Archive for the 'Bainbridge Island' Category

A landslide victory for Barack Obama?

Published by
Tobias Eigen
October 21, 2008 in Bainbridge Island, Politics, Create Peace, Democracy and Seattle. 0 Comments

 I would love to assume that Obama will win this election in a landslide - but I am uncertain enough of our political system to fear the worst. The MoveOn.org campaign has been pinging me daily to ask for volunteer support for Obama in Seattle and on the peninsula, and they are planning a massive get out the vote effort here. Click here to sign up - or read on for some compelling reasons to do so!

TOP 5 REASONS OBAMA SUPPORTERS SHOULDN’T REST EASY

1. The polls may be wrong. This is an unprecedented election. No one knows how racism may affect what voters tell pollsters—or what they do in the voting booth. And the polls are narrowing anyway. In the last few days, John McCain has gained ground in most national polls, as his campaign has gone even more negative.

2. Dirty tricks. Republicans are already illegally purging voters from the rolls in some states. They’re whipping up hysteria over ACORN to justify more challenges to new voters. Misleading flyers about the voting process have started appearing in black neighborhoods. And of course, many counties still use unsecure voting machines.

3. October surprise. In politics, 15 days is a long time. The next McCain smear could dominate the news for a week. There could be a crisis with Iran, or Bin Laden could release another tape, or worse.

4. Those who forget history… In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote after trailing by seven points in the final days of the race. In 1980, Reagan was eight points down in the polls in late October and came back to win. Races can shift—fast!

5. Landslide. Even with Barack Obama in the White House, passing universal health care and a new clean-energy policy is going to be hard. Insurance, drug and oil companies will fight us every step of the way. We need the kind of landslide that will give Barack a huge mandate.

If you agree that we shouldn’t rest easy, please sign up to volunteer at your local Obama office by clicking here.

OLPC Update - new upgrade makes computers work better! XOs available on Amazon in Nov!

Published by
Tobias Eigen
October 20, 2008 in Bainbridge Island, Free/Libre Open Source Software, OLPC and Education. 0 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve written about OLPC computers. There is some news now though - which I thought was well worth sharing. See below and click the links to read the two articles from olpcnews.com about the new XO upgrade that makes the computers actually work properly and the fine news that Amazon is going to be selling OLPC computers starting sometime in November 2008.

One reason for sharing the news is that, as our lives settle down this fall, I’d like OLPC friends on Bainbridge island to start organising ‘OLPC play dates’ - we just need to get them in the calendar and perhaps rotate through homes so we can spread the joy of hosting them. Please ping me if you’d be interested in hosting the first one.

Down the pipe, if enough people on Bainbridge have them and want to enable their children to play with them together, I’d like to explore possibilities for working with the schools to organise more formal sessions… like chess camp. We could combine upgrading, playing and learning about how these machines are used by poor children in the third world. Let me know if you have ideas or willingness to help out in this area.

Now on to the great OLPC news -

It is remarkably easy to install the upgrade, and well worth it. You should carry out this upgrade immediately - I’ll gladly help.. let me know if you need it.The procedure is basically this: download two files from the OLPC Wiki at http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Release_notes/8.2.0 to an empty USB key, press all four game keys on the XO and plug it in, then turn your computer on. Within 5 minutes you’ll have the upgrade completed (warning: your old setup will be completely wiped).

Poking around the OLPC wiki, I also found a number of very nice puzzles, games and interactive activities that my children have been getting alot out of since I upgraded their laptops a few days ago.

So it begins again! There is an opportunity approaching fast to expand our network of friends with these wonderful machines. Tell your friends that it will indeed be possible to get these in time for Christmas, and we can expand our circle of friends that are playing with them. The http://olpcnews.com website is a good place to monitor for news.

Also please be sure to participate in the xobi@googlegroups.com / http://groups.google.com/group/xobi mailing list so we can keep in touch and help each other with our XOs. If you know of others on the island or vicinity that you think would be interested in joining, please feel free to forward this on to them.

