Internet interventions

These are roughly organized potential Internet (and technology) based interventions, that should be considered in combinatin.

Access and inclusion

Access to internet through hotspots, free wireless (Île sans fil), cellular networks
Access to specialized software - business, publishing, analysis, communications
Refurbished computers
Orientation and training
Cloud computing - infrastructure (file storage, word processing, etc) based on Internet servers rather than computer applications.
Free/open source, creative commons, terms of use - legal means to make data or applications restricted or freely re-usable and leverage-able for successive projects
Anonymity and privacy
Accessibility - Making information available to users with different requirements - good basic designs, use of standards, enablers such as screen readers
Transparency and accountability
Individually selective publishing of data
Crowdsourcing - opening up project development to the general or selected public through common interest or contests
Adapt content and software to local languages and cultures, plain language

Mashups - combining data sources and views - for example, http://www.housingmaps.com combines the rental data from craigslist with the map interface of Google Maps. This model can be easily used for any geographically situated data.

Agents, software that can collect, analyze and react to external data and events
Liberation - making content that should (eg, government, personal health, etc) be available for re-use available - eg theyworkforyou and publicwhip which “scrape” government published UK parliament proceedings and breaks them down by member, votes, and other factors allowing for direct linking, commenting, analysis, and general reuse of data

Collaborative information creation - http://www.wikipedia.org , http://www.everything2.com - Wikis and rich text editors
Semantic content - http://edition.cnn.com/2008/TECH/12/17/db.semanticweb/ - more finely specific content that can be aggregated, queried and reused reliably across the internet - clearinghouse for reusable data?
Data sovereignty - issues around a government or institution (eg hospital) working with a foreign company (eg the US government by law gains access to data HP provides support for)
Standards - formal and ad-hoc - use of proprietary (Microsoft) document formats by public institutions, that require recipients to buy (or steal, through piracy) particular, expensive applications, especially when they are not suitable (eg document doesn't need to be edited, so use PDF, text or HTML) or free alternatives exist (OpenOffice), making data easily reusable
Distributed problem solving - use small amounts of support from many individuals (or computers) to solve larger problems - eg Gutenberg Project to type in important public domain books, LibraVox to create public domain audio books.

Email, discussions, personal, group and broadcast chat, presence and status
Peer to peer networking
Communities (of practice, interest) - provide relevant information and social software
Social software - Facebook, MySpace, etc - allow individuals to self-organize by interest and connection
Ubiquitous (ambient) computing - low cost distributed computers and sensors (eg cameras, audio, etc) that can be used for measuring, monitoring, etc. eg community safety, environment.
Commenting - allow commenting on local or third party content
Deliberation - allow polling and rated conversation to drive research, decision-making (Votorola), policy, etc
Citizen media
Event organizing
Automated telephone systems (IVR) - Murmur project records audio neighborhood histories, “switchboard” translation services
Voice over IP (VOIP) - enabling low cost global communications with computer enhancements

Geo mapping - useful for identifying sites of interest. eg crime areas, political boundaries, transportation, etc.

Entity mapping - http://www.theyrule.net, FOAF - Standards and techniques for understanding and navigating individuals, organizations, etc. and their relations. Contrast theyrule.net, which visualizes the interrelated players who make decisions on global corporate boards, with a “wetry.org” (Lenczner) type organization to visualize non-profit organizations.