OT: Nonprofits Review Technology Failures

[Mel Wilson]

On 10-08-17 10:10 AM, meng wrote:
[ ... ]
> "WASHINGTON — At a gathering last month over drinks and finger food, a specialist at the World Bank related the story of how female weavers in a remote Amazonian region of Guyana had against all odds built themselves a thriving global online business selling intricately woven hammocks for $1,000 apiece.
>
> The state phone company had donated a communications center that helped the women find buyers around the world, selling to places like the British Museum. Within short order, though, their husbands pulled the plug, worried that their wives’ sudden increase in income was a threat to the traditional male domination in their society.
>
> Technology’s potential to bring about social good is widely extolled, but its failures, until now, have rarely been discussed by nonprofits who deploy it. The experience in Guyana might never have come to light without FailFaire, a recurring party whose participants revel in revealing technology’s shortcomings.

$1000 seems good -- you can avoid the industrial squalor pitfall at 
$1000.  There are other industrial pitfalls; you can read the Club of 
Rome report, or you can read B. Traven (who wrote _The Treasure of the 
Sierra Madre_.)  In a collection called "The Night Visitor" he 
published a brilliant, funny short story called _Assembly Line_ with a 
Mexican peon, a visiting American businessman, and a strange, 
inverting quantity-discount curve.  I've already said it's brilliant, 
haven't I?

	Mel.
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