digitalcommons

Brazil Projects

Since 2000 there have been a number of initiatives in Brazil to provide access, training, and equipment to people using the Internet. These have been backed by different government ministries and others are grass roots projects such as MetaReciclagem.  The Ministry of Culture is headed by the well-known musician, Gilberto Gil who hired a close associate, Claudio Prado, to serve as underminister of digital culture. Their project, now several years old, is Pontos do Cultura or digital bridges. There are 650 known projects and others that use the name but are not officially registered. Under the government program a group can receive equipment for access, video production, training in open source tools, and a small monthly stipend. 

On Saturday, September 29, Gil and Prado were in San Jose, and I planned a short tour of the town to see a few cultural sites. Unfortunately the Digital Clubhouse which most resembled the Pontos do Cultura--without the open source emphasis--seems to have closed its doors and the phone is disconnected, but there is still a web site.  We did visit Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana MACLA
where they are installing an exhibit of digital photos taken by teenagers who took a summer course at MACLA. Joel Slayton of Cadre/San Jose State University was also in the group as we went up the street to the Tech museum. Peter Friess, the director, gave a tour of Bodyworlds 2 the recent exhibit that attracted huge crowds the day we passed through.

One of the reasons for their visit to the area is to seek support for a new NGO called The International Observatory of Digital Culture which will continue the work they have begun but extend it outside of Brazil after they leave the government. It is likely there will be more formal meetings later in the year and perhaps a public event in 2008.

oplcnews: Tracking the XO computer

The XO is the small laptop for kids in developing countries that was developed by the team in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's headed by N. Negroponte and was called 'the hundred dollar laptop' or One Laptop Per Child. The price has risen to about $170 (in large quantities). I recommend OLPC News, a  site that has both critical and supportive posts each day about different aspects of this project and the technology. It's run by Wayan Vota, head of Geekcorps. Today there is a good article about how the project will succeed, by Pedro Hernández-Ramos, a colleague here at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society.

Recycling old computer gear

Today I was visiting The Insititute For the Future in Palo Alto. At the top of the stairwell was a large pile of computer gear, cables, a Sun workstation, old racks, all waiting to be recycled or disposed of somehow. None of it looked that useful for repurposing in a developing country or local public computer lab.  It boggles the mind to see how much equipment is flowing out of small organizations, schools, and large companies where computers are being replaced rather rapidly.  In a few years there will be millions of standard cathode ray tube television disposed of because they cannot handle a digital signal or the owners deicide to get rid of them rather than convert.  What's in your closet that you will never use?

eldis OnDisc

eldis OnDisc is produced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS), University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. eldis is featured in this web log's sidebar because of its importance as a site for information about development. With the May 1, 2007 free access/no registration access to the U.N. database it will be more important.

Many users with slow or erratic Internet connections have difficulties in accessing some of the files, if not the site itself. eldis has pubished a CD-ROM (PC/Mac. Linux?) containing 866 documents from 190 organizations, as well as Firefox and Adobe Acrobat Reader.  You can search in 29 subject areas from ageing population to trade policy.  Readers in developing countries can request multiple free copies of the CD-ROM, anyone can put the content on their intranet.

Potenco

July 3, 2007. The Institute For The Future hosted a talk by Colin Bulthaup, CEO of Potenco, a spinoff of Squid Labs, based in Alameda, California. Colin characterized SL as a Do Tank, not a think tank.

Fourteen months ago they had been working on smart rope, a rope that knows when it is about to break, but with a grant from the OLPC team they developed a pull-cord generator (PCG) that can be used to charge mp3 players, mobile phones, LED lights, portable batteries, GPS devices, and the XO laptop. 

Their base line human is an eight year old pulling on the yo-yo device. They even tested the amount of CO2 produced as a kid uses it, as well as calories expended (very few). One minute of pulling generates enough energy for 20 minutes of talk time on a mobile phone and four hours play time on an iPod Shuffle.  Colin explained that they had done research on the best kind of string, using some new synthetic material, and as backup, there are two extra sets coiled inside the housing of the device. They have designed it so that it can be hacked. For instance, by removing the cover (top picture) it could be attached to a bicycle hub and generate more than 20 watts of power. Here is a short YouTube video where Colin demonstrate the PCG.