I, Tobias Eigen, am blogging about Africa at Kabissa.org

Published by
Tobias Eigen
August 20, 2008 in Africa, Civil Society, Kabissa, Bainbridge Island, Web 2.0, Social Networking, WordPress, Blogging, Free/Libre Open Source Software, ICT4D, Drupal, web2fordev and freecycle. 0 Comments

Visitors to saidia.org may be wondering what is happening here - not much it seems. I set up this blog some time ago as an experiment, to learn about the ins and outs of blogging and to learn about the free and open source WordPress blogging tool that makes this particular blog possible. My reasons for carrying out the experiment were personal but also related to Kabissa, the organization I started 9 years ago to enable me to be a reliable technology partner for African civil society. The Kabissa team was exploring the participatory web, also known as Web 2.0, and the blogosphere was - and remains - an important part of that, so having some of us blogging was an important part of our research. Outcomes from that along the way have been a research paper available on the Kabissa wiki, a “wikified” version of Kabissa’s Time To Get Online training manual in English, French and Arabic, and of course various articles, interviews and presentations we gave at Netsquared and Web2fordev. These are floating in the blogosphere and hopefully useful to folks seeking to explore the power of Web 2.0 in civil society no matter where in the world.

In February 2008, Kabissa watchers will have noted the launch of our new online community website at http://www.kabissa.org including blogs for staff of all 1200+ member organizations. This includes me! I am now blogging there very regularly, along with Sokari Ekine, Kabissa’s in-house blogger and community coordinator, and a range of very idealistic and courageous people working in African civil society. Check out the blog at http://www.kabissa.org/blog

Thanks to the Drupal open source content management system we are using, the site has some very powerful functionality we are exploring that is relevant and useful for African organizations. This includes a granular notification system allowing registered site users to subscribe to posts by specific bloggers or containing specific tags or a range of other combinable filtering methods. We also are able to do special mailings containing opportunities and timely announcements addressed to a subset of our membership (eg in a specific city or region, or working in a specific thematic area) and then to generate reports on the effectiveness of the mailings. Our monthly member newsletter contains a selection of our best content from the past month along with a member spotlight and “Dear Mimi” Internet advice column. One of the niftiest new tools we are playing with is a blog-by-email gizmo, allowing our members to send email to a specific email address to be posted (by them) on the blog, or to reply to notifications to add comments to blog posts.

So this is the long way for me to tell you quite simply - looking for posts by Tobias Eigen about tech in Africa? Go to http://www.kabissa.org/blog/1 to see them! While you are there, please go ahead and sign up and join the Kabissa community, and if you have something to say please start blogging yourself and participate in blog discussions with others that share your passion about African civil society and the role technology can play.

And as for saidia.org - I like having my own personal blog where I can speak out on my own recognizance without concern for the bylaws of Kabissa or any other organization, and also talk about any topic that spurs me to post.

For example, I have been mulling over a decision to leave freecycle Bainbridge Island, a really neat Yahoo group community I have been part of for three years now. This would be a big decision for me but if I take it I don’t want to do so alone - thanks to my blog I wouldn’t have to. If I do leave, then I would post my explanation on the blog to try to start a discussion in my community about it so I can understand better how best I personally and we as an island community can keep items out of the landfill that others might still be able to use.

Civil Society, Open Source and Me: what is your favorite book?

Published by
Tobias Eigen
July 10, 2007 in Africa, Civil Society, nptech, Bainbridge Island and Free/Libre Open Source Software. 4 Comments

GNU/Linux loyalty. Photo by Frederick “FN” Noronha. Creative Commons. Attribution. Some rights retained. 2006.If there is one book that needs to be in the local public library on the importance of Open Source in Civil Society, what would it be? Add your comments to this post.

I am open to all suggestions - I just want to know why. Special points for books that talk specifically about Africa, and do a good job explaining what Civil Society is all about. The most suitable book will be purchased for the Bainbridge Island library by the local Rotary Club in my name, so I want to be able to read it and recommend it to friends and neighbors that want to know more about why I do what I do in Africa.

Update: as luck would have it, various things seem to be broken on my blog including commenting. I’m trying to fix it - in the meantime, please email me your suggestions and I’ll post them here later. Thanks!
Sorry for the confusion for those looking for this site earlier today and getting error messages or blank screens when submitting your comments. I had been planning to move saidia.org, but the errors I was getting at the old place this morning precipitated things. Please go ahead and add your book suggestions now!

