Kathryn Stoner-Weiss is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, deputy director of CDDRL, and faculty director of the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was on the faculty for eight years in the Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University. She also served previously as visiting associate professor of Political Science at Columbia University and assistant professor of political science at McGill University, Canada. Dr. Stoner-Weiss's research focuses on comparative state-building and effective governance, political economy of developing countries, and Russian domestic and international politics. She is the author of two books on Russian federalism and regional politics, as well as many books and articles on the same subject. She is also co-editor (with Michael McFaul) of After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transition.

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Abstract
The proliferation of information and communication technology in even the lowest-income communities has created space for innovative ICT-based approaches to global poverty. However, projects of this kind are often ineffective because they focus excessively on technological solutions and are inattentive to user needs, preferences, and capacities. This seminar will present four projects that attempt to overcome these limitations in Kenya using "human-centered design" -- an approach to design that is anchored in ethnographic engagement with end-users.

One of the season’s highlights is a panel of students who participated in the innovative class taught by Joshua Cohen and Terry Winograd at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). On November 17, four teams will present their new ICT designs to mitigate water problems and other issues in the slums of Kibera, Kenya. For those who wish to get a taste of this much sought after course, this talk will prove invaluable.

Abstract
Paul Kim will share his long journey that has been focused on devising, offering, and evaluating educational access to the underserved children in developing regions of the world. In shedding light on how these fortuitous events, this narrative account of educational progress and change shares the research outcomes of a variety of mobile technology-integration projects at the K-12 level including: (1) literacy development in Mexico, (2) mobile math learning in California and India, (3) executive functioning assessment in Palestine, and (4) mobile science learning in El Salvador and India. Each country and school visited has its own unique story or set of stories and outcomes that can guide future developments of mobile learning technology including educational games, e-books, and other applications.

Paul Kim is the Assistant Dean for Technology & CTO for Stanford University School of Education. He is one of researchers for Programmable Open Mobile Internet (POMI) http://pomi.stanford.edu. He has been conducting research with multidisciplinary approaches and teaching graduate courses on technology-enabled empowerment and entrepreneurship. He is also working with numerous international organizations in developing mobile empowerment solutions for extremely underserved communities in developing countries. In the higher education space, he advises investment bankers and technology ventures focused on e-learning, knowledge management, and mobile communication solutions. His due-diligence engagements include early-stage angel funding and also later-stage private equity-based investments for large education enterprises.

Abstract

Recently, citizen video has played a central role in mobilizing people and informing the world about countries in crisis.  The lines between the human rights defender, the citizen activist, and the journalist are blurring.  All document violations as well as re-shape existing content. A world of ubiquitous video raises new opportunities to reveal evidence and stories, challenge propaganda, and galvanize publics. It also raises challenges: how to address the the ‘public square’ role of Facebook and YouTube; how to protect anonymity, privacy and safety; how to determine veracity with increasing volumes of content; how to turn visual evidence into real change; and how to highlight less visible struggles. This talk will provide an overview of these challenges and offer concrete recommendations on how to make video-for-change safer, more ethical and more effective. We will showcase the SecureSmartCam, a collaboration between WITNESS and the Guardian Project that attempts to address the needs around online and mobile human rights video.

Sam Gregory helps people use the power of the moving image to create change. He is the Program Director at the human rights organization WITNESS (www.witness.org), where he supervises initiatives that partner on impactful campaigns with grassroots activists, and train and support the growing number of video activists to use video safely, effectively and ethically. Within WITNESS ‘Cameras Everywhere’ Leadership Initiative he identifies solutions to the challenges, and ways to capitalize on the opportunities, presented by increasingly ubiquitous video for human rights - highlighted in the September 2011 'Cameras Everywhere' report.

Sam has created training tools and programs including the WITNESS Video Advocacy Institute, was lead editor on ‘Video for Change’ (Pluto Press, 2005) and teaches ‘Human Rights Advocacy Using Video and Related Multimedia’ as an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School. Sam graduated from the University of Oxford and completed a Masters in Public Policy as a Kennedy Memorial Scholar at Harvard.

Bryan Nunez has been at WITNESS (www.witness.org), the leading global organization training and supporting people to use video in human rights advocacy, since 2002. He oversees technology for the organization as well as the development of projects like the Hub, a site for citizen human rights media, and the Secure Smart Cam, a camera-phone app for human rights activists.  Prior to WITNESS, he was a technology strategist and consultant on a variety of projects ranging from online banking to interactive television.  He is an alumnus of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and has a BA in anthropology from UC Berkeley.

