Open Source

Originally posted on DanBlah.com and cross posted from the Open Technology Initiative.

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

Originally posted on DanBlah.com

While I am by no means a seasoned investigative journalist, I have the good fortune to work with some. Looking ten years back I couldn't imagine a media organization considering geek qualifications a core part of an investigative team. In 2011, turning a geek into an investigative journalist is a no-brainer.

When the Open Technology Initiative presented at the Allied Media Conference in June, many of the participants documented it with posts to Twitter and Flickr. We used Storify, an online tool for compiling social media, to arrange those pics and tweets into a narrative of our workshop and a tour of local wireless networks.

Irrespective of your personal feelings about WikiLeaks, the model it pioneered has challenged traditional journalism models and serves as a harbinger of change for 2011. WikiLeaks-esque tools supporting a new generation of whistleblowers are facilitating fundamental changes in the relationships among sources and journalists. These tools can disseminate exceedingly large amounts of information within remarkably short time frames and challenge journalists, who necessarily must utilize new technologies to vet, manage, source, and expose the needles in the haystack.

American diplomacy seems to have survived Wikileaks's "attack on the international community," as Hillary Clinton so dramatically characterized it, unscathed. Save for a few diplomatic reshuffles, Foggy Bottom doesn't seem to be deeply affected by what happened. Certainly, the U.S. government at large has not been paralyzed by the leaks—contrary to what Julian Assange had envisioned in one of his cryptic-cum-visionary essays, penned in 2006.

For Immediate Release
October 25, 2010

Washington, D.C. -- Today, New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative launched Japanese and Chinese language versions of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) website to encourage Internet users based in both countries to test the speed and other performance measures of their broadband connections.

Chip on Phone Overwrites User-Preferred Software -- Re-installs Original Firmware.

[October 13, 2010 UPDATE: OTI has released this follow-up analysis concerning the policy implications of mobile device lock down.]

Yesterday, some T-Mobile stores began selling its newest mobile device, the G2, an Android-based smart phone originally slated for an October 6 release while AT&T is slated to release it later in the year.

This is a guest post from Timothy Vollmer, an Open Policy Fellow for Creative Commons.

Inside the beltway, there’s been increasing interest from policymakers in exploring the benefits of publicly funded Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under an intellectual property license that permits their free use or re-purposing by others. Initiatives supportive of open education have been discussed in various places within the federal government: the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top Fund, National Education Technology Plan, Proposed Grant Priorities, National Learning Registry, the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, and in proposed federal legislation.

The string of acronyms in the headline translates to “vote for New America’s panels for this year’s 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference.”

The string of acronyms in the headline translates to “vote for New America’s panels for this year’s 2011 SXSW Interactive Conference, which will be held March 11-20."

The Open Technology Initiative and the Media Policy Initiative of New America have pulled together five stellar panels that cover a range of topics. From Open Government to Measurement Lab, we’re excited to bring these discussions to one of the largest Interactive conferences in the nation.