He is interested in how the availability of decentralized electricity will change village life and spur small scale entrepreneurs who will provide charging for others. I suggested that patterns of exploitation in a culture will be repeated with the advent of a new technology, so you might see kids and women assigned/forced to do the charging, but the technology makes much more sense that hauling a car battery around to charge phones in rural areas.

It was relatively easy to pull repeatedly, and the stronger the person the greater the resistance and higher wattage generated. Colin had a hexagonal battery  consisting of an array of LEDs, 2 USB ports (the standard for charging these days), and a DC input. This was a proof of concept, and the commercial battery will look different. Colin discussed the problems of using kerosene for lighting. Besides being very inefficient, it was dangerous and contributed to respiratory disease, and was quite expensive. He sees this advanced lighting  as an important replacement for kerosene.

He also brought an early model of the XO laptop. Many of these will be in rural areas with little electricity infrastructure, so each ministry of education placing orders will have to determine how many PCGs they will need for those users who have no other source of electricity. I asked what the cost will be, and while it was not finalized he said it would add about 10% to the cost of the XO. At this time that would be about $17.  There are plans to sell it commercially in retail, and they have a number of ideas about the next phase, especially in the health sector. One African has developed a low cost defibrilator which could be charge in ten seconds of pulling! Another application is small-scale refrigeration for drugs in hot climates.

He brought an earlier version of the XO and asked who wanted to try it. One person said people had a hard time figuring out how to open the XO, and indeed the researcher who volunteered took 53 seconds to figure out how the screen opened up!

Where 2.0 Wednesday

Where 2.0 Wednesday

Tim Foresman  International Society for Digital Earth and the International Center for Remote Sensing education. He gave a general talk on the importance of geo-data and some of the historic projects including Data Exchange Platform for the Horn of Africa, an under-the-radar project.

The morning demos were less interesting and I was rather sleepy. Maybe it will pickup after the break.

I told a friend of mine who runs the .travel domain about schmap.com.  I returned to their booth and found out about schmaplets. You download a Window app. (Mac comes later) and this allows you to make a guide to a place with text, photos, and linked maps.  The photos are not much bigger than thumbnails, but the integration of the whole package is quite nice. Guests can download the schamplet. There are samples including a wedding in Aix-en-Provence .

Dash. Eric Klein. Mountain View, California. " Geo-located information breaks free." This is the first connected navigation device in the U.S. using GPRS and wifi for two way connectivity.  Out of the box each device is a traffic probe. If you come to a jam it will communicate with other Dash drivers and see what the others are doing. The dash device contributes anonymous data to the Dash network. You can send addresses to your car and get the best route with time. Searching from the car: He searched for wifi network, cheap gas near his destination, and then talked about how ads will improve the user experience. Right... but will you be able to tell the ads from the regular listings that may be more neutral? However, this company is screwed if states ban in-car use of electronic devices like phones and navigation devices, especially two way ones that demand more attention. I spoke to the woman at their booth, and a couple hundred units are being tested  in this area, and 1000 plus around the U.S.  the price is not set but may be around $500 plus about $10 a month for full service. She said she is doing a lot of searching (Yahoo!) before she leaves the driveway. Never when driving.

where  is a mobile GPS based consumer application.   They will deal with the carrier gardens so you, the developer, don't have to. "They are our friends, but they don't need to be yours! " There are millions of sets that are locked, but where can unlock these sets for GPS information. they help developers make widgets and distribute them to users.  It seems like a company which helps small developers reach larger markets and carriers.

Chris Holmes the open planning project 
Grassroots mapping can't be stopped. Open street map  openstreetmap.org  started in 2004. the success of collaborative mapping? a diverse commons of mapping data constantly updated by citizens, gov and the private sector.

How to speed this up: encourage innovation through an ecosystem of reusable tools, and clear up legal ambiguities. He thinks it will be cheaper for a big company to fund an modification of an open project than to pay for complete devlopment. He thinks wikipedia is better and with more safeguards than do some critics. would cartographic mistakes such as you find in wikipedia be more important than some other collaborative project?   Holmes is working on GeoServer. I was surprised to see that there is a project for Baghdad. What could be more dangerous than gathering GIS data outside of the Green Zone?

Ian white, Urban mapping started with paper maps.  Legal issues.  We do informal space: neighborhoods   He spoke about legal issues and the problem of getting New York transit information and the bureaucratic barriers to getting public information. Some municipalities use extreme language when denying reuse of local data. They bring up harm to riders, mayhem, and of course aiding terrorists. However,   Mapping the risks claims that  under 1% of public web sites could help terrorists.   FGDC  promote access, restrict if necessary.   He then discussed the ambiguities about copyright on geospatial data.

