Legacy Scholarship Program’s Sustainable Education in Uganda
March 05, 2012 by Chuck Phillips
In less than three hours, the minimum-wage American worker can earn $20. But here in war-torn Uganda, it takes Okello Charles' father David months to bake and sell enough clay bricks to earn the equivalent amount, 40,000 Ugandan shillings, to pay for Charles’ Typhoid fever treatment.
Charles lives in the dormitories at Sir Samuel Baker Secondary School in Gulu, Uganda, where he is a beneficiary of the Legacy Scholarship Program (LSP), a unique scholarship program instituted by non-profit human rights organization Invisible Children that focuses on enabling "vulnerable" kids like Charles to attend school. As a student disadvantaged by the effects of Typhoid, Charles must focus all of his energy on his studies to stay ahead. Since he can't help his father earn money, he also battles a great deal of anxiety.
Since 13 percent of the students in the LSP are LRA abductees and more than 50 percent are orphans, each beneficiary is assigned a mentor trained in areas of child development, health education, and trauma counseling. The mentors are critical to the success of the students in Northern Uganda, acting as positive role models and providing psychosocial support and counseling in all aspects of student life. To be a mentor is an art form since, like Charles, each student has his or her own challenges and needs. Charles' mentor is Godfrey, and from what I have witnessed during our travels through Uganda with Invisible Children, Godfrey can connect with Charles.
Chuck Phillips CTO
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Digitaria in Africa
March 02, 2012 by Chuck Phillips
Members of the Digitaria technology team are in Central Africa. Here’s why.
For more than a decade, there’s been a mad man on the loose, and we’re not talking about the advertising kind. This is the kind who kills men, rapes women, kidnaps and conscripts children into a guerrilla army. He is the world’s most wanted criminal, his name is Joseph Kony, and he leads a military group called the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
The stories of his horrors are plentiful, and have taught the people of war-torn Uganda that it is easier to break something than to restore it. Here’s merely one event: It only took two hours on April 20, 1995, for the LRA to brutally murder over 300 people in the displacement camp of Atiak, Uganda. These were the early days of the LRA, who, in a relatively small amount of time and with very little opposition or effort, waged an brutally efficient war on Northern Uganda, damaging their economy, their education system, their culture. They destroyed Ugandans’ homes, families, and lives.
The LRA has not gone completely unopposed. The non-profit human rights organization Invisible Children has been dedicated to stopping the LRA since 2006, and Digitaria was one of their earliest partners. It has been an honor and a privilege. We worked together the Schools for Schools project and, more recently, the LRA Crisis Tracker. We talk with the Invisible Children people constantly from our neighboring office in San Diego, and have heard reports of the success of their many programs in Uganda.
Chuck Phillips CTO
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Bursting the Filter Bubble
June 09, 2011 by Chuck Phillips
In a recent Q&A with Mashable, Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble, argues that we’re being isolated because of content filtering. That because of filtering, new ideas and opposing view points are hidden from our view. His premise seems to hinge on the ideas we only consume content passively and that information outside our world-view is difficult to find when we look for it. Neither of which are true in my experience.
Filtering is a convenience for content consumers when browsing the Internet passively, without agenda. When I’m in “passive mode,” I want the signal-to-noise ratio to tip towards signal. I want the irrelevant filtered from view. I don’t believe that I’m unique in that regard. We Homo sapiens are actually hardwired to respond to relevant content. Without relevancy, without accurate filtering, a content provider’s consumer constituency will not remain loyal. They will eventually leave for a content provider that delivers them content that they are interested in consuming while in passive mode.
Chuck Phillips CTO
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Apple iAd Disrupts Advertising, Not Consumers
April 12, 2010 by Chuck Phillips
Generally speaking, human beings hate ads. After years and years of using online and mobile ad-supported applications, we've trained ourselves to ignore most advertisements. Last Thursday, Apple introduced iAd, a platform that has the potential to turn mobile advertising on it's head and gradually repair consumers' perception of the ad.
Chuck Phillips CTO
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