Working in Tanzania, last November, I noticed how much the local people relied on their smartphones, and not just to scroll their social media feeds. Stoked by opportunity, and constrained by infrastructure, they are finding new ways to be resourceful with what they have. In many places in Eastern Africa, including Tanzania, the smartphone becomes […]
Webinar on Virtual Collaboration – December 8, 2016 with Charity Village
This Thursday, December 8, I’m partnering with Charity Village on a (free) webinar on virtual collaboration. Register here. CharityVillage is the Canadian nonprofit sector’s largest and most popular online resource for recruiting, news and how-to information. As a flavour of what’s in the webinar, I wrote this article, High-context communications in a low-context virtual world, […]
Remembering the Brilliance of Ursula Franklin: The Real World of Technology
Ursula Franklin died last month, in Toronto. She was 94. Ursula Franklin was a “Canadian giant” for a whole lot of reasons; she was a world-renowned physicist, feminist, Quaker, author, pacifist, professor, Holocaust survivor, public intellectual, mother, and mentor. She was honoured as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1982 and with the […]
How Government System Designers Can Effectively Communicate With Poor People
This article, Homeless people left out by high tech, in my local newspaper, last week, touched a nerve. The disconnect between Government online system designers and the end-users of those systems is often all too real. It needn’t be that way. Navigating complex online systems can be a challenge for many of us, never mind the homeless, […]
Keeping It Human While Collaborating With The Robots
I’m old enough to remember the The Jetsons cartoon show on TV. Technology is our servant. Life is wonderful. Fast forward to today. Life online. Living through our devices. Alone Together. Is technology our servant or master? The upsurge in robotics It’s a tricky business, living and working with technology. We’re in a tech soup, to be […]