Immersive Media. This is a company that provides gear to Google. There were demos of the 360 degree camera at 30 fps  amazing control over movies with stop action and reverse. they can integrate this imagery into mapping applications. It was quite stunning to see the scope and high resolution of what it could capture.

Michael Jones, CTO of Google. This was one of the better presentations. A mix of witty and pointed slides combined with his assertion that the geospatial information is meant to complement the rest of the information that Google provides. He said that if there were a geo-spatial celebrity it might be Angelina Jolie who has just tatooed the coordinates of the birth places of her four adopted children.

Mor Naaman of Yahoo research showed some interesting applications like tagmaps where locations can be tagged with photos taken there. Here is one for San Francisco: Another app is zurfer  which downloads lots of flickr photos to your phone, so they recommend you have an unlimited account with your carrier.Yahoo! Research projects includes a wide range of advanced technology investigations that look fascinating.

BrightEarth is a project using GIS to make humanitarian issues "come alive" and Michael Graham, Humanitarian GIS Program Coordinator, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum did a demo of the Darfur overlays in Google Earth. These show the destruction of villages in the region. They also have one on real time humanitarian information sharing.

Mikel Maron gave a great talk on research around the past and future of Weaver House, an isolated former tenement house in London where a rail line was going to pass nearby. Besides researching online he went to the local neighborhood archives which "really kicked google's ass" in terms of information available. This drew a laugh, but throughout the conference nobody had ever alluded to all the geospatial information still in paper form.  He showed a timeline of maps where the Weaver House would be located. These showed the changing face of London and its ghettos. A terrific talk.
[email protected]

Janet Abrams. University of Minnesota Design Institute and  author of else/where: mapping new cartographies of networks and territories. She had some interesting things to say, but unfortunately she read most of her paper, something nobody else did during the past two days. She wrapped up the conference, and I biked to the main San Jose Library a few blocks away and found her book. It looks to be a good analysis of the digital cartography as of two years ago. She admits that a lot has happened since it was published.

Presentations from the conference are located here

Where 2.0 Tuesday

Where 2.0 Tuesday

There are 800 attendees this morning. the first speaker was Earle Schuyler MetaCarta, and author of mapping hacks. Mapping the maximum city: mumbai is a book that inspired him to work with a group in India to map a small one acre slum with 500 people, Betwala Chawl that was set for redevelopment with a new building. He talked about how maps provide context for cities and the need for open data sets and standards to encourage these maps and stories to be created. The cost recovery for UK maps has probably inhibited over one billion pounds in commercial development, so his call was to drop the license charges (a minimum of 15,000 pounds for one part of London).

Rich Skrenta of topix.net  has 20,000 communites with personal forums and stories from news sources and from local writers.  they are mapping local stories along with geo data and showed some for San Jose.

John Hanke, formerly of keyhole and director of Google Earth.
2 years ago and now 200 million activations.  "An opportunity is emerging for all of us to build something significant and meaningful: a more comprehensive and inclusive than any other map of the world, a map of images and user annotations."

Maps are more central to web services in the past year.  It is integral to future strategies.  The basemap:  it covers more than 50% of the world's pop with high res.   Examples of nunavit projects and one in the Amazon where people have mapped their territory and environmental assets. I asked him about a greyed out rectangle in the Amazon state in Venezuela (Lat 3.06' Long 65.56'), whether it was requested by the government. He said it was a bug or a bad image. He said they did not filter out any image even a request from the Chinese Ministry of Defense. We don't do that, he said.

Google street view  street level immersive photography  allows great zoom of photos linked to street addresses in five cities including San Francisco.  Red map of the millions of user annotations on Google maps. Hanke said we need billions of annoatations not millions. 

Google maplets is released today. he combined a real estate search with a transit map to make a mashup of a Chicago neighborhood.

David Troy of PopVox holding USA Today with article on Twittervision and Flickrvision. He presented this again today after polling higher than other presenters on Monday night.

Tele-Atlas has one of their orange vans parked in front of the Fairmont. They have more than 20 such vans driving around the U.S. and Canada filming the surroundings with a variety of cameras and lasers and GPS devices. I have posted a short video of the van on YouTube.

