At the end of November, Twitter came out with a new retweet feature that supposedly solved a number of problems with the usage of retweets (RT) on Twitter; attribution confusion, mangled tweets, redundancy, and untrackability.

It is our stated option that the new RT is service degradation. Why? Because...

• Attribution confusion: While Twitter felt we users were confused by who wrote a RT, we were not. We saw faces we trusted recommending information - the best attribution any tweet author could ask for.
• Mangled and messy: Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and where some see mess, we saw art of the Tweet Sculpt - adding our own value to the original tweet to give greater relevance to our followers.
• Redundancy & Noise: For those that have either, you follow too many people. Those of us who live for social media know how to select voices to listen to - ones that only RT value. And by RT'ing the same content, but with new value to each, all RT's gain value.
• Untrackable: To this we simply say "search"

But above all what galls us the most is the forced RT without commentary or annotation. To rip from our control the ability to add value to a tweet, to give it relevance to our followers - to make it ours. For this there is no excuse. Not for its implementation nor usage.

So we hereby issue the #RTFail Manifesto:

That's right - if we follow you, and you use the auto RT function 3 times (you will be warned) then you're unfollowed. Love ya, but no exceptions. The new RT's are Twitter spam, and until they are fixed, they shall be scorned in streams and in apps (looking at you Tweetie2).

For those that agree - join us in the #RTFail Manifesto in these simple ways:

• Get at RTFail Twibbon
• Issue your own #RTFail Manifesto warnings
• And of course, RT the #RTFail Manifesto, but only with a classic RT:
  -your snippet here- RT Join in the #RTFail Manifesto - Bring Back the RT! http://bit.ly/RTFail

We the Twitter RT'ers

Washington, D.C. -- December 1, 2009 -- Facebook today announced that Wayan Vota, the last social networking expert without an active Facebook account, has finally acquiesced to the need to be "friended" by those known and unknown to him through the world's largest social networking site. See Wayan Vota's Facebook here

"We are honored that Wayan Vota got off his high horse and accepted the reality that Facebook is driving adoption in Africa. To continue to lead an exploration at the intersection of technology and international development, he needed to have a presence with us," said Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.* "We've worked hard to bring more than 200 million people - 70 percent outside of the U.S. - onto Facebook to share with friends, family and co-workers. Wayan Vota represents the pinnacle of that effort."

Wayan Vota concours, "It was time that I entered the Facebook. I am excited to expand its ability to connect and share with thought leaders in both the information and communication technology (ICT) industry and the international development community. This will be a wonderful voyage of discovery for both initiatives."

Wayan Vota will continue his work with Inveneo - a social enterprise that puts the tools of ICT (like Facebook) in the hands of those who need it most in the developing world. In fact, he's already developed the ICTworks presence on Facebook to empower Inveneo's Certified ICT Partners in 21 countries across Africa and South Asia.

About Wayan Vota
Wayan Vota starting blogging from before it was a word and now publishes seven different websites and commands LinkedIn, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter from his world headquarters in Washington DC.

About Facebook
Founded in February 2004, Facebook's mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. Anyone can sign up for Facebook and interact with the people they know in a trusted environment. Facebook is a privately held company and is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif.

*To the best of Wayan's knowledge, Mark Zuckerberg has no clue who Wayan Vota is - but he should!

As a new father of a young daughter, the recent Educational Technology Debate on Gender Equality in ICT Education was a very personal for me. I look at the strong women I see in technology and I hope, dream, that some day my Hanalei will be a leader in whatever profession she chooses.

So was with great interest that I read about how Brooke Partridge and Karen Coppock found inspiration for their achievement in ICT. To complete the triptych of women in ICT that I admire, I also interviewed Kristen Peterson, a co-founder of Inveneo and now its CEO.

She's built the organization from just an idea in 2002 to a leading ICT4D organization I so admire, that I pretty much begged her to hire me (and she's now my boss). Here, I interview her about how she came to be in the technology industry:

Its interesting that she noted the importance of parents & mentors, especially her early mentor source: TV. Through this often maligned ICT, Kristin saw powerful women role modes to emulate and give her inspiration. I hope that times have changed enough that my Hanalei can find her own inspiration in real women she sees leading the world.

