Ethan Zuckerman

Crisis Commons, and the challenges of distributed disaster response

Posted on Thu, 09/02/2010 - 12:52

Heather Blanchard, Noel Dickover and Andrew Turner from Crisis Commons visited the Berkman Center Tuesday to discuss the rapidly growing technology and crisis response space. Crisis Commons, Andrew tells us, came in part from the recognition that the volunteers who respond to crises aren’t necessarily amateurs. They include first responders, doctors, CEOs.. and lately, they include a lot of software developers.

Media attention and dysfunction – a recipe for political cynicism?

Posted on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 10:28

I’m not very active in local politics. I follow international news more closely than the news of my hometown. In my defense, Western Massachusetts is a pretty sleepy place in political terms – this part of the state is so blue that the Democratic primaries tend to be the only elections that matter, and often major offices go uncontested at that level.

Increased US engagement in Somalia – it’s a trap!

Posted on Thu, 08/26/2010 - 11:32

This week featured ferocious clashes in Mogadishu between Somalia’s fledgling federal government and Al Shabab, an Islamist militia with ties to Al Qaeda. Al Shabab has declared a “massive, final” war on the fragile government and struck Tuesday with a deadly suicide bombing on a Mogadishu hotel used by the government to house ministers.

links for 2010-08-25

Posted on Wed, 08/25/2010 - 18:04

links for 2010-08-19

Posted on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 18:04

Airplanes, Faith and Latent Networks

Posted on Fri, 08/13/2010 - 18:25

Earlier this week, I met with Evan Paul, a smart urban planner just out of a master’s program at MIT. He’s working with colleagues on a new idea – “Global Planning Partners”, a nonprofit intended to help urban planners in the North work with planners in developing world megacities. And while I love and respect projects like Dx1W that point to the challenges of asking students in the developed world to “solve” developing world problems, I think projects that connect professionals in the developed and developing world to encourage cooperation and skill transfer are significantly more likely to lead to good outcomes.

Housekeeping and shameless self promotion

Posted on Fri, 08/06/2010 - 09:04

You may have noticed that I’ve done some housekeeping on the blog. It was about time – I can’t tell when I last updated my blogroll – best guess is sometime in 2006 – but my homepage was evidently last changed in late 2005. I’ll be adding more links to the blogroll in the next couple of weeks – please don’t be sad if you’re not yet included.
My impetus for this digital housecleaning? I’ve had a couple of kind mentions in the media recently, and thought it might be nice to people searching for me to find out what I’m doing lately… and not what I was doing in 2005. And just in case you missed it, here’s the shameless self-promotion:

Kate Crawford: mobile media and the art of noise

Posted on Tue, 08/03/2010 - 13:57

Kate Crawford of the Journalism and Media Research Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, is two years into conducting a massive study of mobile phone use amongst 18-30 year olds in Australia. The study, supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, continues through 2011, and is moving from a qualitative to a quantitative phase. Her presentation at the Berkman Center today, “Art of Noise: Mobile Social Media and Attention”, focuses on insights from the 339 interviews conducted so far.

Counting International Connections on Facebook

Posted on Thu, 07/29/2010 - 11:37

My friend Onnik Krikorian has become a Facebook evangelist. Onnik, a Brit of Armenian descent, living in Armenia, is the Global Voices editor for the Caucuses, which means he’s responsible for rounding up blogs from Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan as well as parts of Turkey and Russia. This task is seriously complicated by the long-term tensions in the region. Armenia and Azerbaijan are partisans in a “frozen” conflict – the Nagorno-Karabakh war, which lasted from 1988 – 1994, and remains largely unresolved.

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