I packed up most of my desk today, bringing home my treasured IBM T-ad penguin, the gift I was given during Diwali by the Novell Bangalore team, my brand-new signed Kernel Love (I’m in the acknowledgements! woohoo!) and other assorted bits of stuff. Intellectually, I know this is the right thing for me, but emotionally, it is hard :/
On a brighter note, I went to a small small lunch presentation by Daoud Kuttab of ammannet at Harvard Law’s Berkman Center. Was really quite fascinating. Kuttab is working on building some of the basic bits of democracy from the ground up in Jordan by using internet radio to create an open, fair media. It is still oddly restricted in some ways by the political climate, and of course it is limited in distribution by economics and other factors, but it is rebroadcastable (which some Palestinian stations have done, ‘leaking’ it over the border to Jordan) and gave them the leverage to help push for private radio station licensing in Jordan- which hadn’t happened until now. Anyway, sounds like an incredible effort to be involved in the birth of. Glad I went. I’ll probably end up taking Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control at Harvard Extension this semester, we’ll see.