Four NYU students recently decided they’d had enough of heavily centralized, corporate-minded social networking sites. They took on the task of developing a social network to prove that online sharing and privacy should go hand in hand. What they came up with was Diaspora.

Here’s what the New York Times had to say about the team and its project:

(They) intend to distribute the software free, and to make the code openly available so that other programmers can build on it. As they describe it, the Diaspora software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share.

Though the creators of Diaspora have not come right out and slammed Facebook, they have credited a talk by Eben Moglen, a professor of law at Columbia University, as the inspiration behind the project. Mogden is no fan of Facebook or its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s a gem from Mogden’s talk in New York City last February:

Mr. Zuckerberg has…done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age…[H]e harnessed Friday night, that is, ‘Everybody needs to get laid,’ and turned into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal, namely ‘I will give you free web-hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time’.

Will Diaspora dismantle what Mogden calls “a Panopticon built out of web parts”? We won’t know that for sure until the software launches next September, but a few critics aren’t totally convinced.

Regardless of the speculation around its potential to effect mainstream change, Diaspora has generated a sturdy support base in a short time. Thanks to media coverage and buzz from the blogosphere, Diaspora fundraised more than ten times its stated goal in two days. At this point, Diaspora’s Kickstarter account shows that more than 2500 backers have collectively put up over $100,000 to get the grassroots project underway. While we wait for Facebook to be crushed by a user uprising, however, uh, maybe you’d like to click the “Like” button at the top of this post?

April 10 saw the launch of OpenParliament.ca, which aims to make it easier to follow what’s happening on the Hill. You can quickly and easily search for topics, people, communities, and more, and see what’s in Hansard, the official record of what’s said in the house of commons. Hansard has been available online officially for some time, but the interface is clunky and unhelpful; OpenParliament is much more user-friendly and speeds the process up considerably. You can sort the records by the activities of individual MPs, particular bills being considered, and subjects up for debate. The site also provides RSS feeds or email alerts that you can subscribe to, giving you instant updates on what parliamentarians are up to. Click on Libby Davies’ profile, for example, and you’ll see what she’s Tweeted, mentions in media outlets, motions she voted on, and statements she made in the house. Individual Bills also get profiles, collecting together who their sponsors are, who voted in favour or against, and what stage it’s at in the digestive tract of Canadian democracy.

The strength of OpenParliament.ca isn’t the information itself, which was always publicly available; its strength is that it pulls it all together in a way that is intuitive, fast, and beautiful. We’ll definitely be keeping an eye on it. You can also follow @openparlca on Twitter.

Just yesterday, writer/activist/consultant David Eaves threw the switch on Datadotgc.ca, another citizen-built website meant to liberate the flow of government information. Here’s their own statement on the purpose of Datadotgc:

Unlike the United States (data.gov) and Britain (data.gov.uk), Canada has no open data strategy. This must change. Canadians paid for the information gathered about our country, ourselves and our government. Free access to it could help stimulate our economy and enhance our democracy. In pursuit of this goal, this website is a citizen-led effort to promote open data and help share data that has already been liberated.

The site displays a chart on its front page showing the sources of its data, and which ministries and departments are providing open access to government data, to how many documents and databases; tellingly, the bar chart shows a bunch of zeroes, for everything from the Privy Council to Defence to Health Canada to Fisheries and Oceans. Unlike OpenParliament, which launches with 16 years worth of publicly accessible records already loaded, Datadotgc.ca (a homophonous play on the .gc.ca government of canada domain extension) will grow over time as volunteers add more links to the database. The project seems more technically complex, focused on building a huge structured database that will be of use to democracy nerds who want to build other sites (like OpenParliament) that slice and dice raw information in helpful ways.

So, while the government may not be getting more open, citizens are doin’ it for themselves with projects like these two. Got more examples? Leave some links in the comment section below!

Back in July of 2009, the Canadian government launched an eight week public consultation on copyright reform.  Members of the public were invited to let their will be known surrounding issues such as fair use, copyright terms, ISP neutrality and a host of other issues. With over 8,300 respondents in total an astounding 6183 people made it known that they opposed another bill C-61 (a meager 54 respondents favoured the bill)

Bill C-61, of course, was the draconian U.S. DMCA-style copyright reform bill that former Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced to parliament in June of 2008. The bill was ultimately abandoned when an election was called that fall, but has remained on the periphery since. The Conservatives have attempted to pass copyright reform three times without public consultation, bending to the will of industry lobbyists.

