Laura Morris
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Rising Voices EditorRising Voices editor, radio features producer, sometimes photographer. Interests include tiny stories, bicycles, and confluences of aesthetics and politics. Tweets @zigzagrailroad
Latest posts by Laura Morris
15 May 2013
Could Social Media Unlock Disaster Relief?
Working with the power of user generated content to improve humanitarian disaster relief, Micromappers organizes digital volunteers around the world to easily and quickly process social media-based information during crises.
30 April 2013
Where Does Citizen Media Go From Here? An Interview with Turi Munthe of Demotix
Bringing citizen journalists' content into the mainstream, Demotix began in 2007 to address the changing landscape of media. Rising Voices spoke with the company's founder about the next steps for citizen media.
29 March 2013
VOA Launches Experimental Digital Broadcasts via Shortwave
VOA Radiogram is sending digital messages across traditional shortwave frequencies. With a broadcast originating from North Carolina (USA), the transmission last week reached as far as Australia. This technology - simple and inexpensive - could be especially useful in times when the internet is not available, such as emergencies or under repressive regimes.
20 March 2013
Get Online Week 2013: Europe's Digital Empowerment Campagin
This week is “Get Online Week”, a push to teach new digital skills to those with limited exposure to the Internet. The program this year tries to address Europe's rising unemployment, and especially focusing on young people, teaching and training them in new skills.
18 March 2013
Programming Possibilities: Writing Code in Arabic
"قلب (Alb) tries to expand the digital conversation to consider more people. The fact that every modern programming language is in English is an idea that has shocked even the most veteran computer scientists. It's just not something you think about." An interview with the programmer Ramsey Nasser, creator of قلب (Alb), and a response from Tarek Amr.
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4 March 2013
The iLabs: Letting Context Drive Development
The iLabs recognize that a focus on local interpretation over foreign “experts” brings in local knowledge of what does and doesn't work – extending their impacts beyond the life of a single project: "We believe that the most efficient programs and technologies are developed flexibly, with a base in the active participation of the communities they serve..."
5 February 2013
Spaces: AltCity, Coworking in Beirut
AltCity is Beirut’s first coworking space; a solution to freelancers’ isolation and also a way to meet people working in similar fields, the space addresses practical issues of prohibitively high office costs while fostering a community among web developers, activists, and designers. It also provides a space to train the city's unheard voices in new media.
31 January 2013
World Radio Day 2013
This coming February 13th will mark UNESCO’s World Radio Day, bringing together broadcasters, advocates, creators, and networks to improve and celebrate radio around the world. UNESCO recognizes that radio can, in emergency situations, be the best way to get information to people who need it most - and at other times can help people to engage with issues that affect them every day.
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23 January 2013
Resources: A Course Sprint for Open Video
As part of its School of Open, P2PU (Peer to Peer University) published a free and online course on creating Open Video, teaching how to understand video files, coding, subtitling, encoding, and metadata. They created the course in just one weekend using a process they call “course sprint.”
