Una de las cosas que hice este semestre fue tomar una clase en el MediaLab para aprender a programar en celulares, y hacer activismo con celulares y otros medios electrónicos. Entre una cosa y otra me involucré en un par de proyectos para los cuales estoy cruzando los dedos de que funcionen. Muy amablemente mi profesor Chris Csikszentmihalyi (que es co-director del Center for Future Civic Media) subió un post al respecto en el blog que tiene en PBS.
The A Word: Information and Activism
by Christopher Csikszentmihályi (Bio), June 5, 2009
…
One student, who apparently never sleeps, completed two projects in May
and even deployed one in the field, resulting in 1,000,000 sms messages
being sent throughout Mexico. The texts initiated a an interactive
questionnaire, asking a diverse group of Mexicans about their
experience with the flu. 56,000 filled out their experiences, and the
resulting data, while a little noisy, seems to perfectly match the rate
of infection determined by other, slower, less distributed methods.
Andrés argues that this may be the best technique for monitoring early
outbreaks, since cellphones are far more common across location, age,
and income in Mexico than other epidemiological inputs.Andrés wasn't
content with a million text messages, or the top-down nature of the
swine flu project, so he also launched a project to help Mexicans
report and learn about voting fraud in the elections scheduled for this
July 5. By matching Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS with public (or semi-public) government geographic databases, Cuidemos El Voto
allows citizens to report or be notified about voting fraud at their
individual polling place. With resolution down to a few blocks in the
capitol, the system also notifies journalists and accredited elections
monitors, allowing them to immediately locate and document fraud.
…
Ésta si es una propuesta de acción, donde lo que importa es el cuidado del voto , me uno con humildad a ésta noble propuesta en donde no importa si anulas o votas.
Cuidemos el voto! bien por ésta……