jaginsburg.com
  • home
  • journalism | science | tech
    • sci | tech
  • exhibitions
    • introduction
    • mickey pallas
    • News art
  • children's media
  • photography
    • photography
    • book covers
  • blogs
    • Medium
    • better
    • PechaKucha
    • TrackerNews (archive)
    • archived faves
  • DNG Archives
    • Fields

Bar, Hack, Lab, Fix: The Genius of Play and the Power of Opportunity

6/15/2011

0 Comments

 
masthead
Link suite overview: On creating a bottom up culture of distributed innovation, making tools, making tools that make tools, fish songs; and a thought

Want to see a happy man? Watch Dale Dougherty, editor of MAKE magazine,All of us are makers. Makers are enthusiasts. They are amateurs. They are people who love doing what they do… 
(They ask): ‘Can I do it? Can it be done?’ wax poetic about the glories of motorized muffin-cars, electric drill-powered scooters and the “Sashimi Tabernacle Choir” (a mash-up of plastic “singing” fish and an old car, created by a physicist with a taste for the benign bizarre and time on his hands).
Although the inventions often dive into the realm of the sublime ridiculous, there is genius in the journey and delight in discovery.

“Bar / Hack / Lab: Fix,” the new link suite on TrackerNews, explores one of the most encouraging trends to emerge over the last few years: group-organized collaborative “doing.”

Rather than wait for a vaguely defined “Them” to fix things, people all over the world are gathering in hackerspaces, innovation labs and accelerators, or meeting up at BarCamps, Maker Faires and hackathons. Guided by an open source ethos and joy of community, information is shared and help offered. Disciplines cross-pollinate effortlessly:  techs work with crafters, who work with builders , who work with mechanics, who work with electricians.

It seems almost to good to be true—the world as you thought it was supposed to be back in kindergarten. In fact, a hackerspace can feel a little like a kindergarten for adults: a room full of toys, a place to play, humor welcome. “Maker” culture is full of promise. Anything is possible. Really.

Read More
0 Comments

iLabs: Community, Connection and a Culture of Innovation: a conversation with InSTEDD’s CTO Eduardo Jezierski

6/14/2011

0 Comments

 
masthead
For the last few years, CTO Eduardo Jezerski and his colleagues at InSTEDD have been working on a model for an innovation lab—an “iLab”—to build local tech capacity in developing countries to support projects with social impact. The first, in Phnom Penh, is now 100% Cambodian-run, producing tech solutions that not only address local needs—primarily focused on public health—but are so useful, they are being adopted elsewhere as well. Could Southeast Asia be the next Silicon Valley? A second iLab was launched  a few months ago in Argentina, so perhaps it will be South America.Recently, TrackerNews talked to Ed about iLabs, hackerspaces, BarCamps and creating the right circumstances for “virtuous circles” of good. (Article also available as a pdf). * Disclosure: The TrackerNews project was incubated at InSTEDD  —J.A. Ginsburg, editor, June 2011

1. TrackerNews: Let’s begin at the beginning with a some background. What was the spark for the iLab idea?
Eduardo Jezierski: The iLab as a concept came from a “melding of minds” across technology and social work. My background is in technology, while our CEO, Dr. Dennis Israelski, has dedicated his career to working on global public health issues, mostly in Africa and China. Although these two domains—technology design and public health—would seem to be quite different, we discovered they share quite a bit in common.

For both, it is important to constantly adapt to changing situations and to embrace iteration. It is a very different proposition from, say, building a car, where you’ve got a standardized set of processes to create a commodity product. Traditional post-industrial organizational styles and practices simply don’t apply. Our shared goal is to push the design frontiers in tech to improve health, safety and development in low-income settings—and to make sure the improvements are real and measurable and driven locally.

We began by defining the characteristics of projects that have had long-term impact:

  • Open spaces, neutral “commons”
  • Agile planning and strong field work
  • Collaborative culture
  • Local ownership
  • Sustainability through concrete business plans
  • A culture of designing for the end user, (which might be a patient)

We saw that the most innovative outcomes tended to draw from a combination of these elements. Clearly, our next step was to create a place that would provide all of these “fertile soil” characteristics for socio-technical work: an innovation lab or “iLab.”

Ironically, I am not a big fan of the word “innovation.” It has become so cliche and evokes so many wrong concepts about how things happen (e.g., the genius character, the epiphany moment, the romantic tale of invention). If you are really interested in innovation as a concept, I strongly recommend reading Scott Berkun’s book, The Myths of Innovation.

The iLab is a place that nurtures innovation, not as a goal, but as a part of the process of doing great work in technology for social good.
________________________________________

Read More
0 Comments

    background

    The TrackerNews Project was a demo aggregator I developed for InSTEDD, an independent spin-off of Google.org's humanitarian practice. It covered health issues, humanitarian work and technology.

    archives

    November 2013
    November 2011
    October 2011
    August 2011
    July 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    January 2011
    December 2010
    November 2010
    October 2010
    September 2010
    August 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    April 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009
    November 2009
    October 2009
    September 2009
    August 2009
    July 2009
    May 2009
    April 2009
    February 2009
    December 2008
    November 2008
    October 2008

    Categories

    All
    Agriculture
    Architecture
    Big Data
    China
    Climate Change
    Communications
    Conferences
    Cyber Security
    Deforestation
    Demographics
    Disease Surveillance
    Earthquake
    Energy
    Environment
    Food
    Food Aid
    Free Press
    Haiti
    Health
    Hunger
    Innovation
    Instedd
    Land Mines
    Lighting
    Microfinance
    Mining
    Nuclear
    Oceans
    Philanthropy
    Pollution
    Probiotics
    Recycling
    Sanitation
    Social Enterprise
    Solar
    Tech
    Terrorism
    Transportation
    Travel
    Trees
    Vaccines
    Water
    Water Borne Disease
    Water-borne Disease
    Weather

    •
introduction
Picture
sci / tech
blogs
children's media
Picture
exhibitions
photography
Website designed by 
J.A. Ginsburg