Category: Social Innovation
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Financial Inclusion and Democratizing Finance – I
From Noise to Signal A couple of weeks ago, El Salvador’s CryptoPopulist President shared on social media news about an international “Bitcoin” meeting his country was hosting starting May 16. He also listed the names of the 44 entities participating in the event. Not surprisingly, key countries were conspicuously absent. Regardless, the Crypto hype press…
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Contesting Innovation
Innovation is always good. Innovation regulation is always wrong. These are the two innovation axioms we repeatedly hear in unison from mainstream media, innovators and innovative companies, big and small. Indeed, the two are connected. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. If, by default, all innovation is good, then why regulate?…
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A Glance at Carbon Dioxide Emissions Data
Lack of data is certainly not one of the issues at the table when discussing energy production and carbon emissions. Well-known sources for the former include the UN Statistics Division, the International Energy Agency (IEA), the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), and British Petroleum (BP). The latter publishes an annual report while IEA data is…
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Waste no time waiting for e-Waste data
The town where I currently reside is planning to change its e-Waste collection policy starting next year. As it is today, town people can go downtown once a month and drop their old computers, laptops, monitors and the rest. This will now be reduced to one day per year. Missing that date will entail people…
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Chasing ICOs (away?)
Recent events seem to suggest the cryptocurrency bubble is finally starting to deflate. Bitcoin, Ethereum and most of their crypto cousins are significantly down while regulators in several countries are finally beginning to take action on the ground. Nobel laureate economists are also speaking up against the digital currency, arguing that the new currency cannot fulfill…
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Overall Perspectives on Technology
Disruptive, transformative and revolutionary are some adjectives commonly used to describe the potential impact of new and emerging technologies on society. Joblessness, human decay, and the Singularity sit on the opposite side, constantly reminding us of the darker side of technology. Indeed, there are two traditional approaches to the social impact of technology, which, despite…
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Social Innovation Redux
Context I was invited to the Social Innovation – Driving Force for Social Change (SI-DRIVE) final conference, which took place earlier this week in Brussels. SI-DRIVE is a four-year project funded by the EU and launched in 2014. The project has undertaken comprehensive research on the topic. It has also managed to create a network…
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Innovation and Inequality in an Unequal World
Innovation has taken the world by storm. More than a pure storm, it is now looking more like a stationary looping hurricane. No escape. Embrace or die. Only a few have opted for the latter. In any event, this is, without doubt, a critical development. New technologies are creating wave after wave of innovation, perhaps…
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ICTs and Inequality: An Overview
Not without reason, Inequality seems to have taken command of most development, socio-economic and even political discussions. The fact that a supposedly “technical” and long (and excellent too!) book such as Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a best-seller of sorts last year is a good indicator of the relevance of this topic in our…
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Women, empowerment and new technologies
Yesterday, we celebrated International Women’s Day (IWD) for the 108th time. The celebration first took place in 1908 in New York City. Back then, it was called the International Working Women’s Day (IWWD), first organized by the Socialist Party of the US. At some point, the additional W dropped, and the event became a celebration…
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Governments, Crowdsourcing and Innovation
The paper on the role of governments in crowdsourcing I presented at the last ICEGOV 2014 gathering in Guimaraes, Portugal, is now available here – in this blog. The paper was supposed to be published by ACM Press as part of the proceedings of ICEGOV. However, the proceedings are still unavailable on the ICEGOV or…
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Pakistan Interview: e-governance and development
I gave the following interview to a local business newspaper during my mission to Pakistan. The interview was published on 15 December. BR Research: You have previously worked in Pakistan. How was the e-governance situation like back then, and how is it now? Raul Zambrano: It was back in 1993 when UNDP launched an initiative…