Dave Chakrabarti Footnotes in Technivism

Last week, the City of Chicago issued a draft of an RFP (Request for Proposals) for a planned city-wide wireless internet network. And they want your comments. Yeah, you. Want to save a significant chunk of money every month? Read on...

The Get Illinois Online coalition was formed specifically to address internet access for the state, and is very actively involved in efforts to ensure the Chicago Wifi RFP moves in the right directions.

A friend emailed me today with a link to the Blank Noise Project, a blogging project developed to highlight the concept of "eve teasing" in India.

Eve teasing is the term given to the sexual harassment every Indian woman faces in the streets, every single day, without exception. In my experience, it's more prevalent in major cities than it is in more rural areas, though crimes against women continue to be perpetrated across the country.

I found the Blank Noise Project an extremely practical and interesting approach to a problem that has no easy solutions. Men in India are taught by older male role models, scenes from movies, and by their peers that this kind of harassment is an acceptable form of social behavior. In movies, particularly, it's extremely common for a man with his troupe of merry, shady men to burst into song at the object of his affections, and by the end of the movie (often by the end of the song) they've fallen in love. The problem lies in the social system that has only recently begun to accept a woman's equality in even nominal terms...and much work remains before women are truly seen and treated as equals in the country.

This is an overview of my work with Drupal's Mailhandler module, designed to allow content creation on a Drupal (or CivicSpace)site via email. If we combine this functionality with a mailing list address that's authorized to post content, we have the first steps towards an integrated forum and mailing list system (the next stage would be to develop a system that automatically emails any created content to the mailing list address).

I've been thinking and tinkering with solutions to achieve true forums / listserv integration for a long time now, along with many other techies working to network large groups of people. The idea is that an online forum (or bulletin board) could coexist with a listserv (a traditional mailing list), transparently integrated.