Kiran Jonnalagadda’s Blog

My friends at the Tactical Technology Collective are organising Info-Activism Camp in February 2009. From their description:

The Info-Activism camp will bring together 120 rights advocates from the global South with technologists, designers and activists for a week long hands-on workshop to share skills, tools and tactics in digital advocacy.

Info-Activism is an approach to advocacy that recognises the artful use of information and communications as a primary tactic in successful campaigns.

The camp provides a space for intensive learning and doing, a structured 'skill-share' environment for experienced advocates that will give them the confidence and know-how to leverage the limited resources they have to create greater impact. During the week, participants will learn how to creatively integrate new technologies in to their advocacy and create long lasting connections with other advocates and tech-activists.

The camp will give rights advocates the practical skills, tools and techniques to use technology to:

• Gather and analyse information and facilitate evidence-based campaigning
• Create and disseminate targeted, accessible and engaging information for advocacy efforts that have impact on targets and mobilise support
• Increase participation from affected communities
• Enable cooperation and coordination with allies
• Minimise security and privacy vulnerabilities

If you’ve been to any of TTC’s earlier Source camps, you’ll know them to be true camps, held away from urbanity in a full time week-long camp, technology driven, and yet focused on practical applications for the activist. These events are great places to meet folks who care about changing society for the better.

The venue is yet to be decided. It is likely to be near Bangalore. Application forms will be available later this month. More information here: Info-Activism Camp - February 2009, India.

Peter Griffin wrote in about an organisation that helps visually impaired kids raise money by giving them work braille-embossing visiting cards. I visited the Wikipedia page on Braille last night and was fascinated to learn that Braille is a six digit (2x3) binary-encoding scheme that originates from military use. The system is designed around how fingers feel rather than being merely embossed versions of latin characters.

I’d like my cards braille-enabled, but have some questions. Peter, can you pass these on? Posting these in public because others may be curious too.

• Do the kids do the embossing themselves, or are they just the beneficiaries? The Outlook article doesn’t say.
• How do they mark the braille dots? By hand, one card at a time? If so, I do think these kids could benefit from a technology upgrade that lets them be more productive. Such an upgrade may not make sense when there isn’t much work, but I hope it’s in the plan.
• What kind of paper should the cards be printed on, to make braille impressions that last? Since I’ll be carrying stacks of cards around, it would be nice to not have them smother the dots off each other.
• The logistics. How do we do this? Do I get my cards done the regular way and then send them for braille-embossing? To what address do I mail them? Can I instead email a design and expect to receive printed and embossed cards in my mail a week later?

(Note: In the braille version of the title above, I’ve used regular spaces instead of the braille space, Unicode character 2800 “⠀”, because my browser treats the braille space as non-breaking and messes up the page’s formatting.)