United Nations mashups: Visualizing world challenges

April 8, 2008

It is quite exciting to see that the United Nations and their different branch-organizations are slowly harnessing the potential of the web in innovative ways. I have previously blogged about the idea of a huge interesting UN aggregator project and the UNDP water wiki during the last web4dv conference. To offer openly information sources and especially to visualize information is essential to understand our complex word from different perspectives.

Gapminder is a great example for that. And another one is the tactical technology collective with this booklet: Visualizing Information for Advocacy: An Introduction to Information Design.

It is promising to see that UN organizations such as UNEP follows the same steps and offers the Atlas of Our Changing Environment on Google Maps:

Through illustrations, satellite images, ground photographs and powered by Google Maps, this interactive media depicts and describes humanity’s past and present impact on the environment.

Today also UNHCR announced a mashup with Google Earth Outreach program, “which punveiled a powerful new online mapping programme that provides an up-close and multifaceted view of some of the world’s major displacement crises and the humanitarian efforts aimed at helping the victims.”

Here is the actual site, but you need Google Earth to load it.

Patrick Philippe Meier writes about it: “the next step for an iRevolution is to enable refugees to access this information on a regular basis. This need not require high-technology. The information could be broadcast by radio, for example.” I believe it will become even more effective when refugees themselves can add information and update those visualized contexts from their perspective.

One other excellent source was recently launched, UNdata, with over 55 million records and comprehensive statistics.

Not English, but a multilingual social web is the key for collaboration

December 17, 2007

The social web is quite separated in different language domains. English is a key language to bridge different cultures, but it can also be a dead end. Worldwide collaboration can only work in a multilingual network.

English is one of the major languages on the net, whether it is on blogs, social networks or the chitchat on twitter. But languages are still breeding fast though the social web; the Japanese blogosphere is one of the biggest ones, for example, Google’s social network, Orkut, is the biggest in Brazil and India. Tanzania is also one example for a vibrant Swahili blogosphere. Chinese mandarin will be the most spoken language on the web. Global Voices is one of the few websites trying to connect cultures. Volunteer translators give insights to countries and cultures where usual media outlets do not report from.

But let’s have a look at the issue of language. Dave Gray has a nice visualization for different dimension of language here. He drew the four steps of language:

  1. Communication
  2. Conversation
  3. Collaboration
  4. Co-creation

On this United Nation website for cultural diversity it says, “Language not only communicates, it defines culture, nature, history, humanity and ancestry.” There are between 6.000 and 7.000 spoken languages on this world and unfortunately half of them are in threat of extinction. Language is fundamental for the collaborative web. It can enrich a discourse through blogs.

Translating machines have improved significantly. One example is the google translation for Arabic. But when it comes to collaboration, it is up to users to find a way to interact. How can we achieve this multilingual web? It needs a high language skill to collaborate effectively and creatively. A long tail of language has emerged. The future focus should be on networks with cross language interaction. Each language has a unique set of concepts, beliefs and expressions, which risk to be lost if all relies only on English.

So it is a dilemma. On one way English allows us to communicate worldwide, but at the same time it narrows down the potential for collaboration by simply contradicting cultural diversity. It greatly connects worldwide people, however, it is limited to small proportions of web users capable to read and write in English. I am personally in the same dilemma. I would love to blog in German — as being it my native language, my writing is much better — but I decided to blog in English to be able to network in this vast social network. Mixing languages can be possible as we have done it through the web2fordev conference blog, but even for that blog it was quite difficult to get French speaking authors involved.

Here it is an interesting statistic for the main languages in the Internet. There is a tendency towards a few strong languages. There are four languages not based on Latin characters. By the way, it took more than ten years after the Internet’s major breakthrough for ICANN to announced on the Internet Governance Forum to offer internationalized country code for top-level domains — and this just happened recently. This would mean that Chinese or Arabic letters become possible in domains. Ethan Zuckerman wrote more on that, and here, the UNESCO.

internet-languages.jpg

At last, languages are also important to protect our environment and can be decisive to preserve our biodiversity.

