The conference will feature panels and speakers on a variety of topics, including information communication technology (ICT) and development (including a special forum on Haiti and a discussion of telemedicine strategies), new media and authoritarianism, open governance, and a roundtable discussion of how policy schools can get involved in the debate. Our high profile speakers come from the U.S. Department of State’s Office of eDiplomacy, New York City Council, FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, and Columbia, Harvard and Stanford Universities.

I mention this not just because I teach there but because I’ll be on an afternoon panel exploring how information and communication technology is being used by governments, development agencies, non-profit organizations and ordinary citizens to work toward a better world. I think there’ll be some authoritarianism thrown in for good measure. Or, at least, techniques activists are using to get around authoritarian attempts to repress and block speech and citizen access to information.

As mentioned, the event is free. The schedule is here. Some notables include John Zittrain most likely talking about open and closed Internet systems, and Patrick Meier discussing how he and others used Ushahidi to respond to the earthquake in Haiti.

Hope you can join us.

About Policy Making in the Digital Age

This article originally appeared on ScribeMedia.org.

Please visit the original to rant, rave or otherwise discuss.

Related posts:

1. Alert: Ushahidi in Haiti
2. MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY-MAKING IN THE 21ST CENTURY: BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS, IT WILL BE OBSOLETE
3. Dollars in Digital: Producing Web Programming and Making It Profitable

So what’s the who, what, where, when, how and why of what I’ve been doing lately?

Good question. And I think I have some answers.

Scribe moved. This is a good thing. While we made it through the economic disruption of the past year it made no sense to pay what we were paying for office space. Fortunately, construction giant Skanska needed an office near the World Trade Center site and took over our lease. This happened in August.

We were homeless for a month after that and worked remotely. This was actually quite pleasant as I spent a lot of time at our family’s house on the coast of Rhode Island. Now we’re in shared space at Sunshine Suites in Tribeca. We’ll use that for bizdev. In the background I’m combing Long Island City for studio space. I’m basically looking for something in the 1,500 square foot range with high ceilings where we can set up our audio/video gear and editing stations. It also means I could walk to work which would be nice.

In the meantime I started teaching a course at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. It’s called Tubes, Code and Content: Creating Media in our Digital Age and focuses on how NGOs, non-profits, community groups, activists and governmental agencies can use Internet and mobile communication technologies. So, it’s basically teaching students what I talk to clients about all the time for ScribeLabs.

I set up a community site for the course. You can see it here. And if you want to hear me in action, the first of my weekly lectures is now online and called “Media. Communication. Protest.“

This is much different than what I was doing at the Graduate School of Journalism (skills training and advising students on their Masters Projects) and hopefully there will be room and time to continue both.

In the meantime, I’m trying to figure out what to do with this space. I originally created it to communicate with my journalism students. I’d often re-blog content I created for ScribeMedia.org here but that seems redundant. Then I got into Tumblr and started re-blogging all sorts of found crap there but that fizzled back in June. I’m too busy to keep up with that. But I do Tweet a lot so I’m in that space quite often. And now I’m writing over at TubesCodeContent what I might have written here in the past for my students.

So where does that leave this space? Good question. Perhaps as ground control for what I do elsewhere? But also for random musings and projects that don’t fit elsewhere, like, say, my weird music mashups. We’ll see.

More importantly, Sasha and I are still in Queens. She’s overseeing SMAC as we try to grow it into a sustainable publication. She’s also writing and creating videos for what seems like the delightful Russian publication called Snob. Unfortunately, I can’t read Russian but it sounds great unless everyone’s lying to me.

And that is that. What I haven’t done and I hate that I haven’t done it, is actually seen most of you. This, I know, must change. Digital communication is nice and all but it doesn’t hold a candle to shared laughter, knowing smiles, camaraderie and support.

Cheers.

This fall I’ll be teaching at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs. This will be very different from what I’ve done the past few years at the Graduate School of Journalism and I’m excited about the opportunity.

For starters, the semester-long course lets me deep think about a variety of issues. In particular, how NGO’s can leverage the Internets, how commercial and governmental restrictions are limiting the Tubes and how the Interweb really functions as a small world network; and what that might mean for all of us who communicate through it.

I’m calling the course Tubes, Code and Content and will be both creating and curating content around it over the next few months. Some of it is below. It’s thoughts and podcasts heavily influenced by the BBC and NPR with some FLOSS thrown in for good measure. I’ll make sure these are better organized as we move into the future but the audio files below include the themes I believe important in this day and age.

• Lawrence Lessig on Culture
• One Laptop Overview
• Clay Shirky on Social Netkworks
• Africa Connectivity
• Africa and Google Maps
• Africa and Microsoft vs Open Source Solutions
• Tibet: Someone’s hacking their computers
• Chinese Web censorship.
• France creates laws to ban sharing information
• France Law comes into being

I’m currently considering different platforms to present the course on. Current candidates include Drupal, Elgg, BuddyPress/WPMU and Pligg.

I don’t choose lightly. I believe the platform choice is as important as the actual content that ends up on it. That is, what students can actually do on the platform is as important as what content they can actually contribute to the project. Or put another way, functionality, collaboration and content creation are all one and the same.

When and as I create the course Web site, these presentations will all be modified. Hopefully, they’ll be modified with what we as a collective are continuously creating and producing.

That said, I’d like to hear what you’re thinking about and who you’re listening to as you consider your ideas about how the internet can best be used as a distribution platform and communications medium.

Either way, or anyway, we can do better than what has previously or currently occurred. Let’s connect and try. And let’s communicate and demonstrate a better path forward.