Design is in

Ory Okolloh's idea: Ushahidi

When there is a crisis, such as an earthquake or riots, a major part of the problem is the lack of valid up-to-date news on the situation. Ushahidi, which means ‘testimony’ in Swahili, is a platform all of us can use, to send information during a crisis. Ushahidi is a free and open source project with developers hailing from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands and the USA working on it.

Ushahidi uses the simple technique of ‘crowdsourcing’, which allows large amounts of information sent by SMS, email, or the web to get aggregated and shown on a site, as a map or a timeline. Anyone can download the Ushahidi engine and run it on their own servers. This can be effectively used at times of riots, and would be particularly useful in India too, where accurate information is not available when people need it the most. You can see projects that Ushahidi has enabled here.

A Kenyan blogger Ory Okolloh, started Ushahidi as a citizen journalist effort during deadly post-election rioting in Kenya. Since its inception the software has been used in several parts of Africa such as the Congo, South Africa, Malawi, and has been recently used to track the swine flu outbreak and the recent Indian elections as seen on the website. Ushahidi helps get the immediate relief to zones of trouble, especially needed when news agencies are not in the area. A similar open-source software Sahana was used after the Sri Lanka tsunami in December 2004, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan, the 2006 mudslide in the Philippines, and earthquakes in Peru and China.

Ushahidi uses a free software called Frontline SMS that turns a mobile or laptop into a text broadcasting hub. Once an sms is sent, the message goes to the web administrator’s inbox, who can then reply to verify the message, or send a mass message out to large numbers of people, or post the information onto a Web page with location information from Google Maps (or do all three) as explained here.
 
Ushahidi, as well as Ory’s own site Mzalendo, which helps increase transparency of the Kenyan Parliament, are essential to the spread of awareness and awakening of the Kenyan people. Such movements have far reaching impact, and can help many developing nations where technology can be effectively used to give power to the people. Technology can be used to propagate hatred and unrest, or provide much needed information and awakening, which is what these web platforms are enabling. Ushahidi, being an open source engine, can grow and adapt to the web, and to newer technologies and websites.

The founder Ory Okolloh is a native of Kenya with a Havard law degree. From a poor family, she knew what it was not to have enough money. Her parents struggled to put her in a good school, and she missed getting her place in her dream high school due to corruption. Her family didn’t have enough money, or the right last name, or contacts. Her father died of AIDS in 1999, but never told anyone about the disease because of the social ostracism that would come with it.

Today, she feels, Africans need to get better at telling their stories and images of Africa in the press focus on just the negative things.  As she says, it’s not enough for us to criticize; we all need to think about what actions we’re willing to take: “My dream is for my daughter to find her future in Africa.”

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

writesomething.net

Epics are generally massive pieces of literature, usually covering the entire gamut of human emotions, written by one inspired soul. There is an online epic in the making, though some may call it senseless, it does talk about thousands of human emotions, as thousands, or millions of people have written it. Writesomething.net is where the action is.

Some may call it crazy, and it is definitely tedious to read after a while, because nothing makes sense except the tagline of ‘endless senseless collaborative book’. Its beauty lies in its randomness, just pop in on any of the 3035 pages (which keep increasing), and you are reading someone’s thoughts, from god knows where on earth. It’s the ultimate open source writing exercise going on.

Such initiatives have happened in the past as well. There is Our Own Book, a venture started by two IIM students in India. Here a brief storyline is provided, and contributors have to help develop the story, and ultimately a book gets published with the most number of authors. You can contribute to their story here, and know more about the terms of use here.

There is also The Age of Conversation, another collaborative book, which is the idea of Gaurav Mishra. The first Age of Conversation (the second one is in progress), reached #36 in business and investing books on Amazon.

Writesomething.net does not seem to have an aim to publish it into a book, not now at least. It’s the lack of a storyline, the lack of any restriction or aim, its spontaneous nature, the sheer senselessness of it that makes it fascinating. Its extremely easy to use, just type and hit ‘publish’ and contribute to the epic in progress. Its encouraging human expression, an invitation to just pen your thoughts anonymously for the world to read. In some strange way it connects the entire human population. You may read some random line that surprisingly echoes the thoughts in your own head. And someone else may be reading your mind too.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

© guardian.co.uk

One of the most interesting design blogs in blogosphere is the ‘Classics of everyday Design’ section of the Art & Design Blog at the Guardian.co.uk. So far it has documented some 60 classics of design, mostly from the USA and UK. It’s fascinating to read about the creators, history and reasons behind some of the most everyday objects and experiences, which we take for granted.

The blog is written by John Glancey who is the Guardian's architecture critic. Each entry is rich in information, and fun to read. It covers a wide range of objects from the humble paper clip at no 3, to Queen Elizabeth II. There are some objects, which even we, halfway across the world can identify with such as the Slinky, at no. 36, and the humble highlighter pen at no. 30. One of our favourites is no. 31, none other than Bubble Wrap. We never really stop to think of this as a ‘design classic’, but it deserves that title. Bubble Wrap was apparently invented by accident, around 50 years ago by two American engineers, Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes when they were trying to invent plastic wallpaper.