Swag break. 45 minutes to make the rounds of exhibits where I picked up one magic marker, two t-shirts, two CDs, a gorgous book of ESRI maps, a Mapquest road atlas, and giant clip. A woman roamed the crowded floor on a Segway. Why? the wifi network does work but is slow because of the hundreds of laptops I see open around the room of 800 or so attendees. At 11 a.m. I cannot reach the Google map server because of congestion.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a booth, and they are getting more into open standards, especially with regards to patents. It seems like there are several open geo efforts developing in parallel. By the end of the conference perhaps I can tell them apart. Kevin bankston of eff discussed government surveillance using location technology  He spoke about privacy issues with these technologies. the government can get trinagulated data without any special paper or supoena. Look fo eff cell surveilance on Google. He offered advice to companies as they set their own terms of service or when they have inquiries from government agenies. EFF can help.

Jim Greiner VP of GM MapQuest
"How to lead in the evolving mapping marketplace. 5 success factors."

-demo the value to the user and then make it the standard
-give the user control
-reinforce the foundation
-don't just provide dat-help make a decision
-evolve with your users-help them whereeve and whenever.

After a nice buffet lunch Mike Liebhold of Institute For The Future chaired a panel of heavyweights: Stephen Lawler Microsoft
David Colleen Planet9 They announced Raygun which is virtual real world 3d data with real people walking around in real environments.
Don Cooke TeleAtlas
Jack Dangermond, ESRI
Michael Jones of Google

Mike commented, we are entering a phase of tremendous experimentation with 3d data on the web. We may have multiple geospatial 3d web or we will have one, regardless of the client software. Some of the converging technolgies we look at at IFTF. Both Teleatlas and Navteq are gathering 3d imagery. Mobile Augmented Reality Applications: MARA is a Japanese 3d tool for mobile phones. Retailers will want to go inside buildings in order to sell and allow the user to explore. Second Life has a version of the Chinese forbidden city with no geographic coordinates. He showed immersive travel sites, a cenotaph in India.

Bernie Krause is showing soundscape a new service of Wild Sanctuary.  A wonderful recording of wolves howling from Algonquin Park in ontario two months ago and now they are mapped on Google Earth. Rather impressive ambience. I forgot about the maps as we were immersed in the sound. Next was the Galapagos Islands with birth of wild finches. There was a dramatic demo of a soundscape before selective logging in a Sumatra forest and after which was devoid of animal sounds, just running water. As he said, the soundscape had disappeared. Other examples were in the Brazilian Amazon and Yellowstone National Park.

Aaron Roller of Garmin showed how to put trail maps onto a Garmin device. they built a motion-based agent. they found motivated customers who sent their travel/running data for their own ego. There are even people mowing lawns, looking for the most efficient path and mapping their routes. They are obsessed with data. Their sales are up to 19 million and growing. developer.garmin.com is announced today. Another product is the garmin communicator plugin. http://geocaching.com is a user site for geocaching games.

stamen is San Francisco design studio whose primary focus is data visualization and maps. mappr.com They have mapped the prostitution arrest for 14street in Oakland California over a two month period. trulia is a client of stamen's and they are doing real estate prices. There were movies of buildings at the time they were built and then by price. Very abstract but interesting at a glance.  Now they have a web-based map built on flash. hindsight.trulia.com is the new service.

Local Live of Microsoft. He showed 3d navigation of the hotel and park area of San Jose. they want to have data for most of the world and have it a good web platform where users can share geospatial data.  They are stressing accuracy and realism and scale. They showed the Austrian library movie where all the objects were generated without human intervention, just using algorithms. Quite amazing. It takes them three weeks to generate a city. they now have 20 new cities. With New York they have over 50,000 buildings.

Ordnance Survey in the United Kingdom.  Ian Holt
Learning lessons from neo-geography
We have been around for 200 years. During WWII they produced 20 million maps for the Normandy Invasion alone! The flagship product is th eOS MasterMap with integrated layers. rss is the main way of sharing structured information on the web. They are using GeoRSS.


OpenLayers. Chris of Metacarta. an open source javascript API. You can place any kind of geodata on any map whether it's from Google or Yahoo.  They are part of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation Consortium. There is a great gallery of maps here . Gutenkarte maps works of literature in map form. Here's Around the World in 80 Days:

Graphserver.  Brandon Martin-Anderson  This is an itinerary engine you can have parameters like maximum walking distance. This is open source for small transit agencies that can't pay for big licenses. The itin. is rendered into human readable text.   There are walking directions.