I'm headed to Africa soon for three weeks of meetings and trainings in Nairobi, Abuja, and Accra for Inveneo. I'll be in each city about a week, and would love to meet up with those in the technology and development fields. Of special interest would be those who are involved with OLPC, 4P Computing, and the health and education aspects of ICT deployment.

How I roll in Africa

See, while I am a fanatic proponent of web-based discourse - I'm publishing at least six different blogs right now - I'm convinced that online discourse is an amplification of offline, in-person meetings.

In fact, I believe that online conversations are not possible without some level of face-to-face discussions between participants. Or as a friend once said "meatspace has the highest bit rate"

I'll be traveling through meatspace in accordance with this general itinerary:

• Nairobi the week of July 27th
• Abuja the week of August 3
• Accra the week of August 10

If you're in any of those cities when I am there, or know someone I should meet, then please let me know via:

• Email: wayan at wayan dot com
• Twitter wayan_vota
• Skype Call: wayan_vota
• Yahoo IM: wayan_vota
• Google Talk: wayan.vota

In April of 2008, I started the Technology Salon as a forum where technology and development professionals could share there opinions on emerging trends in information and communication technologies and international development in an intimate and informal discussion around:

• technology's impact on donor-sponsored technical assistance delivery, and
• private enterprise driven economic development, facilitated by technology.

Now, almost a year later, the Technology Salon is developing into a real community of practice - a network of development and technology professionals who share a common passion for ICT4D, and through regular interaction and communication, are improving their knowledge and implementation expertise in empowering development with technology.

From its inception and reinforced through feedback from its participants, I've found there are three attributes keys to the Technology Salon success and growth:

Hot Topic: The Rise of 4P Computing

1. Conversation, not presentation
   The Technology Salon is primarily a forum for discussion, so presentations are discouraged and Power Point is generally banned. Speakers have only 10-15 minutes at the beginning to present their activity, before participants are free to ask questions, share their own experiences, and drive the conversation in a direction that interests them. This both brings forth the group's knowledge and keeps participants engaged for the full meeting.


2. Intimacy of participants:
   The Technology Salon attendance is capped at 15 people to make sure each participant has the opportunity to speak and share their experience. This cap also encourages pre-registration and subsequent attendance. Last but not least, it allows for quality pre-and post-event networking by participants.


3. Confidentiality of opinions:
   The Technology Salon employs the Chatham House Rule - what is said in its discussions can only be attributed to the Salon itself, not to any specific participant. At the same time, the Salon is not recorded nor the discussion transmitted outside its meeting place. These precautions allow participants to speak their opinions freely, thoughts that would not be shared if participants worried about attribution or out-of-context quoting.

In 2009, I look to improve on the Technology Salon's success while maintaining its three key attributes - conversation, intimacy, privacy. Its goal is to evolve beyond its current exclusive nature into a standard of discourse between technology and development professionals. To achieve this greater scale and legitimacy, and make its impact felt beyond its direct participants, the Technology Salon will need to improve its:

Hot Topic: Computers vs. Cell Phones

1. Event promotion:
   The Technology Salon has grown organically, mainly through word of mouth and a small announce-only email list I manage. It could benefit from a larger promotion in the technology and development space, reaching practitioners who as yet have not heard of it, and attracting higher-profile speakers and attendees. At the same time, this new interested needs to be balanced with the intimacy that differentiates the Salon.


2. Meeting regularity:
   Owing to its informal nature and my hectic travel schedule, the Technology Salon meeting have been ad-hoc - scheduled with speakers are available or a topic of interest presents itself. The only regularity has been its timing - on a Thursday from 8:30am to 10am. For it to become a fixture in professional life, it needs to have a regular schedule, but one that can be balanced against the opportunity for guest speakers and capturing of fast-moving topics.


3. Publication of outcomes:
   Until recently, the Technology Salon has been forcefully off-the-record. Few if any details of the Salon or its conversation points have been documented or shared publicly. For the Salon to have a larger impact, it needs to publish more of its outcomes - be they points of consideration and interest vs. formal pronouncements or conclusions. Yet this grater transparency needs to be balanced carefully with the need for confidentiality for individual participants - which if anything, seems to be the key success metric to date.


