Blog
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The End of Paper: Interview with Richard Padley of Semantico
At the 2010 Tools of Change for Publishing conference in Frankfurt, we met Richard Padley of Semantico. He spoke at the conference about mobile platforms from the perspective of publishers faced with multiple delivery models including apps and the web. We started off our interview with Richard Padley by asking: What does the Red Cross…
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Katja Mruck on starting a peer-reviewed open access journal
In 2001, Katja Mruck started a peer-reviewed multilingual open access journal FQS – Forum on qualitative social research. In this interview, recorded at the Third Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Berlin, Germany (28 September 2011), she explains what ingredients were needed to make the journal’s launch a success. Mruck is the Coordinator open access and…
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Masooda Bano: the impact of international aid on volunteering and development
The negative impact of aid on development has been a recurring and controversial subject in recent years. Drawing on her extensive research in this field, Masooda Bano asserts that there is a strong negative correlation between foreign aid, and voluntary organisations’ ability to mobilise communities. Masooda Bano is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Department…
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Opening access to Red Cross knowledge: an interview with John Willinsky, Public Knowledge Project, Stanford University
Why are scholarly journals not obsolete? How does a journal contribute to learning? Why would the Red Cross need a scholarly journal? A lively conversation with John Willinsky from the Public Knowledge Project, recorded at the Third Conference on Scholarly Publishing in Berlin, Germany, on 28 September 2011.
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Chronology of a new transit camp on the Tunisian border (Part 2 of 2): Going live
Part 1: Like clockwork | Part 2: Going Live 10:45 – The distribution of relief items starts At the far end of the camp, four volunteers led by Arturo, a logistics specialist from the French Red Cross, get basic relief items ready for distribution. The items are NFIs, as we call them, or non-food items.…
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Chronology of a new transit camp on the Tunisian border (Part 1 of 2)
Part 1: Like clockwork | Part 2: Going Live 06:00 – Base camp wakes up Base camp wakes up. A cool breeze has risen along with the bright sun, whipping up sand and dust. The first crews of volunteers move out to the transit camp at Ras Jedir. Some of the volunteers, like 32-year-old Moaz, have…
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Ras Jedir: feverish early days and freezing nights
ZERZES, 4 April 2011 — “We stopped everything we were doing”, exclaims Mahfoud Bessah, the 39-year-old community-based programme coordinator at IFRC’s regional delegation in Tunis. On 21 February, he headed over to the eastern border immediately upon hearing the first reports of people crossing over. The Tunisian Red Crescent and UNHCR were already discussing how…
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TOC Frankfurt Ignite! Presentation: Of Emergencies, E-Books, and Literacy
In this session, Reda Sadki, will examine his own organisation’s non-profit publishing activities. With 750 publications given away each year in print and on the web, he has initiated an effort to rewire a traditional publishing workflow into a digital one, including the use of XML for layout automation, print-on-demand (POD) and e-books. Reda Sadki is…
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What is a system?
Donella H. Meadows wrote the following simple, eloquent description of what is a system: “A system isn’t just any old collection of things. A system must consist of three kinds of things: elements, interconnections, and a function or purpose. A system is an interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that…
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Survivre au sida: Celebrating life to fight racism, poverty, and disease in the poor suburbs of Paris
Click on the audio player’s right arrow to listen to the radio show. Arab and African families were hit hard by the AIDS epidemic in France. They were amongst the first to be diagnosed in the early 1980s. The conjunction of poverty and racism then resulted in thousands of infections that were preventable and deaths…
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