Each of the entries on the blog tell us the whole story behind that design, and also make you realize what life was without it. The impact of design on human life has rarely been documented, and this seeks to help us understand that impact. Some of the other interesting ones are Times New Roman at no. 56, which we agree is a beautiful, yet underestimated typeface. The London Underground logo at No. 54, another example of a visual culture that people take for granted, much like the PCO or Xerox logo we see in here in India. Such documenting of the design culture around us, and its impact is essential, and in fact sorely lacking.

A classic is defined as something judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind. The design classics quietly fit into our lives so well, that most of the time we don’t even realize they are there.

By Armeen Kapadia and Sanjay Basavaraju

Published with Lulu

Publishing a book is no more a legacy, these days. Independent publishing is focusing on fresh content from budding writers. The focus is on low quantity and try to take content directly to the readers. Lulu has gone one step ahead. It has changed the way we publish books.

Lulu is a prime example of the open-source revolution. Its founder and CEO, Bob Young, who also co-founded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) in 1993, the open-source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Bob is a true technology entrepreneur and open-source visionary with four successful multi-million dollar start up companies on his resume.

Lulu believes that every writer should publish their book for free with them holding the complete intellectual property rights. Lulu attracts 2 million site visits every month. What is interesting is the Lulu’s approach.

Excerpts from Lulu.com:
Lulu eliminates traditional barriers to publishing and enables authors to sell their work directly to their particular audience — no jumping through hoops to find a publisher who is likely to reject their work. Using Lulu’s simple publishing tools, they format and upload their digital content. Then they can take advantage of Lulu’s global marketplace, social networking and author services, free customized storefronts and retail listings on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and much more. Lulu’s lucrative 80/20-revenue split empowers authors to profit from their work.

Lulu can be explained in just two simple steps: Publish and Sell. Lulu provides templates for various sizes. It also provides templates for covers. It also offers choice on the kind of bookbinding. The author has the right to set the price of his or her book. The books are even promoted. The books published via Lulu seem authentic and professional because the writer can even register an ISBN number. Lulu is benefited from distribution channels such as Amazon and social networking tools such as Facebook.

Lulu is to books like iTunes is to music. Hopefully more talent will rise out of such a system. It has radically changed the way we publish, sell and buy books. There is a tremendous potential for retail bookshops to do bulk shopping of books via Lulu and sell them locally.

Recently, Lulu launched a poetry site too. If one wants to publish a book and let the work do the talking, Lulu is the right space to do it.

By Sanjay Basavaraju

It sounds like a German movie. But it isn’t. Wolfram Alpha already nicknamed as ‘Google-killer’, has impressed many experts during a demo presentation. It is the brainchild of Stephen Wolfram and he calls it ‘Computational Knowledge Engine’. The name is horrible and can’t be more complex. Ironically, to get to know more about it, I had to use Google to throw up some pages.

Some, who have got a glimpse of its function, believe that in the future, if one types the question, ‘Google market share’, Wolfram Alpha would compute a graph of Google’s dwindling market that may be shocking to believe. I personally feel that Google is still superior. Wolfram Alpha and Google are entirely different in their function.

Google is like a library and throws up web pages for a search query. On the other hand, Wolfram Alpha answers factual questions based on syntaxes, which one can easily learn. Google is for finding and Wolfram Alpha is just for calculating. For example, Wolfram Alpha is equipped to answer “What was the average rainfall in Kerala last year?” Stephen apparently is a fan of Google and is open to collaboration. It is least likely to happen since any talks of collaboration will happen once Google believes it can gain from it. That may take a few years for Wolfram Alpha to prove what it claims.

Regulators have long constantly watched Google. Google has been walking a tight rope since it has been seen as being monopolistic, an image that it wants to shed. It seems Google is optimistic about Wolfram Alpha’s success. If it succeeds, the chances are that Microsoft would be interested in acquiring it. And when that happens, Google can add those key functions of Wolfram Alpha into its own search engine. Google is blamed for already killing Lycos and Altavista, amongst many forgotten search engines. Now it seems Wolfram Alpha is aiming to do the same with Google. Such a situation helps Google to convince the public about its new approach towards competition. I doubt Google would wait for such a thing to happen. I am sure, by now, something is already cooking inside Google.

Nova Spivack, a technology visionary and entrepreneur, explains in his blog, “Wolfram Alpha uses built-in models of fields of knowledge, complete with data and algorithms, which represent real-world knowledge. One drawback is that it does not answer natural language queries — you have to ask questions in a particular syntax, or various forms of abbreviated notation. The vision seems to be to create a system, which can do for formal knowledge (all the formally definable systems, heuristics, algorithms, rules, methods, theorems, and facts in the world) what search engines have done for informal knowledge (all the text and documents in various forms of media).”

Some believe the site is over-hyped but many are optimistic. For that matter, even Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, seemed to talk about Wolfram in his letter to shareholders this year.

“I think it will soon be possible to have a search engine that “understands” more of the queries and documents than we do today. Others claim to have accomplished this, and Google’s systems have more smarts behind the curtains than may be apparent from the outside, but the field as a whole is still shy of where I would have expected it to be.”

If you are interested to know more about Wolfram Alpha, you can read a detailed explanation here.

It remains to be seen what will be the effect of Wolfram Alpha on the world. I doubt if it can unsettle Google anytime soon. I feel that Wikipedia should be more worried about it rather than Google.

By Sanjay Basavaraju