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"140 chars is a novel when you're being shot at"

Submitted by Tanya on Wed, 2009-07-01 09:20

-courtesy: @chadelund Quote of the day- #iranelection

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about how Web 2.0 is improving governance, with or without the help of the government in question, and irrespective of whether the country is developed or not.

Throwing traditional wisdom to the winds, the Web 2.0 story is continuing to unfold in a way that was not predicted by researchers and experts of the development community and outside.   When I last wrote my blog entry on this issue, it was specifically to explore how Bangladeshi citizens, independently of the government, NGOs, or media were sharing their experience of the BDR mutiny and its results.  This shone a light into the situation in Bangladesh to many who would have been otherwise left in the dark about the BDR revolt.

Then Iran happened.  The situation in Iran has many interesting parallels with Bangladesh and the BDR revolt – both related to the citizen-fuelled proliferation of news, occurring independently of the Government, and in Iran, even inspite of the opposition of the Government.

Talking about a revolution: governance, web 2.0 and Digital Bangladesh

Submitted by Tanya on Fri, 2009-05-08 11:54

Around March 4, someone posted on YouTube a thirty to forty minute clip from a meeting between Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and army officials. It showed the confrontation between angry army officials and the PM on her decision to negotiate with the mutineers rather than take military action.

Within hours, the clip had spread to the four corners of the world. Facebook users put the YouTube link in their status, bloggers wrote about the video, related articles were dug up, and TV stations around the world discussed the meeting and its implications on the newly elected PM and the army. (All of these applications are considered a part of Web 2.0, where Web 2.0 refers to a perceived second generation of web development and design that facilitates communication, secure information sharing, interoperability, and collaboration on the World Wide Web).

e-democracies: will Digg-like social networks pave the way for participatory decision-making?

Submitted by Alfredo on Fri, 2009-04-24 18:16

The hype about social networking sites doesn't seem to come to an end.  If it's not Facebook, it's MySpace, and now it's Twitter.  Even though some people are still reluctant to believe in the functionality of some of these web 2.0 applications, it's a matter of years before they become a tool that we have to use on a daily basis, as it happened with email and the internet not so many years ago. 

In this entry, I will follow-up on one of Tanya's three points mentioned in her last entry -namely, participation-, and will make the case for Digg, one of some applications for social bookmarking that allow its users to share, comment and vote on their preferred bookmarks.  From my perspective, these participatory features can give us a glimpse of how decision making processes in the public sector might look like in the not-very-remote future.