Africa Source Photo: GNU/Linux loyalty. Photo by Frederick “FN” Noronha. Creative Commons. Attribution. Some rights retained. 2006.

Upside down tomato gardening

Published by
Tobias Eigen
April 11, 2007 in Bainbridge Island and Gardening. 1 Comment


Originally uploaded by thomas pix.

I absolutely love this idea! Probably totally obvious to many but not to me! I’m gonna try this.

Thomas’s instructions for making it out of an old bucket, newspaper and some seeds are here, and he links to more instructions at seedsofknowledge.com.

I did make the upside down thingy on my own. Took a standard 5-gallon bucket and drilled a 2.5 inch (55 mm?) hole in the center of the bottom of the bucket. Lined the bottom of the bucket with newspaper (you can use a coffee filter, too) and cut an X in the bottom where it aligned with the hole in the bucket.

Suspended the bucket between two chairs so as to be able to get the plant in there, then fed the tomato seedling through the bottom so the roots were in the interior of the bucket. Packed some peat moss around the roots and then topped it off with potting soil within an inch of the top of the bucket.

Water liberally and away it grows! You can’t see it in the pic, but I’ve planted parsley in the top of the bucket (you can plant basil, too) to complement the tomato. They grow well together.


Men change diapers too

Published by
Tobias Eigen
March 21, 2007 in Bainbridge Island, Politics and Gender. 1 Comment

Men change diapers too

OK, this article in the Christian Science Monitor makes me very happy. :-) Vienna gives a gender change to its signs and I think it’s a wonderful idea that other communities - including Bainbridge island - should follow. I can totally relate to a young father interviewed for the article:

Mendel, however, thinks the campaign is progressive. If he needed to change a baby’s diaper and saw the new sign, he says, “I would feel 100 percent integrated.” Overwhelmingly, diaper-changing facilities are found in women’s restrooms.

There are plenty of places for me to change diapers around here - though I have done my share of sitting on the toilet seat with a messy diaper in my lap. What I like about changing the signs is that it makes me - like Mendel - feel more normal in that role when I’m out and about with my munchkins.

The message I particular appreciated is the notion that it’s a matter of taking the issue of Gender Mainstreaming to the people, described on Wikipedia thus:

Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women’s as well as men’s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.

In Vienna they are seeking to confront expectations about gender roles and shock people - I like it!

What it reminds me of also is that we don’t always have to wait for the politicians to create change for us - here are a couple very visible signs of gender backwardness in my own neighborhood that I have been watching and am hoping to see change:

  • Daycare provider forms have “mother” and “father” fields to fill out
  • Nursery school parents organize “Mom’s night out”
  • Local grocery store has a reserved parking space for pregnant women and young mothers, but not for young fathers
  • The most popular parents e-mail list on the island is called bainbridgeislandmoms

Gentle nudging has already fixed the Mom’s night out. :-) Let’s see how we do on the others.

Introducing Kabissa to the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island

Published by
Tobias Eigen
February 21, 2007 in Africa, Kabissa and Bainbridge Island. 1 Comment

IMG_0433.JPG

Yesterday I was invited to give a talk about Kabissa to the Rotary Club of Bainbridge Island. It was a pleasure to participate in one of their weekly meetings and to learn more about how the Club functions and contributes to the community.

Much to my surprise, the Bainbridge Island Rotary Club is very engaged in charitable work in Africa, in particular in a district of northern Uganda where they are carrying out an ambitious well digging program called the Uganda Clean Water Project.

I continue to be struck by the number of connections there are between folks living on this island and the African continent.

Africa Potluck with Kabissa on Bainbridge Island

Published by
Tobias Eigen
February 21, 2007 in Africa, Kabissa and Bainbridge Island. 0 Comments

Africa Potluck with Kabissa on Bainbridge Island

On February 3rd, 2007, Judy Brown and Tobias Eigen hosted a well attended “Africa Potluck” on Bainbridge Island. In this photo, Liz Trautman, Kabissa Member Relations Manager, tells stories about the important work of Kabissa members and their use of Kabissa services and programs towards their mission.

 

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