Projects

This page contains information about the various extracurricular projects I have been and I am currently involved in, in various capacities.  Some of them are more serious and more professionally oriented, others are mostly for fun.  I tried to organize everything in a more or less chronological order.

Ongoing

• “The Human Network” – My oldest and dearest initiative of all.  It was started by a  group of friends as a simple mailing list aimed at keeping in touch with all the talented young people we have met through at the ITU Telecom Youth Forums.  It is constantly growing as a community and has evolved into a space where people bring ideas and seek collaborations on various ICT-related projects.  This initiative has gone through some ups and downs, but currently there is a dedicated group of people working on taking it to the next logical step.  Updates will follow.

• “Internet Governance IL” – The aim of this project is to create a resource about the Internet Governance debate in Hebrew and within the Israeli context.  It is inspired by the Internet Governance Project, which brought together a group of academics who are active players in the debate, and by the Diplo Foundation’s capacity building program, which highlights the need for local capacity building and, where possible, in a native language.  Hopefully, this site will become not just a repository of knowledge, but also a place for updates on Internet Governance related news and a space for discussion of opinions on the subject. 
  I am actively seeking collaborators for this initiative.

• “Cooking Travels” – Both Veronica and I love cooking and we really love trying out new recipes.  What is particularly interesting is exploring new smells and tastes that are coming from cultures other than the one you currently live in or the one you grew up with.  When you take somebody’s family recipe and try making it, you are learn so much about the people, about their culture, and about their life.  So, this project is about traveling through cooking.  We want to create a space where on the one hand, friends can share their traditional recipes and, on the other hand, try making food from other cultural backgrounds.
  I had an earlier attempt to do something similar, but it failed.  This time we are trying to do this differently and make it into a community with multiple contributors and multiple curious people willing to try out new things and share their experiences.  So, if you are up to it, please drop me a line.

• “CommFree” – This is an idea I had in the Fall of 2007 about spending a day a month away from MIST.  There is more explanation in the link, but the basic idea is to rest and to put our daily use of technology in perspective.  I have been practicing it since then, even though in a not very systematic manner.  At the beginning I was posting updates about how I spent my ComFree days, but as time went by, those updates became less frequent and as of today I usually don’t post about that.  Nevertheless, if you know about similar initiative, I would love to hear about them.  Thanks!

Past

• “Cornell OLPC” – This is a group of Cornell undergraduate students who in Spring 2009 won a grant from the OLPC project to go to Senegal and deploy 100 XO laptops in a local community.  I helped them with some advice, but they did all the work and I was really glad to see how they succeed despite the numerous difficulties they have encountered on their way.  If you are interested in details, I suggest you read their blog.

• “See the world through their eyes” – In Spring 2009 I participated in Lenovo and Microsoft organized competition for photography projects ideas.  The great flexibility for the proposed ideas on the one hand and the high stakes on the other, convinced me to give it a shot.  The first stage of the competition involved popular vote and it was the first time I tried leveraging my online networks for something that I thought was worth their attention.  I got over 260 votes, absolute majority from people I knew, which was really heartwarming.  Unfortunately, it was not enough to make it to the next stage, but the experience itself was interesting.

• “Digital Bridge – Israel” – In the year 2004, soon after I and two of my friends have participated in the different ITU Youth Fora, we pooled off a digital literacy project for kids in the disadvantaged ares of Tel-Aviv.  We worked with two school, one Jewish and one Arabic, in Jaffa, teaching the kids basic computer skills and some HTML.  You can find more about what we did and what came out of it in the link.  Unfortunately, we did not create a sustainable model for this project to continue, but we learned a lot and we served as an inspiration for similar projects in other parts of the world.
  Here is a short clip about this project:

If you find any of this interesting or thought provoking, please send me your views and suggestions.