events

The "NPO Information Technology Usage" lecture tour is currently underway in Taiwan, offering free training to NPO staff. Full-day training sessions will be held in four locations across the island, starting with Taibei on April 30 and ending with Hualien on May 20. This is the third year that this event has been held.

The event is organized by United Way, the Frontier Foundation, and the Microsoft "Unlimited Potential" Community Technology Skills Program. See the announcement (link in Chinese) on the Frontier Foundation's website for more information.

CPRsouth is calling for papers related to ICT regulation and policy in the Global South, for inclusion in its fifth international conference, to be held in Xi'an in December 2010.

The deadline for abstracts is 25 April 2010. For more information, visit the website cprsouth.org. The conference is organized by LIRNEasia, in collaboration with the Xi'an University of Post and Telecommunications.

On Thursday evening, the Storygarden Cafe will host a free NGO Salon featuring Eric Xu, the founder of Ecauses.org (link in Chinese) and a prominent advocate of internet technology for the nonprofit sector. Eric will talk about the phenomenon of "Slacktivism", which Wikipedia defines as:

...a pejorative term that describes "feel-good" measures, in support of an issue or social cause, that have little or no practical effect other than to make the person doing it feel satisfaction. The acts also tend to require little personal effort from the slacktivist.

The talk will be in Chinese. For further details, see the announcement on the China Development Brief website.

An announcement on the NGOCN website (link in Chinese) invites Beijing NGOs with an interest in ICT to attend the opening ceremony of the Intel "New World" Award. Since there are only 20 seats reserved for NGO representatives, people interested in attending the ceremony are asked to register for the event in advance, via the NGOCN website.

The "New World" Award, which will run from January to April this year, seeks to identify nonprofit projects which use ICT in successful and innovative ways, in areas such as organizational development, knowledge management, financial management, or project management.

Tomorrow evening, the Storygarden Cafe in Beijing will host a free NGO salon, featuring talks by Wang Bo, a documentary photographer whose recent work has focused on poor students in Western China, and Emyln Phillips, a lecturer at the International College of Beijing with interests in knowledge management and e-learning.

Wang Bo will share some of his experiences, and photographs. His work has led to the creation of the Westup website, which encourages donations to assist poor students to continue their studies. (Talk in Chinese only).

Emyln Phillips will talk about the open-source e-learning software Moodle, the easy-to-use SMS messaging system FrontlineSMS, which is aimed specifically at non-profit organizations, and also the Ushahidi platform, a tool for gathering and reporting crisis information from the community in real-time. (Talk in English, with Chinese translation).

The Storygarden Cafe is located close to the Xizhimen Subway Station; for directions consult this map. Tomorrow's event is one in a series of regular NGO salons held at the cafe. The original announcement on the Storygarden Cafe blog is here (link in Chinese).