> There is an interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com (via Slashdot ) that talks about the Dell Battery Recall program and how the blogosphere “kept the heat on the manufacturers to do something about it and helped the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) conduct an investigation into the burning batteries.”

As mentioned in the BusinessWeek.com article, the blogosphere’s ability to continue to provide examples and data raised the profile of this issue into something that Dell needed to accept and address openly. Kudos to them for dealing with it as they have - maybe they should take a page out of Apple’s playbook (and Rita’s post )  in regards to positioning and ease of use.

Last night in a fit of insomnia I was scanning Slashdot for the latest and greatest - and I stumbled on a link to this article from the Washington Post. Michael De Kort, a (now ex-) Lockheed Martin engineer working on a project for the U.S. Coast Guard identified “several critical safety and security problems” within the project and tried to bring attention to them by going through the traditional processes for dealing with such issues. According to the article, he went through proper channels to voice his complaint - including “Lockheed Martin ethics investigations, engineering management reviews, quality reviews, propram management reviews” and also working through “the chain to Lockheed Martin corporate legal, to the CEO Bob Stevens, and to the Board of Directors”. He also contacted  the Inspector General’s Office of the Department of Homeland Security which is currently conducting a review and reached out to Representative Peter King (R- NY), Chairman of the Homeland Security Oversight Committee. I highlight the steps he took because it seems that he did what any good employee would do in this situation; use appropriate channels to voice concerns about a project.

What he did next is interesting to me - especially in light of the BusinessWeek article I mentioned at the top of this post. He made a video of his complaint and posted it on YouTube. The original video is below

If you cannot watch the video or would rather read a transcript of his video, Slashdot user Pushnell
has helpfully created one.

At 1:09pm this afternoon, his YouTube video has received approximately 41579 views. At 5:15 pm his video had received 47186 views. As of last night the Washington Post was reporting over 8,000 views. As of this afternoon there are over 25 stories about him and his story, and they are on Time.com / CNet.com / CBS news and a host of others. Direct link to my Google News search is here. 

It seems that his story has legs and e has created a profile on Slashdot to respond to comments about his video.

I wonder what appreciable results his posting on YouTube will bring about. Will it raise the profile of this issue to the point that both Lockheed Martin and the Coast Guard need to publicly address this issue? Will the blogosphere embrace this despite having one central source for this story (his YouTube video) as opposed to the many others found on the Dell Laptop Battery incident (YouTube videos, blog postings from many different users, etc)?

Finally, what does this mean for other whistleblowers in the future? Has he set a precedent for them? Instead of a whistleblower pitching his or her story to the traditional media, will YouTube and the blogosphere be the go to outlets? Mr. De Kort lends a human face to the problem that might otherwise be buried in a lawsuit somewhere and thanks to wonders of the archiveal nature of the Internet (and the series of tubes that make it up) his story will always be found in video or text format regardless of the merit of his story. Currently, he is unemployed, and according to the Washington Post,  Lockheed Martin
said that “the video did not influence the decision to lay off De Kort and that he had had been notified earlier this year that he would be out of a job.” Who knows what the details are surrounding his dismissal, but I wonder if his actions can also get him a new job.

Finally, a hypothetical scenario to ponder that could affect us directly in our day-to-day lives. Are we far off from the days when some anonymous ‘hacker’ will decide to not only highlight the security flaw in an operating system but also provide a screencast showing your average user how to exploit this flaw?

I’m watching this story with interest - leave me your thoughts in the comments below.

According to a Reuters article, the 1,753 residents of the farming village of Hansdehar have chosen to connect to the world via the Internet, in hopes that the Indian government might take notice of the poor condition of their infrastructure. From a link on smartvillages.com,  Internet users can see pictures of the village, read profiles of the residents,  learn about the specifics of the infrastructure problems of Hansdehar.

The website was the brainchild of Kanwal Singh, a former web developer for the Chandigarh government. His mother's house will be the set up for the first Internet station in the village. Once the connection has been established, the Internet will enable residents to seek out opportunities they would not have otherwise known existed.

 A number of residents already know what they would like to do on the Internet. Here's a sample:

• Get better prices for their crops by trading on the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange
• Publish an academic paper on mathematical theory and philosophy
• Find a marriage partner
• Apply to college
• Unite with other rural villages that have been ignored by the government.

John Voelcker, an interactive media strategist, released a review of the top ten technologies that are changing the world. His list is based on technologies developed by social entrepreneurs who thought through the development , usability and financing of their solutions. 

Voelcker's list is as follows, followed by summaries (based on his paper) of what these products actually do:

1. The Enviroloo by Enviro Options (Pty) Ltd of Kya Sands, South Africa.

Sewage treatment poses a problem in the developing world. People are exposed daily to disease carrying insects and contaminated water. In response to this problem, South Africa-based Enviro Options Ltd. introduced a new system, the Enviroloo, which uses heat and ventilation instead of a water-based system.   

(more…)

Over the past few years, microfinancing has grown in popularity with a number of internationally focused entrepreneurs and international development workers. The concept of microfinance was introduced by Dr. Muhammad Yunas, who began an experiment in Bangladesh in the mid 1970’s. The professor gave a group of 42 women only $27 to start a bamboo chairmaking operation.  He found that that $27 allowed the women to take care of themselves and their families, sell their chairs and repay their loans. In the early 1980s, Dr. Yunas began the Grameen Bank, which extended small loans (typically less than $300) to the poorest of the poor to help them onto the road of self-sustainability.  The loan repayment rate is around 98% and the bank is now hugely successful, it’s worth having been estimated at nearly $2.5 billion. Grameen’s operations have been modeled by a number of similar microfinancing institutions in a number of other countries, including Nepal, India, Norway and even in the US.

Twenty-eight years after Dr. Yunas first loaned the $27 to the bamboo chair operation, a staff member of the Village Enterprise Fund, Jessica Flannery, along with her filmmaker husband, Matthew, learned that they could use Paypal to essentially wire loans to rural communities through a field operation volunteer who was with the Village Enterprise Fund. The couple worked tirelessly to figure out how they could get involved in microfinancing. They came up with this: an Internet driven microfinancing operation they named Kiva. (more…)

On June 1, 2006, The Bivings Group held its first ever Philanthropic Brain Trust, which took the form of a pro bono communications strategy brainstorm for a local nonprofit called DC Fights Back. Our company is deeply committed to volunteer work and we are always looking for new opportunities to give back to the surrounding community and offer our intellectual capital to a good cause. We are deeply grateful to the Spectrum Science Communications team (Amanda Sellers, Liza Morris and John Seng), the Zeno Group’s Heather Gartman and Phil Armstrong, the Smithsonian’s Colleen Perlman and Sharolyn Hyson from HIMSS for their participation and for bringing their ideas to table.

DC Fights Back is an organization that is committed to raising AIDS awareness in the Washington, DC area. Health educator Alex Lawson presented us with some shocking statistics that made us all wonder why most of us don’t hear about AIDS on a regular basis. Take a look at these numbers:

(more…)