The links between language, culture and the environment suggest that biological, cultural and linguistic diversity should be studied together, as distinct but closely and necessarily related manifestations of the diversity of life on Earth. Researchers have referred to this new field of study as “biocultural diversity”.

Blog action day: E-waste, the downside of the growing web

October 15, 2007

blogaction.jpg

Greenpeace IndiaToday is blog action day and this year’s topic is environment. Thousands of bloggers will devote their writing skills to create more awareness to our threaten environment. I decided to write about e-waste (electronic waste). As Internet grows everyday, so does the demand for electronic equipment that preserves and extends the access to the Internet. Unfortunately, personal computers, laptops and mobile phones do not only have heavy toxic parts, their life span is mostly very short. The waste ends in places where people cannot protect themselves from the toxins, but have to recycle them as an income. Every year, hundreds of thousands of old computers and mobile phones are dumped in landfills or burned in smelters.

Some statistics

  • Electronic waste represents 2 percent of America’s trash in landfills, equal to 70 percent of overall toxic waste (wikipedia)
  • It is estimated that the US alone exports 80 percent of its e-waste to China, India and Pakistan. (treehugger)
  • Germany has a yearly dumb of over 1 million tons of e-waste, which is over 13 kilos per person.
  • Only 11% of PCs are recycled; the percentage for televisions and mainframes recycled is even lower. (ITfact)

The growing e-waste has consequences especially on the poor because all sorts of electronic waste is legally or illegally dumped in developing countries. It is not only computers but also vacuum cleaners, cables and all other sorts of appliances and electronic equipment. Greenpeace campaigns against the producers of laptops requesting them to use less toxic parts and obliged them to offer a recycle mechanism. Electronic waste is a valuable source for secondary raw materials if treated properly. But the recycling of e-waste is done very basically with tremendous health risks for workers (check out the photo from Greenpeace India).

Most e-waste goes to Asia, especially India and China, but growing amounts go to Africa. Here are some sources, which describe the difficult situation in different countries:

Check out the following video to see how drastic the situation is and find out that in the US it is unfortunately still legal to export e-waste to other countries. E-Waste: Dumping on the Poor (Asia Society)

And last but not least, here you can find some tips to avoid e-waste: Green E-Waste Tips

Fair trade laptop - an extra 30 euro would be enough

May 12, 2007

Fair trade coffee is widely known and successful, but what about fair trade computers? This was the question of a session at the re-publica conference back in April with Frithjof Schmidt (member of the European parliament) and Andrea Manhart from the Ökoinstitut in Freiburg (ecological institute).

The labour conditions of workers, who manufacture notebooks in China are burdensome. Environmental problems of the production process are widespread as well. “A price raised of 30 euros would significantly improve these conditions,” says Andreas Manhart in a pioneer study (German) titled “Social implications of laptop production.” Other interesting findings from the study were:

  • Despite rising commodity costs, laptop prices have fallen continuously throughout the last years. Production has been changed to locations such as China.
  • Almost all laptop brands are produced by eleven Taiwanese firms, like Qanta, Compal or Wistron, who have the right manufacturing knowledge.
  • The cost of labour is not higher than 30 euro per laptop.
  • The ongoing competition between laptop sellers reduced the profit margin to 3% in average.

NGOs give now more emphasis to the problem of toxic waste. Greenpeace started a campaign with a green electronic guide ranking of laptops. As a consequence to ngo lobbying Apple announced last week “a greener apple” campaign, which promises more recycling efforts and the removing of toxic chemicals . The two blogs greenguy and being the change have a coverage on that.

But a fair trade approach also includes the social implication of laptop production. Its goal is to protect labour rights and guarantee environmental regulated production. A recent survey in Germany showed that many consumers are willing to buy fair trade laptops. Interestingly, A. Manhart said that a certification process does not necessarily bring the solution because it is impossible to monitor the widely distributed value-chain of laptop production especially in China.


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