So, finally, the public has spoken and in near unison oppose the claustrophobic sanctions of bill C-61. Canadians, in fact, are a much more generous and trusting population than we could have guessed. The overwhelming majority support stronger fair use/fair dealing protection, shorter copyright terms, and believe individuals should be protected from liability for non-commercial use. Moreover, as popular as lightening copyright restrictions was, the opposite is equally equally true: only 153 respondents favour limiting or halting unauthorized filesharing and only one, one single respondent, supported fining those for copyright violation.

So what does this mean?  Essentially, Canadians are asking for the very opposite of what the government has been trying to pass for years. The question now is whether current Industry Minister Tony Clement is listening.

After the jump, the full results of the questionnaire, courtesy Michael Geist:

CRTC: making a tangled mess of broadband policy?

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced today new rules for how internet service providers are allowed to monitor, control, and throttle your internet access. After years of ponderous thought on the issue of how much control ISPs can wield over their customers’ web access, the CRTC has ceded the issue to the internet providers themselves, deciding that “transparency” is a suitable substitute for regulation. Now, with 30 days’ notice, ISPs get to set the rules and enforce them, and it’s up to the public to complain about oversteps and unfair consumer practices. With proven, repeat-offender oligopolists like Bell, Telus, and Rogers in charge, what could ever go wrong? Reports the CBC:

“It approves all of the throttling practices that ISPs currently engage in. It requires consumers to prove something funny is going on and consumers don’t have the means to figure out what ISPs are doing and they don’t have the resources to bring that to the commission’s attention,” said PIAC counsel John Lawford.

“There’s a lot of fine-grained double-speak here. There is no requirement for any of it.”

NDP digital issues spokesman Charlie Angus, who last year introduced a net neutrality private members bill to the House of Commons, also criticized the framework.

“Basically the CRTC has left the wolves in charge of the henhouse,” he said in a statement. “ISPs have been given the green light to shape the traffic on the internet toward their corporate interest. This decision is a huge blow to the future competitiveness of the internet.”

The real kick in the teeth is that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission is apparently poised to introduce a set of net-neutrality-positive laws into Congress as early as tomorrow, and last week two congressional reps introduced the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, which would catapult our neighbours to the south far ahead of Canada in terms of ensuring broadband availability and openness.

Women in the Dadaab, Kenya refugee camp receiving training to work with Samasource, a web company that outsources computer jobs to women, youth, refugees, and internally displaced people living in poverty. Photo courtesy Samasource.

This coming week I will be covering the 6th UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris. In preparation for the event, youth delegates have been participating in an online forum and discussing a variety of issues which affect youth during this global economic (and social) crisis.

Naturally, one of my preferred topics is along the lines of information and communication technology (ICT) and social media. As I discussed last week, ICT and social media, slowly, but surely, are allowing people to reverse the dominance of Western information. As tools are developed to allow active translation of English websites into even the most obscure dialects, those with basic education are tapping a source of previous privileged wealth.

Social and economic investment via ICT (such as the internet and mobile phones) is another key purpose. However, while the Internet is bringing us together, there remains the contentious “digital divide.” As Sylvia Namukasa, a UNESCO youth delegate from Uganda comments, “In Uganda, ICT only favors the urban youth who can access computers, unlike their rural counterparts, many of whom have never had a chance to look at a computer.”

We need to actively work against this disparity. Instead of pouring our hard-earned savings into charities, which continue to laud free goods on people who have no need or want for them, Canadian youth, in particular, should consider investing in their technologically able and inventive counterparts.

Across the ocean, people in the “developing world” are turning technology into an economic revolution with life-altering effects for the poor. Technology allows “us”—Westerners saturated by the stereotypical images of starving Africa—to circumvent the popular aid mantra and go for the real deal: delivering solid work into the arms of people who need it, or assisting those in acquiring the necessary knowledge to build the structures of a functional economy.

