"For fifteen years, the answer to financial inclusion was more innovation" www.semafor.com/article/08/0...
View: A trust gap could unravel Nigeria’s financial inclusion winsNearly 33 million bank accounts sit dormant — a sign that access without confidence doesn’t hold.www.semafor.com"Sound waves built new relations of solidarity because they could not be confined within colonial borders" onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Sonic Cartographies of InternationalismHow does sound chart a different story of anticolonialism? Sound could perhaps draw out another map of space in history. Mirroring the form of sound waves, this article travels across borders, follow...onlinelibrary.wiley.com“It takes considerable economic, social, and cultural capital simply to inhabit those spaces. … If we truly want inclusive AI communities, they cannot simply globalize Silicon Valley’s conversations.” restofworld.org/2026/global-...
The global grassroots gatherings trying to humanize the AI boomLocal tech groups in Kenya, India, and the U.S. are building communities and conversations around AI, but also face questions about privilege and reach.restofworld.org
One of my smartest friends pointed out that an important assumption in this post was already wrong. So I've added an update at the top.
Tom LoosemoreI've written a long blog post about AI Agents and the need for those running services to prepare - technically, operationally, commercially, strategically, legally and in terms of policy. AI Agents could be a properly huge deal. There. I wrote it. loosemore.com/2026/08/04/k...
"The larger ambition is to become a “Mondragón of Music: a constellation of community-owned ventures that form the foundation of an alternative economy owned by artists and workers" www.thenews.coop/subvert-co-o...
Subvert co-operative: A future ‘Mondragón of music’?A co-operatively owned music platform has launched this year – with over 20,000 members and a vision to become a ‘Mondragon of music’www.thenews.coopThe question is not whether an AI system can produce grammatically acceptable Swahili, but whether it reasons in Swahili, or merely wears it reamby.substack.com/p/kelvin-rom...
Kelvin Roman on Why Context Belongs at the Foundation of AIThe African Innovators Series(TAIS): Tech, Data, and AI Changing the Gamereamby.substack.comWhen creating Japan's map of members of parliament, I started by consulting ChatGPT & Claude: "I want to create something like this; is it possible?"... AI didn't make me an engineer. But it has given people who previously had no choice the first step note.com/kokkai_map/n...
【登壇全文】誰が来ても、誰が去っても、時計は同じ速さで進んでいる——国会議員マップに込めた考え｜国会議員マップ【公式】デジタル民主主義サミット2026でお話ししたこと 先日、デジタル民主主義サミット2026に登壇し、国会議員マップを作った経緯や、私がこのサイトを通じて実現したいことについて、お話しする機会をいただきました。 私は普段、建設会社を経営しながら、工事現場で仕事をしています。 政治の専門家ではありません。 プログラミングの専門家でもありません。 人前で話すことにも慣れていないので、当日はかなり...note.com
This is fascinating: Southeast Asians in the Arctic—How Filipinos and Thais are reshaping Greenland. www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGkF...
Southeast Asians in the Arctic: How Filipinos and Thais are reshaping GreenlandYouTube video by CNAwww.youtube.comThe outputs of meaningmaking now resemble meaningmaking so closely that it’s easy to let the model make the calls, and not notice the muscle of agency atrophying, until one day you reach for it and it’s gone vaughntan.org/aimirror
AI is a mirror, not our rival - Vaughn Tantl;dr: Now that AI tools can generate many outputs that look like they were made by humans, we begin to fear that there’s nothing exclusively humanvaughntan.orgWhat does scientific progress sound like? blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...
What does scientific progress sound like? - LSE ImpactIs science becoming less innovative and disruptive? Listening to the data could provide more nuanced answers.blogs.lse.ac.ukTo save expertise, we need to resist technocracy. In the case of int'l orgs, this requires that we demythologise their origins, that we acknowledge they have never been independent from politics, and that we refrain from technocratic wishful thinking aeon.co/essays/are-w...
aeon.co"The early lesson from these pilots in Brazil & Urugay is simple: the technical architecture can make data accessible to a model, but only the people who understand the data can make the answers trustworthy" govinsider.asia/intl-en/arti...
Using MCPs to close the trust gap between LLMs and open data portalsPilots with the Uruguay and Brazil governments showed how a Model Context Protocol (MCP) provide a a structured way for AI to tap into up-to-date and actual data from the open portals, instead of rely...govinsider.asiaHere Taiwan's mirror question. Most identity systems ask: How can the institution verify the person? Systems that earn belief also ask: How can the person verify the institution? Any system that demands belief before inspection has reversed the relationship cyberambassador.tw/trust-by-des...
Trust by Design — Keynote + Q&AA trustworthy system does not demand belief. It earns the right to be believed — including the complete live Q&A.cyberambassador.tw[On the myth of evidence based policy] "The decision to proceed with the policy (or abandon it) was, in every case, not primarily, or even largely, dictated by a dispassionate review of high-quality research evidence" iea.org.uk/publications...
Inside the Sausage Factory“Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made.” – Attributed to Otto von Bismarck SUMMARY … Continue reading "Inside the Sausage Factory"iea.org.ukAI inherits – and often exacerbates – the same scaling problems that have long undermined development programmes, from One Laptop per Child to smokeless stoves voxdev.org/topic/techno...
How AI can put 20 years of development evidence to workA new playbook from J-PAL argues that AI's value in development lies not in the technology itself but in how well it is grafted onto decades of existing evidence about what improves lives.voxdev.orgThe dams Cameroon dreamed of for fifty years are built and running. What blocks their megawatts is everything downstream: wires, transformers, unpaid bills, and the current that leaks away before it arrives africanarguments.org/2026/08/came...
Cameroon Has the Power. It Cannot Deliver It | African ArgumentsThe dams Cameroon dreamed of for fifty years are built and running. What blocks their megawatts is everything downstream: wires, transformers, unpaid bills, and the current that leaks away before it a...africanarguments.org2 years later, the Innovation and Knowledge sharing unit was shut down. No successor unit, no new name... The mandate and support functions for questioning and adjusting the way the public sector works and innovates were slowly diminishing lenekrogh.substack.com/p/artefact-1...
Artefact #1: The room that could only be one thingWhat a flexible room taught us, before it stopped being onelenekrogh.substack.comMasks & other “pagan” artworks were seized from the villages, burned, or thrown into the rivers. Their interpretations are therefore constrained by the near-complete erasure of the cultural traditions in which they were produced www.africanhistoryextra.com/p/the-white-...
The White Masks of Gabon: “Foreign” symbolism in Traditional African sculpture.Among the most refined works of African art are the distinctive white masks of southern Gabon in Central Africa.www.africanhistoryextra.com
Unlike that of the rest of southeast Asia, Pakistan's gas demand has been falling. Pakistan's solar boom is partly attributable to excellent do-it-yourself videos on Tiktok and youtube, and partly to two other factors, says Zainaab Basil in an interview with BNEF. www.bnef.com/insights/40017