Love in the Time of Cholera Maps: Mapping Communities from the Ground Up
Steven Johnson, Co-founder, Outside.in  He wrote Ghost Map which is set in 1854. A map was made of a cholera outbreak. He shows how the map of the deadly area centered on a polluted pump, and the further from the pump people were the less cholera there was. Snow used the map to market his ideas of preventing cholera. His map was sort of a Victorian mashup. The density of the neighborhood was such that it revealed a pattern of cross infection in this most densly populated part of London.

outside.in is a place where you can read stories from local neighborhoods searched by name, city, and zip code. When I signed up and tried to enter a place it could not find the address in San Jose and kept placing a community garden in Mountain View. Very weird. They now have a service for part time bloggers and everything is output as GeoRSS.


The Where Fair had more than a dozen of special projects including HyperCities, a UCLA project that has maps overlayed and with a rotating timeline for Berlin   and Rome  . Starting with a 1247 map of Berlin it continues up to the present and you can see the changes in the town before and after the Wall. This will be online soon.

iFIND: a location-based social software on the MIT campus lets faculty and students using the extensive wifi network to find others, campus events, and make contact through chat.

Other projects are listed here. Not all were present when I was there.

After a reception there were birds-of-a-feather sessions. I attended
Open Source Geo, Josh Levine. http://www.osgeo.org/  30 people present

some open source projects are not part of this group. geotools is an osgeo project  open planning project for govt. transparency and community participation

GDAL/OGR  is a raster vector set of libraries for geo data manipulation. can read 20 vector formats and 50 raster formats.  It is used in Google Earth.

Quantum GIS is a desktop GIS that runs on all platforms and is free.

mapbuilder is another tool. It is used by topozone.com where you can search for places and download topographic maps free of charge. topozone.com  Here's one for Lake Alpine in California, a wonderful place for kayaking.

Open moko  Michael Shiloh Sean moss-pultz ocenside, ca

It is an open source mobile computing platform framework. A Taiwanese manufacturer,  FIC decided to be at the forefront of the ubiquitous computing revolution. There is one phone that supports the software framework.  NEO is the ONE the first freed phone. Existing phones can be modified, but it depends on the openness of the manufacturer. FIC published all the data for communications and low level functionality. There are modules in development: dialer, main menu, music player, and history. The NEO is a touch screen.

The phone is still not ready for the end-user. it's a GSM phone and by exchanging a sim card he can call on Cingular, but there is still work to be done. his talk was more for developers and what needs to be done.  The cost is $350 for the device and the developer's lunch box is $150. They are shipped from Taiwan.

Where 2.0 (Maps and Geo-spatial data tools)

Where 2.0

I have always liked maps. I would follow the Rand McNally road atlas maps as we drove across the U.S.s everal times before I was twelve. In school I liked to draw imaginary islands complete with coves and roads along the coast Usually there was a volcano inland, much like Montserrat.  I would visit travel agencies and steamship lines and collect pamphlets and maps for tourists. I still have a collection of paper maps from decades ago.

So I was excited to receive a pass to the second OReilly where 2.0 conference which brings together developers, hackers, programmers, and large cartographic firms for a two day exchange of information and demonstrations of new geo-spatial applicaitions.

Monday evening May 28 there was an opening session called Ignite where about twenty five minute presentations were given followed by a chance to vote on your favorite one.   There were already hundreds in the audience, and about 90 % were male attendees between 25-40.

Geocommons. Fortiusone launched this tonight. Behind each satellite image they saw a story, but it was hard to access. They felt a commons was needed for those without a GIS background. 

hipoqih a Google map mashup that lets anyone follow you on the Internet as you walk with your GPS phone sending alerts that map to your route. From Galicia in Spain. Uses a PC or Nokia plugin. Linux coming soon. No word on the Mac.
30proof, Sonoma, California is working with Wild Sanctuary to put a huge collection of natural sounds recorded by Bernie Krause into a cartographic, place-based context.

