Written English Version: During this holiday season, many people take the time to reconnect with their family. This is true with deaf people, too. Yet for a large number of deaf people, their families are hearing. The majority of interaction is likely to be spoken, and the deaf individual is unavoidably left out of them. This situation is certainly true for me. This situation is not to be pitied, but simply is. What this highlights to me is not the barriers inherent here, but the importance in getting through and overcoming them. How communication is utterly important in maintaining...
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Idea Lab is a group blog by innovators who are reinventing community news for the Digital Age.
Each Idea Lab blogger is a winner of the Knight News Challenge grant to reshape community news.
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How Community Radio Becomes the 'Voice of the Village'
It all started in the Tetherless Computing Lab at the University of Waterloo. Our research group led by Prof. S. Keshav prototyped an extremely low-cost software and hardware platform called KioskNet, for providing Internet connectivity in rural areas. The first pilot deployment was done in May 2006 in the village of Anandpuram in the Vizag district of Andhra Pradesh (India), and has since been followed by deployments in West Bengal (India) and Ghana (Africa). But we soon realized that providing a communication infrastructure to rural areas is not even half of the story. It is useless unless appropriate applications are...
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13 Ways to Talk to a Programmer
[With apologies to Wallace Stevens.] If you decide to venture beyond talking about how your news organization's site should work into actually changing how it does work, there's one essential skill you'll have to learn: how to talk to a programmer. Most nonprogrammers have no idea how to communicate their idea for a new feature or a whole new website in a way that's going to be useful to the person who's actually building that site. Here are thirteen tips to get you started on the road to fluency: Learn how to write a spec. One of the biggest frustrations...
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Signal-to-Noise and Related Content
Related Content: If you're in California's bay area, don't miss Drupal Day on Friday May 3, a special open session of NewsTools2008's mixing up journalists, technologists, entrepreneurs. Journalism's charge is to increase the signal to noise ratio. Some commentators on stuff, including my favorite marketing guru, say the irrelevant noise has begun encroaching on the signal that matters, after some years of improvement driven by online tools. I wish I could tell you the easy answer. I can't. I just know that the faltering signal is a problem. As mentioned by IdeaLab bloggers and elsewhere, solving this problem is a...
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It sounds like journalists today also have to be marketers. They have to know who they are trying to reach, and... to pitch their stories to a broader audience.
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