signal that delivers exactly the right message to your iPad. Multiple transmitters would issue radio waves that, when they reach your tablet, combine to produce a crystal clear signal. If there’s another person in the room with an Android phone or a laptop, the system would take those devices into account so that they, too, received unique waves from the transmitters. Such a system would need to precisely analyze wireless information from the devices at all times, and constantly recalculate the complex combinations of signals from each of the transmitters on the fly. Figuring all that out in real time would of course require some extremely powerful computers.

That, in a nutshell, is DIDO.

Read more at Businessweek. Or a less human story / more tech focussed report here. Download the white paper here

How connectivity is revolutionizing everything

10 themes analysed at Tech News and Analysis