GreenRiver.org News

May
27th

Wed

GreenRiver.org Releases Two New Web Apps

We’ve completed two applications this May. Ben Tucker, our Director of Technology, headed up a small team building The Portfolio Place, a project of the National Center at Northeastern University. This application builds video samples and resumes about professional sign language interpreters. Aaron Michal, the Software Architect here at GreenRIver.org, headed up the team programming a redesigned version of Sitebuilder. Sitebuilder is a tool the Authors Guild developed for authors. It allows authors to build and update their websites.

michaelknapp

Apr
17th

Fri

Social Media for Social Justice?

It’s been a month since the SXSW interactive conference in Austin, and the event continues to gnaw at me. All of us can’t help but notice that the content on facebook, tumblr, and twitter is centered on us: we’re busy tweeting about ourselves, making virtual ‘friends’, accumulating followers, so on. But it’s not until you put 7,000 technologists in a gigantic convention center that you experience the brick and mortar impact of a virtual culture built around self promotion. During my week in Austin, with the exception of Lawrence Lessig’s presentation on political corruption, I didn’t discover any talks about how to use our technology to improve our relationship with one another and our planet. It feels like the social media explosion is about how to focus the amazing benefits of technology on ourselves. This makes it very hard not to be cynical. Building monuments to ourselves, and optimizing their search engine rank, is not the way to create a better future.

michaelknapp

Mar
30th

Mon

An Information Warfare Monitor project of The University of Toronto Munk Center and The SecDev Group have exposed Ghost Net, a cyber espionage network targeting the Tibetan government in exile, as well as many other targets. The report is titled Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network. Kudos to the great work done by Ronald J. Deibert, Greg Walton, Nart Villeneuve and Rafal A. Rohozinski uncovering this network, and to the wisdom of the Dali Lama for initiating their investigation.

michaelknapp

Echospace.org has launched. This web application is used to construct educational programs and resources in place- and culture-based learning for students, teachers and communities. Working with Designer Ellis Neder of Sway Design, we built this Ruby on Rails application for the ECHO partnership. The partnership consists of the Alaska Native Heritage Center, Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, Iñupiat Heritage Center / North Slope Borough. Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, New Bedford ECHO Project, and Peabody Essex Museum. Log in and give the application a try!

michaelknapp

Mar
6th

Fri

Check us out at SXSW 2009!

We’re looking forward to being in Austin Texas for SXSW and to our participation on the panel Remixing the Museum Exhibition with Steven Alvarez (Alaska Native Heritage Center), Jim Forrest (Peabody Essex Museum), and Ellis Neder, (Sway Design). The museum application we’ve coded will launch at the conference.

michaelknapp

Jan
27th

Tue