Better World Network

Presenting at the April 27, 2006 at the Uplift Academy Meeting “How can we use the network to help 6 billion people help each other help themselves?” Notes on general meeting at http://upliftacademy.org/parisnotes. His paper is available at http://upliftacademy.org/files/Ellerman%20Rethinking%20Development%20Assistance.docy.org and his slides at http://upliftacademy.org/files/Ellerman%20Rethinking%20slides.ppt His author of “Helping People Help Themselves : From the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance (Evolving Values for a Capitalist World)”

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Tags: upliftacademy, unhelpfulhelp, ua:parisworkshop

Tom Munnecke interviews Michail Bletsas, Chief Connectivity Officer of the One Laptop Per Child project from the MIT Media Lab. They discuss the role of technology in education, the design of the laptop, and the technologies be developed. Interviewed at the NetSquared Conference in San Jose, May 30, 2006. Roland Berger from Club of Rome also appears at the end.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Tags: digitaldivide, upliftacademy, onelaptopperchild, olpc

Jeffrey Ashe, manager of community finance at Oxfam America, gave a presentation at the Uplift Academy workshop in Wellesley, MA Aug 7 on his Savings For Change program as well as more general issues of NanoFinance.  His references to the person to his lower right are to Francis Moore Lappe, author of Living Democracy.

Jeff was one of the early pioneers in the field of microfinance, and is now coordinating a group of innovators in the field of savings-led microfinance.  In this model, women save their own money, manage it themselves, and retain all capital and interest in their own village.  Although the dollar amount of such savings-led activities is less than debt-based microfinance, the net transformatioinal value can be greater, as women learn of their own ability to work together and earn their own income and interest.  This is also of interest for its "viral" spread potential.  Needing no external capital or accounting, women can teach each other how to do this… Note that in Mali, Jeff points out that of the 1000 groups started, 400 have started "spontaneously" by women teaching other women how to do this.  The Uplift Academy is interested in how this "nanofinance" pattern can be propagated using network technologies, (such as Blip TV).

This is an unedited tape of his talk, which will be edited into a more concise overview later. 

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Tags: oxfamamerica, upliftacademy, nanofinance

A spontaneous interview with John Francis, who witnessed an oil spill and decided to walk around the world in silence… here is his story 20 years later

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov)

Tags: dosomethingmoments, upliftacademy, planetwalker

Formats available: Flash Video (.flv), Third Generation Platform Version Two (.3g2)

Tags: swahili, digitaldivide, upliftacademy, wikipedia, wikimania

This is the introductory talk at the Paris Uplift Academy Meeting on April 27, 2006.? see http://upliftacademy.org/paris

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: upliftacademy

Tom Munnecke took this video on Motorola Cellphone at the Wellesley Uplift Academy Meeting during Howard Greenstein’s and Dean Landsman’s talk on new media support for patterns of uplift. Filmed Aug 8, 2006.

Howard is demonstrating how someone can record an audio podcast from anywhere in the world with a cell phone and play it back on a computer via the web. Tom Munnecke was recording this on his mobile phone and then loaded it to BlipTV, which then redistributed the link to Flickr, Del.ici.ous, and Better World Network automatically.

Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), Flash Video (.flv)

Tags: upliftacademy