The INFO Project Blog

Recently, we attended a Forum One seminar on Social Sites for Social Good. Among the savory kernels of digital marketing truth we sampled, among a audience packed into DC’s National Press Club, was this presentation by Jonathan Colman of the Nature Conservancy on an influential social bookmarking tool. We Digg it, y’know?

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We were glad to see an in-depth interview with Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) founder Moshe Pritsker on New England Cable News (NECN), the largest 24-hour regional news network in the country. I met Moshe at this year’s Science Blogging conference in North Carolina and pretended to know what filming “benchwork” entailed. It’s much easier to watch and find out how this innovative video magazine is breaking down language barriers and speeding science along.

Anna Kushnir, a researcher at Harvard investigating STIs who I met at Science Blogging 2008, writes for the JoVE blog–that’s the Journal of Visualized Experiments, a much buzzed about site where you can watch scientists at work. She asked us how we use video now, and how we could use video in the future, to advance our project. So I emailed around these queries to INFO staffers, and got some interesting responses. This is what we talk about when we talk about video.

Also on the video tip… 

On Tuesday, Heather Sanders and I journeyed to the UN Foundation  at 1800 Massachussets Ave (a certified Green Building) to shoot an interview with Purnima Mane, the deputy executive director of UNFPA. We’ll post her interview up here shortly–she gives an amazing pitch for reinvesting in family planning–but the visit also gave us a great opportunity to see what the UN Foundation is doing with video these days. Not only do the have a podcast room (where we taped) but they are feeding at least one YouTube channel and building myriad other dynamic projects like Nothing But Nets, a malaria relief campaign that’s tapped NBA players and Sports Illustrated writers to fight a disease that infects more than 500 million people each year. Read the rest of this entry »

For those who follow the HIFA2015 (Health Information for All by 2015) Listserv, there has been an interesting thread on the future of information dissemination to and from health workers in developing countries.

Much of the discourse has been about the cost and effectiveness of print materials on one hand, and the difficulties of accessing the Internet and other electronic resources such as CD-ROMs on the other. Some of the posts have been about the way health workers absorb and communicate information with proponents and opponents of print and electronic formats airing their views.

Of course, as with most of these types of debates, the future path lies somewhere in the middle–printed reference materials, the Internet, e-forums, blogs, e-learning, e-books, etc., all have their place. The challenge will be to teach future generations of information seekers and information communicators to use all these vehicles to achieve their goals. Read the rest of this entry »

While many at last week’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland were wringing their hands over the US housing slump, Jordan’s stunning Queen Rania was ringing in an exciting new campaign with the UN Foundation and Nike-convened Coalition for Adolescent Girls. Read on for Davos diaries from Bangladesh to Guatemala… Read the rest of this entry »