Sympathy for the Tinkerer
Tinkering gets a bad rap and I am making it my personal mission to rehabilitate the term. I keep an eye out for articles about tinkering and it is dismaying to see tinkerers getting the…
Tinkerable Technology Equals Green Technology
This week’s Economist has an excellent special report on waste, entitled Talking Rubbish. It contains the usual Economist savaging of government decision-making and bureaucracy but more importantly some very interesting news on waste management around…
OLPC XO-2 goes Open Hardware
I admit to being a little gobstopped by Nicholas Negroponte’s announcment in the Guardian that the next generation OLPC will be Open Hardware is a pretty big deal. I picked up the announcement this morning…
Top Five Ted Talks
At the Shuttleworth Foundation we have a now reasonably well-established tradition of gathering together every Tuesday at lunch to watch a Ted Talk. I borrowed this idea from Vera Franz of the Open Society Institute…
Open Hardware for Development
In my last post I wrote a bit about what kinds of information and communication technologies are needed by the poor. I have also written about the importance of tinkering and tinkerable technologies as a…