Estoy en el Aeropuerto Internacional de Houston, uno de mis menos favoritos, esperando mi vuelo a Las Vegas, probablemente la ciudad que menos me gusta en todo la planeta. Me fui de Buenos Aires lleno de una dulce tristeza. Hay tanto que echaré de menos. Aquí, en Houston, después de haber llegado demasiado temprano en la mañana, después de que me confiscaron una costosa botella de vino antes de que pueda asumir su papel de regalo de boda, los busto-parlantes en la televisión y los acentos tejanos me están fastidiando.

Todos los busto-parlantes hablan al mismo ritmo, la misma cadencia, mientras que música teatral y los efectos computarizados de sonido competen para dominar los gritos. Todos siguen fingiendo que las elecciones del Partido Democrática todavía está en juego. Tienen que hacerlo - nadie ve un partido de fútbol cuando ya sabes que va a ganar. Cada 15 minutos repiten: “permanezca atento esta noche para ver chicas jóvenes que están dispuestas de hacer cualquier cosa - incluso se desnudan! - para suplantar la identidad de Marilyn Monroe.”

Sólo una vez, por unos 15 segundos, CNN hizo mención del terremoto en China que, hasta el momento, ha sido responsable para los muertes de más que 15,000 chinos, un número que seguramente seguirá creciendo. Durante los 15 segundos, la familia china sentada a mi lado dejaron de hablar y miraron fijamente a la televisión. Mientras tanto, todos los demás en la puerta dejaron de mirar la televisión ahora que terminaron hablando de la supuesta batalla entre Clinton y Obama. 15.000 personas muertas. Decenas de miles más aún siguen atascados bajo los escombros. Salvó la familia china, todos los demás en la puerta empiezan a contar chistes animados. La sala se llena de gestos y risas.

Me acuerdo de cuando me enteré por primera vez de los ataques del 11 de Septiembre. No sabía nada hasta que 10 días después cuando llegue a Rishikesh después de diez días de caminata
en la Himalaya india. En todas partes de Rishikesh - el hotel, el ciber-café, los restaurantes - cada residente de Rishikesh agarró mi brazo efusivamente y me dijo: ’señor, lamento muchísimo lo que pasó en tu páis. Yo me siento profundamente triste’. Sus declaraciones no vinieron de cursos de hospitalidad - hablaron realmente desde el corazó. En 9/11 menos de 3.000 personas perdieron la vida. Menos de una quinta del número de muertos en China, hasta el momento.

La puerta se llenó del clamor ensordecedor de los tejanos, ya preparandose para el estado mental que se requiere Las Vegas de todos sus visitantes.

Originally published on Idea Lab.

An avalanche of analysis, impassioned commentary, and angry rants descended upon the tech mediapshere over the two past weeks ever since One Laptop Per Child Chairman Nicholas Negroponte urged developers for the XO laptop (formerly the ‘$100 laptop’) to recreate the student computer’s user interface for Windows XP rather than Linux. That decision led to the defection of Walter Bender who had been OLPC’s president of software and content and a longtime colleague of Negroponte. It also led free software guru Richard Stallman, who ironically switched to a XO laptop himself just before the announcement, to ask out loud, “Can we rescue OLPC from Windows?” Like Stallman, many other free software advocates argue that one of the principal goals of the One Laptop Per Child Project was to free students from proprietary software, which they are not able to alter to suit their own needs.

But Ivan Krstić, formerly OLPC’s director of security architecture, says that the OLPC project has always been about education first and technology second.

What has been missing from all sides of the debate so far is that, no matter if the XO user interface runs on Windows XP or Linux, it is still currently missing many applications to help students learn and participate in the classroom.

In hope of getting local Uruguayan programmers to develop educational applications for the XO laptop, Rising Voices grantee Pablo Flores of the Ceibal Project, is organizing a programming “jam” this weekend in order to introduce local programmers and get them thinking about developing innovative applications that particularly suit the needs of the hundreds of thousands of Uruguayan students who now carry their bright green laptops to school each day. What follows is a translation of Flores’ original announcement in Spanish.

