[p2p-research] New website about active citizenship and other issues more or less close to P2P

[M. Fioretti]

On Mon, Oct 05, 2009 08:45:43 AM -0500, Ryan Lanham wrote:

> This looks a lot like a mobile phone-sort of initiative.  M-learning
> is something I follow.  It hasn't made much progress, but your
> initiative seems very suited to useful deployment on cell phones in
> Africa, the Caribbean, etc. Here in the Cayman Islands we have only
> about 20% of houses with access to a computer.

I'm convinced that if I do it right it has a lot of potential and
usefulness even in EU/North America. A report published last week says
only 52/55% of italian families has a computer at home (often out of
lack of interest, not money).

Besides, I'm SURE that even in countries with much higher computer
penetration rates most people still use computers and the internet
only as toys. In other words, that if you want to let them know of
certain things, you have to convince some of their neighbors to drop a
printout in their home letterbox. Two other reasons to go for the
"chunks of info that fit on one PRINTED page" are:

1) I don't believe much in online petitions and what Morozov (IIRC)
   rightly calls slacktivism ("if the world is wrong, start a Facebook
   group, feel good about it and do nothing else"). Permitting only
   printed copies to hand out manually is also my way to hint to FOSS
   and other activist that getting their butts off their chairs and
   talking with real, average people is necessary to make enough change
   happen soon enough.

2) real literacy rates outside activist circles are really depressing
   in many countries. People just shut their brain off if a text is
   longer than what I plan to write.

So these are the reason why I'll do it this way. I confess I had not
thought at all to the "mobile phone browser" users, as I dumped them
in my mind together with "ordinary" Internet users. But you're
absolutely right that information "formatted" as I plan to do, on a
vanilla website, will be not only useful, but also perfectly useable
even by people who only go online through a cellphone.

Thanks!
	Marco

-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84