A nonprofit organization that runs mHealth programs in 20 different countries has started a campaign that collects old cell phones and recycles them, using the profits to fund their humanitarian work. Hope Phones is one of those classic kill-two-birds-with-one-stone organizations: tackling the problem of cellphone waste and fundraising for their humanitarian mission at the same time.

The growing popularity of social media in Cambodia, not as entertainment but as a source for alternative news, is threatening the established government leaders and their state-controlled media narratives. In the national elections this June the opposition pulled in 55 seats to the ruling Cambodian People's Party 68, in large part due to the participation of plugged-in and social media-savvy youths. More recently, the government has had their state-approved media account of a November clash between striking garment workers and police refuted by videos uploaded to the Internet and spread through social media.

The war-ravaged province of South Kivu sits at the eastern border of the DRC, beside the stem of Tanganyika, an African Great Lake. Boris Weber, team leader for the World Bank's ICT4Gov, explains to techPresident that after years of conflict and violence in the province, the provincial government was simply not sending the money allocated to local governments. “Partly, they just didn’t have any incentive to send it. Also, they had no way of knowing and tracking how their money was going to be spent.” The World Bank’s participatory budgeting program, piloted in 2012, aimed to resolve that dilemma by giving those in Bukavu a direct say in how they wanted to see their budget spent; therefore creating the accountability needed to incentivize the provincial government to send money down the line. But locals view the program with a skeptic eye and ask, is it enough? Read More

Last month, Microsoft India launched Microsoft CityNext. CityNext is an initiative in which city residents and government officials alike use technology to improve and grow their city. One blogger called it the “Real SimCity for India.” One of the biggest challenges on India's plate right now is how to update aging infrastructure to cope with expected city growth in the next two decades.

They are rebels with a cause, fighting for open science. Each of them do it in their own way. Still, they all have a common goal: to change the way in which science is practiced, the way its results are distributed and even who gets to participate. It’s a loose movement made up of a new breed of scientists such as the Italian veterinary virologist Ilaria Capua, who challenged the World Health Organization’s policies on sharing data and created a global consortium of scientists who sought to foster international sharing of avian influenza data. Capua’s stand was an act of rebellion against institutional science, a victory for open biology and the start of a new type of scientific research enabled by the Internet and ICT tools, through which international cooperation could be reached by online data sharing. And yes, it was a way of hacking biology.

The Social Media Tracking Centre (SMTC) is an election monitoring process that pulls in information from multiple data streams—Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and blogs and websites—and can be used to generate visualizations and other analytics. It was first launched to monitor Nigeria's elections in April 2011, and then subsequently used in Liberia, Ghana and Kenya.

According to the UN’s Millenium Development Goals website, primary education enrollment in developing regions reached 90 percent in 2010. And still, 123 million young people around the world lack basic reading and writing skills. Various efforts are underway to improve basic education. What role might open data play?

Don't trust everything you find on the Internet.

In the midst of the terrible drought that struck the Indian state Maharashtra in March 2012, a political scandal broke and revealed a top minister was helping divert water from farmers to power plants. Greenpeace India launched an awareness building campaign on May 22 by unfurling a 250 foot banner that read “Water For Farmers / Not Power Plants” over a dam. Although an online petition garnered support from urbanites, Greenpeace India needed to reach people in rural areas, the ones hurt most by the drought. The Digital Mobilisation Lab at Greenpeace (MobLab) blog took a critical look at what worked and what didn't, and interactive voice response comes out a winner.