One excellent example of just how ingenious we can be with our money is exemplified in Samasource. The organization, founded by an Indian woman living in California, delivers small bits of computer-based work to women, youth and refugees living in poverty. TMS Ruge, the Ugandan co-founder of Project Diaspora, inspired by the need to invest back in his home country, has jumped on board. He currently has a team of web developers assisting with US-based contracts. While simplifying his own work, he delivers added income to individuals without the opportunity to join the formal work sector. I can guarantee this has a deeper impact than free malaria nets or second-hand clothing, both which eventually sneak out of the household and find their way into the informal economy anyway.

Txteagle is another example of how outsourcing via ICT can be revolutionary to people in poorer countries. From translation to conducting surveys, households confined to rural areas of Kenya have the opportunity to increase their livelihoods with tasks that integrate well into their daily lives—like taking care of livestock and doing domestic work.

For those of us who are not at the point of having work to outsource, there exist organizations that develop ICT in areas generally considered unreachable. For example, in Northern Uganda, I stumbled across a humble organization called Battery Operated Systems for Community Outreach, or BOSCO. By connecting up internally displaced persons to the internet, BOSCO has initiated a new means for refugees to acquire funding for locally-initiated development projects. For example, getting the necessary resources for solar-power in a town that had only, until then, functioned by costly paraffin lamps.

Or take AppAfrica. East African tech entrepreneurs and innovators develop software that allows huge changes to those isolated in rural Uganda with only cell phone access (and yes, almost everyone has a cell phone). One example, Question Box, is a means to democratize information, which further fosters economic development. People call in with all types of questions, such as “How can we control soil erosion in our village?” or “Can a mother pass HIV on to her child?”

As I gear up for this UNESCO Youth Forum, I want to encourage young people to consider the “snowball” effect of investing in work opportunities via ICT or technology itself. One woman making a dollar or two extra a day via Txteagle can now afford to buy malaria nets (stimulating the local economy) and send her children to secondary school. Her children, in turn, will grow up in the atmosphere that we have all come to understand and which secures, in part, democracy and government accountability: hard work pays off; we are accountable to the decisions we make.

The Obama presidential campaign was innovative. For the first time in American politics, a candidate used art and design to bring together the American people—capturing their voices in a visual way. [I’ve] collaborated with artists and designers to create Designing Obama, a chronicle of the art from the historic campaign. Get the inside story on how design was used by the campaign, and scope out the pieces, created unofficially, by grassroots supporters.

The bloom’s off the rose a bit in Barack Obama fanboy land, what with the backpedalling on torture prosecutions, still gunning for Afghanistan, and stalling on civil rights measures. But it’s still nice to remember electric feel of last fall, when the Obama presidency was pure potential—not to mention the most aesthetically beautiful campaign ever seen.

We’re excited today to unveil the all-new-and-improved, holy-cow-it-took-us-long-enough, next generation This Magazine website, this.org. I flipped the switch on the site early this morning and as far as I can tell all the bells and whistles are working as intended. You can now read our daily blog at this.org and read all the magazine’s print edition articles at this.org/magazine. Magazine articles will now be posted on an ongoing basis, with a new article every other day or so; by the time the issue’s full content is online the new one will be in your mailbox (if you’re a subscriber) or on the newsstand at better booksellers coast-to-coast. We’ve taken bold steps in the direction of 2002’s hottest! online! trends! and added commenting throughout the site, on magazine articles as well as blog posts. There are RSS feeds now available too, for just the blog, just the magazine, or both combined, so you can read what you want, how you want.

We’re not junking thismagazine.ca or BlogThis, but they’re moving to the back burner and won’t be updated with new material from here on out. Gradually our old website articles and blog posts will be moved from the old sites to the new one. You might notice, for instance, that we’re currently missing about the last five weeks’ worth of blog posts; a small technical hitch that I’m working on. Some author names also got lost in the shuffle, but we’re working on restoring them. The website is always a work in progress, so I figured it was better to launch even with a few small hiccups and let you poke and prod and send your feedback.

Thanks for being a reader and supporter of the magazine, whether you subscribe or read for free online. This is a strange time for print publications like This: lots of people are proclaiming the death of print media, but we’re feeling pretty optimistic, actually. Our experience over the last little while has been that people still like and value having This Magazine in print, and the type of journalism our talented and passionate contributors work so hard to do. At the same time, we feel it’s important to establish a mmore robust, meaningful, and two-way web presence, and this.org is the start of that. Take a look around, let me know what you think—either with a letter to the editor or by kicking the tires on the new commenting system.