Expression of opinion is one of the things one can do on the Internet. We at LIRNEasia use it to communicate our evidence-based views. Our website is basically a blog. Evan Williams was a co-creator of Blogger and the largest shareholder of Twitter. He believes the model is broken.
I saw first hand the futility of the Mullahs’ efforts to prevent Internet access by Iranian youth when I was in Tehran at the height of the Arab Spring. But what is new is that it’s the Minister of Culture who is highlighting the hypocrisy and futility. According to “The Iran Primer,” a website and publication of the United States Institute of Peace, “Iran is one of the most tech-savvy societies in the developing world, with an estimated 28 million Internet users, led by youth,” the site says. “Iran boasts between 60,000 and 110,000 active blogs, one of the highest numbers in the Middle East, led by youth.” The Iranian authorities admit, reluctantly, that it is almost impossible to rein in Iranians who are eager to know about the outside world and know how to use alternative means to gain access to the web.
At LIRNEasia, we all do our own CSR. Rohan and Harsha are perhaps among the most invited speakers to business conferences. Helani taught Information Systems to Masters students. Call this mine. I do not blog.
As part of IDRC’s announcement of the extension of the think tank initiative to South Asia, a policy research roundtable was organized in Galle on January 21st, 2009. I was asked to speak about innovations related to the research infrastructure. This is what I came up with. The most interesting stuff, in my view, is on the use of the Internet as a dissemination medium, especially with regard to dissemination in the ‘pull mode,’ where we make sure that the information will be available to stakeholders when they want it, rather than when we choose to give it them (the push mode). These slides are at the end of the presentation.