The time has arrived to make some new applications for XO laptops. Uruguay is in a privileged position, since our high density of XO laptops gives us a large user base who can use our software. To put it another way, Uruguayan programmers have the double benefit of being able to both provide practical solutions to meet the educational (and other) needs of our country and, at the same time, distribute their applications to the entire world.

To facilitate the exchange, with the support of LATU and the Faculty of Engineering, a gathering called Ceibal Jam! is being organized this weekend for developers interested in programming applications for the XO. Information is constantly being updated on the wiki, where you can register and participate.

The purpose of the meeting is to make initial contact between those interested in developing on the XO platform and to start working on some interesting applications. To do so, we are going to host some introductory talks and workshops, and then organize in small teams focused on specific development goals. In particular, there is an initiative to develop a system to facilitate the creation of blogs from the laptop, which would increase the number of blogs authored in schools throughout the country.

“Jam!” meetings take place throughout much of the first world and consist of gathering people with common interests to work intensively to create something together. Its origin comes from jazz groups, which conducted improvisational “Jam sessions,” usually after a concert. It is a new mdoel in our country, but we hope that is not the last meeting of this kind.

Be sure to attend!

Sometimes I feel like there are more websites dedicated to documenting citizen journalism than actual citizen journalism initiatives. Among them: J-Lab, Idea Lab, Media Shift, Press Think, MIT’s Center for Future Civic Media, Contentious, Online Journalism Review, Social Media, NewAssignment.Net, and a slew of personal blogs (like this one) that are often focused on that mysterious term with ever-shifting meaning, ‘citizen journalism.’

Among the lesser known sites (at least for the great majority of Americans) documenting stories about documenting stories is the Spanish-language PeriodismoCiudadano.com. Unlike most of the above-mentioned sites, PeriodismoCiudadano.com prides itself in covering citizen journalism projects outside of North America and Western Europe, including frequent looks at initiatives in China, Brazil, India, Chile, and Venzuela.

And Jamaica. A month and a half ago they covered the Prison Diaries project of the S.E.T. Foundation, one of the ten projects we’re helping support at Rising Voices.

Later this month I’ll be visiting the Prison Diaries project in Kingston with Georgia. As you can imagine, they’ve had plenty of struggles convincing prison authorities there that the prisoners should be learning digital media production techniques, but within a couple months I’m confident that we’ll have a unique and meaningful glimpse into what it means to be in prison in Kingston, Jamaica. For now, I leave you with my translation of the original post by Paula Gonzalo, which you can read in Spanish at PeriodismoCiudadano.com.

This isn’t the first time that we’ve spoken of capacitation projects at a jail. The Youth Penitentiary Center in Barcelona participated in a digital literacy workshop in prison with the use of blogs.

The concept of prison diaries isn’t new. In 2001 National Public Radio in the United States recorded an intimate portrait or five prisoners behind bars using audio diaries. The successful British novelist Jeffrey Archer wrote a three volume memoir titled Diaries from Prison, which was later made into a play.

Prison Diaries, a grantee of the second round of funding of Rising Voices located in Jamaica, will use citizen media tools like blogs, video, and podcasts to share the diaries of prisoners, allowing all Jamaicans to discover the realities of Jamaica’s overcrowded prison system.

It all began in 1999 with the S.E.T. Foundation, a transformational program aimed at prisons which has successfully reduced the recidivism rate in Jamaica’s prisons. Through S.E.T. the prisoner becomes a constructive player who can significantly contribute to society while the community gains another citizen.

It leader, Kevin Wallen has been doing a notable job with motivational workshops inside the penal institutions. Public safety in Jamaica has deteriorated so much that it’s been dubbed the ‘homicide capital of the world.’

The purpose of the Prison Diaries project: “it tries to confront the veneration of ‘bad boys’ by training current prisoners how to blog and podcast.” The prisoners will generate their own content with the training that they have received thanks to the S.E.T. program. They will record and edit audio and video clips which will be posted on their blog so that the general public has access.