Sweatshops
Following the recent tragedy in Bangladesh- would you pay more for ethical production? Depressingly, a Huff/Post YouGov poll of American shoppers found little awareness about the incident or sources of their clothing. This paper from 2005 found that despite their stated support for free trade coffee consumers often purchased other cheaper brands. Find further economics working […]
Innovative use of social media in the Pakistan elections
The Election commission worked with a site called Jaag Pakistan website which aimed to encourage reporting of electoral fraud and violence. This used crowd sourced technology. View the online map for reported instances.
Humanitarian crises app
New United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) Humanitarian Kiosk iOS app A new application for geting the latest news direct from the UN about humanitarian crises and international aid.
Syria digital security monitoring project
http://syria.secdev.com/ Maintained by the SecDev Foundation, a Canadian not-for-profit organization. It aims to provide tools to encourage digital openness in Syria. In addition to links to resources for activists, the digital security news section is a good source of reports on social media analysis of the conflict and reports of digital censorship within the region. The […]
MyWorld Survey
A major global survey for citizens launched by the United Nations and partners. It asks respondents to prioritise six out of sixteen possible issues in order to gather data about values to inform future global development plans. The survey will be running until 2015. The blog http://blog.myworld2015.org/ will be providing updates on the purpose and […]
Google Reader
Plans to discontinue Google Reader (the RSS feed reader) have been announced. Articles on this available here http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/mar/14/google-reader-rss-retired and What Does the Demise of Google Reader Tell Us About Open Web Standards? This brief article is followed by blog posts suggesting alternatives to Google Reader: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/poll/2013/mar/14/google-reader-will-you-miss-it-alternatives-poll Feedly is coming out as a strong alternative: http://www.feedly.com/ Netvibes […]
Google public alerts
http://www.google.org/crisisresponse/publicalerts/ Google is now advertising public service crisis and disaster alerts. This includes coverage of Japan where it is being used for earthquake warnings: http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/public-alerts-for-google-search-google.html A useful blog for locating information reports event on use of new media for crisis communication is the iRevolution.net maintained by Patrick Meier: http://irevolution.net/
International Women’s Day: 8th March
This year’s UN International Women’s Day focuses on ending violence against women. The song One Woman is released today to help laucnh the campaign. Hear it here: http://song.unwomen.org/
Journalists in danger
A Day Without News http://adaywithoutnews.com/ Grassroots campaign with UN support to highlight the growing numbers of journalists who have been killed and injured in armed conflict. The website has a blog with news. Other key resources on this topic include: INSI international news safety database which records deaths and injuries worldwide, archived information from 1990 […]
Access to Middle East and Islamic resources
http://amirmideast.blogspot.co.uk/ Useful blog highlighting open access resources in this area. Journals covering all subject areas. Created by USA libraries. Find out the latest news about what you can get for free. Covers culture, history, civilisation.
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