4. Sponsorship:
   To date, the Technology Salon has enjoyed informal sponsorship by its host, the UN Foundation. For it to gain greater legitimacy as a professional forum, it needs to have a formal organizational sponsor that allows the Salon affiliation and yet autonomy in topics and conversation - so that the Salon remains driven primarily by its participants.

And in the spirit of its participant-driven organization, I encourage your ideas and suggestions for improvement, especially if they can help me with the four areas I want to focus on for 2009: publicity, regularity, publication, and sponsorship.

Better yet, are there topics of ICT4D interest you'd like to see at an upcoming Salon, where you can also provide the speaker?

Enlightened by OLPC News success

Recently, I've been looking at OLPC News in a whole new light. I'm seeing it as more than just a blog. In fact, when you bring in the OLPC News Forum and how both integrate with the OLPC Wiki, I see a three part system that is the community of practice around the One Laptop Per Child program.

First, a definition of a community of practice:

A community of practice is a group of people who share a common passion for a subject and through regular interaction and communication, improve their knowledge and expertise in the topic area.

Communities of practice differ from teams and networks in that they are bound by a shared desire to learn, and implement the learning through practice.

I believe that the triumvirate of OLPC News, OLPC News Forum, and OLPC Wiki serve to accomplish four goals typical of a community of practice:

Exchange and interpret information between participants

When you look at the success of OLPC News in being an independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion of the "$100 laptop" initiative, with almost 900 posts and 10,000+ comments, you quickly realize that there is a massive exchange and interpretation of information at all levels of ability. Add in the 3,200+ members of the OLPC News Forum and their 25,000 posts and you realize the conversation is greater than any single domain.

Yet, there is not other platform where OLPC insiders like Walter Bender and Mary Lou Jepsen to technology visionaries like Lee Felsenstein and Steve Cisler, to the many thousands of interested and committed supporters can express their thoughts and hope to change others (and their) minds as equals.

Participating in OLPC discussions

Retain the collective knowledge of participants

From the beginning of the One Laptop Per Child initiative, the OLPC Wiki has been the supreme knowledge resource and official knowledge repository for the OLPC community. With sections managed by OLPC directly, yet an open architecture that lets the community publish its own learning's, the Wiki has grown organically to be the final arbitrator of fact from fiction, even if those facts first came from OLPC News instead of OLPC itself.

Even better, community members have made the direct link between the wiki and OLPC News & Forum. Wiki pages have developed directly from OLPC News posts or Forum conversations, and the Wiki also drives new thoughts and ideas for posts and conversations. One of the best examples is How Laptop delivery Breaks, where an OLPC News reader, using the OLPC News Forum to collect and analyze data from the community, created the best known knowledge base around a major OLPC issue.

Raise the competencies of each participant

From the feedback I've received since the inception of OLPC News, I am confident that the conversation on it and the Forum, combined with references to the Wiki, has educated thousands of OLPC supporters on everything from the need for a defined implementation plan, to the actual costs of the OLPC program, to the steps to add Ubuntu on the XO laptop. In the process, the level of conversation has also increased, with basic questions giving way to investigative reports on deployments and intense debates on the basis of education itself.

I think the impact of this discourse is best expressed by Lee Felsenstein:

"[OLPC News] was the missing link we needed - constant journalism and analysis from an expanding group of interested and intelligent (most, at least) readers. Attention integrated over time, with an active audience. I shifted most of my blogging effort over to OLPC, somewhat to the detriment of my own blog but much to the enhancement of my profile."

Lee Felsenstein in OLPC action

Create a shared identity and purpose for participants

A dozen writers, at least 50 contributors, and countless commenters spread across the globe - few even know real names or have seen photos of each other. Yet every single one of these people considers themselves an OLPC supporter in one way or another. This is what OLPC News, Forum and the OLPC Wiki have created. User groups from Washington DC to Vancouver, each with on and offline activities that forge inter-personal links and informal support networks that reinforce the online community.

In fact, participation in OLPC News and Forum has created such strong identities for several participants, they are now recognized experts on topics they once led in obscurity. Personally, my identity with OLPC News has led to opportunities and employment I once thought well beyond my reach.

And that is the whole purpose of a community of practice - to improve your knowledge and expertise in a topic area of interest through regular interaction and communication.