Blog
May 2, 2013
Crowdsourcing Dynamically Changing Government-Citizen Relations
Crowdsourcing is drastically changing how governments and citizens interact worldwide. In recent years, initiatives have launched in countries as geographically and culturally disparate as Iceland and India in an effort to facilitate good governance and to reduce corruption. The result – a fresh and innovative spin on the government’s relationship with the people.
Here are a few of the most compelling such initiatives:
IPaidABribe.Com: Launched by Ramesh and Swati Ramanathan of the Janaagraha non-profit organization in Bangalore, the website allows citizens to anonymously post reports about the bribes that they have paid to government and company officials. So far, 22,493 bribe posts worth 833,033,890 rupees have been reported in India. The project has also “gone global,” already boasting partner websites in Kenya, Greece, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Morocco, Kosovo, Ukraine and Azerbaijan.
June 15, 2011
New Online Sales Site Demands Transparency from Users
A new marketplace website hit the web today with a new concept: complete transparency. According to Mashable, through the Copious site, buyers and sellers must disclose their true identity when trading items online.
Copious, which will compete with eBay, Craiglist and Etsy in the saturated online marketplace arena, requires its buyers and sellers to connect their accounts to Facebook and be transparent in their onsite actions — purchases, shares and comments on for-sale items included.
The site eradicates anonymity from its ecommerce experience. Here, privacy is replaced with trust and transparency, or so the startup contends.
“Building around real identity means no more anonymous transactions between aliases, no more sifting through reviews from equally anonymous third-parties, and no more recommendations based solely on what you’ve bought in the past,” says Copious co-founder and COO Jonathan Ehrlich. Read more
May 27, 2011
Students on the Road to Success through Social Media and Gaming
The next generation of students is turning to social media and online gaming to learn the in’s and out’s of success in the collegiate world, reports Mashable.
Social media and online games have the potential to convey 21st century skills that aren’t necessarily part of school curricula — things like time management, leadership, teamwork and creative problem solving that will prepare teens for success in college and beyond. Making the transition between a highly structured environment in high school to a self-driven, unstructured environment in college can prove a huge challenge for many kids.
Educators spend a lot of time thinking about how to fix this problem. The solution doesn’t lie solely with games, but a lot of the psychology that motivates teens to play games holds potential. We need to figure out how to tap in. Read more
May 19, 2011
New Twitter App Indicates Your Social Media Influence
Mashable, an online social and digital media source, has picked up a story regarding a new way to track a person’s Twitter influence very easily and effectively. The app allows Twitter users to view any other user’s influence and how it in turn influences others. Want to see how influential you are on Twitter? A new app