Abstract

Running across freeways with labor organizers, speaking with taxi drivers and laborers, and visiting rural areas of Egypt convinced me during my fieldwork that neither social media technologies nor the youth that use them caused or directly led a revolution where people from every walk of life took to the street. Indeed, only 15% of Egyptians and other Arab Spring countries have Internet access and a small percent of them are active on social media. These dynamics replay themselves in the many countries and cultures that I have worked within - from Kyrgyzstan, to Native America, to India. Indeed, while re-telling a story that places heroic youth and wonderfully liberating technologies at the center ignores the masses, dismissing social media’s dramatic impact on journalism and high-end organizing in turn is equally shortsighted. This talk will bring up different arguments (sometimes in conflict with one another) of how networks of the street and networks of the Internet work with one another, placing working classes and community organizers side-by-side with social media users.

Dr. Ramesh Srinivasan, Assistant Professor at UCLA in Design and Media/Information Studies, studies and participates in projects focused on how new media technologies impact political revolutions, economic development and poverty reduction, and the future of cultural heritage. He recently wrote a front page article on Internet Freedom for the Huffington Post, an Op/Ed in the Washington Post on Social Media and the London Riots, an upcoming piece in the Washington Post on Myths of Social Media, and was recently on NPR discussing his fieldwork in Egypt on networks, actors, and technologies in the political sphere. He was also recently in the New Yorker based on his response (from his blog: http://rameshsrinivasan.org) to Malcolm Gladwell’s writings critiquing the power of social media in impacting revolutionary movements. He has worked with bloggers who were involved in overthrowing the recent authoritarian Kyrgyz regime, non-literate tribal populations in India to study how literacy emerges through uses of technology, and traditional Native American communities to study how non-Western understandings of the world can introduce new ways of looking at the future of the internet. He holds an engineering degree from Stanford, a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab, and a Doctorate from Harvard University. His full academic CV can be found at http://rameshsrinivasan.org/cv

ABSTRACT:

A system is only as strong as its weakest connections.  The most fragile and easily disrupted links of international development and foreign aid structures are unfortunately the most important:  those connecting community stakeholders with one another and with the larger system designed to support them.  Grassroots civil society organizations are essential to sustain growth in developing regions.  Across Africa, these groups do the hands-on, local development work that changes lives, but the overwhelming majority operate in isolation, unable to collaborate, to plan new interventions, share best practices, or communicate directly with funders and supporters.

Joshua Stern will discuss some of the systemic obstacles facing grassroots civil society organizations, and the impact that web technology is having in developing communities across East Africa.  Stern co-founded Envaya whose mission is to build and deploy a software platform that provides “the last mile” of connection between grassroots activists and the larger development sector.  Built to be easy-to-use and optimized to work in challenging, developing-world environments, Envaya's online and mobile tools empower community organizations to stake out an online presence, connect and coordinate with each other, and directly engage the international development sector.  The tools encourage collaboration and transparency, inspire activism and civil society engagement, and increase the efficiency of established programs. In just over one year, the Envaya platform has become the largest online network of civil society organizations in East Africa.

Joshua Stern (Stanford '06) is the Executive Director of Envaya. After graduating, Joshua served in the Peace Corps in Tanzania. He founded Envaya in 2010 with Jesse Young (Stanford '06, MS '07) and Tanzanian civil society leader Radhina Kipozi. Joshua splits his time between Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area.

Andrew McLaughlin is Executive Director of Civic Commons, and a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School, teaching a course on freedom of speech in the Internet age. Previously, Andrew served on President Obama's senior White House staff as Deputy Chief Technology Officer of the U.S.; as a member of the Obama-Biden transition team; as Director of Global Public Policy at Google; and as Vice President and Chief Policy Officer of ICANN, the Internet's technical coordinatingorganization.

Introductory Seminar

This first session is meant for students who are registered for the one-credit course.  We will look at the course requirements in this session and provide a broad overview about the speakers to come in the course of the quarter.  Those interested in attending the seminar series and are not registered for the class are encouraged to come on October 6. This will mark the beginning of the speakers with Andrew McLaughlin of Stanford University.

For the schedule of speakers http://cddrl.fsi.stanford.edu/libtech/events/series/liberation_technology_seminar_series/