Tagzania is place for the novice to make maps and share them through tagging. This is the route of an eastern migration of the monarch butterfly along with the sites they pass over.

fatdoor.com, Palo Alto, California  You sign in with your address, and begin to get to know your neighbors. (Many in the audience did not; some did not want to know their neighbors!)  Read the terms of service which are very restrictive in term of copyright, trademark, patents, and how they use what you provide in building your neighborhood. You receive no compensation. This does not look like a community network of yore.

Mapicurious is a personal mapping site for the map-averse. If friends ask you for recommendations, you can provide a map. One example here are BBQ joints in Atlanta.

dopplr.com is a site for linking up with other frequent travellers. Dan Gillmor seems to live in a planes and at airports, so his dance card was filled with friends and colleagues. Now to tag it with carbon footprints of the conference hoppers. By invitation.

San Francisco Tree Map is a project of Friends of the Urban Forest.  They promote community based tree planting, youth programs of arboriculture and now cartography. The map shows the trees planted, and with a donation you can plant one over the Net.

OSGeo:
The Open Source Geospatial Foundation has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software. The foundation's goal is to encourage the use and collaborative development of community-led projects.

David Troy of PopVox, Anapolis, Maryland, who had done some very neat mobile phone apps was back with twittervision and flickrvision. The former lets people watch the short text comments of mobile phone users all over the world. flickrvision zooms around the globe showing the location of recent flickr photos. I found the latter more interesting than "going into Starbucks" in twittervision.  He will be rolling out more innovations in the coming months. David won the first round of voting which took place after more than half the demos had finished.

Bruce Daniel spoke about bad map design or cartographic anaesthesia. He called for more aesthetic design of maps and showed various examples of design that blended old techniques of shaded relief and local stylization. Cartifact labs.

Swivel aims to be the YouTube of data. they host huge data sets of all types and can render them into charts. Last night they introduced Swivel G which maps the data onto maps.  Just out of the starting gate but looks quite useful.  An interesting map of the top 13 countries for military spending .

Tuesday the conference kicks off at nine a.m. and runs for about twelve hours with a couple of birds of a feather sessions to wind down the event.

MakerFaire

MakerFaire

MakerFaire is sponsored by Make Magazine, a wonderful publication for the do-it-yourself movement. It is for peole who don't just want to consume a product but make them, modify them, see how they can be fixed if broken or repurposed if thrown away.

Over two days (May 19-20) at the San Mateo County Fairgrounds 400 Makers and 45,000 attendees interacted with the projects and each other.  I personally have never had such a good time at a public event. To give you an idea of the spirt of the place, we parked the car and watch a father and daughter unload an ATV converted into an electric cupcake. When the girl saw us her first words were, "Do you want to drive it?"

The exhibits ranged from musical instruments, fabric crafts, computer controlled devices of all kinds, battling robots, and a variety of unsual bicycles and a complete amusement park driven by bike power. A drag strip offered races between different power tools. Simulators allowed you to pilot a hang glider or and 1950's flying disc. High mileage vehicles included a biodiesel BMW motorcycle, tuned Priuses, and different electric cars.

I was glad to meet Stephen Dunifer of Radio Free Berkeley. He has long been a pioneer pushing for a more enlightened and open policy for community radio. In additon, his technical publications he sells kits for low power radio transmitters starting at $280 for a 15 watt station.

Robots

There were different classes of battling robot vehicles, a robot drum set, and a model of R2D2. These two yellow robots could perform a variety of gymnatic exercises in a suprisingly fluid manner.

The next  MakerFaire will take place in Austin , Texas, October  20-21, 2007.  I'll be posting a video of the  event later. In the meantime,  watch this one

Steve Vosloo

Today I had a visit from Steve Vosloo, a Reuters Digital Vision fellow at Stanford. His project is called Digital Hero Book Project, based in Capetown, South Africa originally. Children were aided in writing a paper book with their own stories to help them cope with crises. The next step was to digitize the books and put them online.  One Zambian writer's book cover is shown at the left. At Stanford, Vosloo is working with the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley which does training in sophisticated media tools to make movies of people's stories.  He is working with schools in the Western Cape and in India and the US, while looking at techniques where mobile phone cameras can be used to capture story material.

We traded information about his projects and others that might be of interest to him such as Video Volunteers and OurMedia and discussed the upcoming iCommons conference in Croatia. Vosloo recently made a presentation before a foundation, a corporation, and a venture capitalist, all of whom gave him suggestions as he prepares to look for more support to continue the project at the end of his time with the  Reuters program.