NDN Blog

NDN is excited to announce that we will be giving a webinar on February 25th, 2011 at 2:00 pm ET on how the Governments Border Plan Is Working.

We will be breaking out some of the statistics showing how the government is making the border safer in a presentation that clearly shows that the border is safer now then it has been at any other time in the country.

This webinar is important for a couple of reasons:

1.  There is still a pervasive narrative occurring in the media and among certain politicians, that the border is out of control. Not only is this a patently false statement but it is hurtful on a macro and micro level.

On the macro level, Members of Congress say that without the border being secure they will not move on broader reforms. On a micro level, the characterization that the border is out of control actually hurts the economies of the cities that neighbor the border.

The more that statistics and first hand accounts of what is actually happening on the border seep into the national media, the harder it becomes for journalists and politicians to paint the border as out of control. Please tune in, weigh in and give your thoughts on the what is presented. This last statement brings us to the other reason this is an important webinar...

2.  By presenting these border statistics in a clear way, NDN hopes to facilitate a conversation. If there are statistics that are presented in this presentation that raise skepticism, this webinar is your opportunity to raise questions. 

It is imperative that people from all over the country weigh in on this as it informs the debate, and makes it that much richer.

So by all means sign up now!

Click here to RSVP.

In the wake of the President's State of the Union call for America to retake energy leadership, the price of oil exceeding $100 per barrel, and stiff global competition for iinvestment in technological innovation, the time for America to take action is now.  How can America take back our clean energy leadership?

On Friday, February 11th, Michael Moynihan will present a webinar on our Electricity 2.0 program and his new policy proposal for a 'Green Lane', a highway for clean electricity with easy on/off ramps to link every consumer and producer of electricity in the United States. The Green Lane will help hasten the arrival of electric vehicles, energy efficiency, the smart grid and other new clean technologies.  The best part is it largely exists today; we just need to switch it on.

We invite you to tune in to Michael Moynihan's webinar at 2pm on Friday, February 11th to discuss  Electricity 2.0 and learn more about  the 'Green Lane', which will accelerate a clean energy future for our country.

Click here to RSVP.  Log-in information for the webinar will be sent the day of.

This blog has long contended state passed immigration laws are problematic for many reasons, not least because of the civil rights implications of having un-trained local law enforcement officers profiling people based on their skin color and other characteristics deemed to be "undocumented like."

On top of these problems, there are very real economic and legal issues, which are conveniently listed below:

1. Costly Law Suits From Local and National Organizations
2. Possible Involvement Of Federal Government In The Form Of More Law Suits
3. Budget Deficits For Overtime Pay of Local Law Enforcement Officials
4. Backlash from Local Law Enforcement Officials Who Are Divided On Whether The Laws Are Effective
5. National Political Backlash

With Arizona introducing a bill in the state legislature last week to revoke the 14th Amendment, the Arizona Republic has released an editorial outlining why the state can ill afford passing this latest anti-immigrant state law.

You may believe "birthright citizenship" should be ended. Fine. Get involved on the national level. Measures before Congress target birthright citizenship with two different strategies. This is the place to have the debate.  If you think Arizona should be leading this fight, please think again.

The state's efforts to enact immigration laws resulted in one law (employer sanctions) winding up before the U.S. Supreme Court and another one (SB 1070) on an inevitable path toward the nation's big, white marble courthouse.

What this editorial does so well is articulate just how expensive these state passed laws are to the general population of the state while also rightly noting that the appropriate place to have these discussions is the Congress.

Congress is best equipped to host this debate. An Arizona-led court battle over birthright citizenship would also be a waste of money. Arizona faces billion-dollar deficits for years to come. We don't need to throw buckets of cash at high-priced lawyers. What's more, the bills introduced in the Arizona House and Senate last week may be tossed by the courts on grounds that fall far short of the 14th Amendment challenge their authors intend.

Read the full editorial, it goes on to explain exactly how the state passed law would deny children of undocumented immigrants birth right citizenship.

What is most important about this editorial is that it outlines the problem's associated with state passed immigration legislation, from the perspective of a state that is currently grabbling with the fall out from passing these types of laws.

The lessons that Arizona are having to learn should provide ample evidence why other states should think twice about passing their own laws.

Appreciate everyone who came to our presentation and webinar of "Raising Our Game."  Feel free to leave us suggestions for improvement, and thanks for coming by. 

As enforcement has increased along the southern border, traditional points where undocumented immigrants have crossed into the United States have been pushed into drug smuggling routes.

This has lead to increased predatory actions by the Drug Cartels in areas where migrants cross. The cartels have begun robbing families of immigrants who cross in remote areas of the desert. In Arizona, a Border patrol agent was recently killed defending migrant crossers from bandits who were attempting to rob them.

Kim Murphy of the Los Angeles Times recently wrote a story connecting the guns used in the killing of the Border Patrol agent back to a gun store in Arizona:

In a sign of the cost of widespread U.S. weapons smuggling into Mexico, federal law enforcement sources have confirmed that two guns, part of a series of purchases that were being monitored by authorities, were found at the scene of the firefight that killed a U.S. Border Patrol agent in southern Arizona.  Sources said U.S. authorities did not have the ability to adequately monitor the movement of the guns toward the southern border, in part because current laws and low levels of staffing.  As a result, "the next time they became aware of those weapons was when they turned up at the crime scene," said one source, who, like others connected to the case, spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal investigation.

As it turns out the most person asking more questions about the flow of guns into Mexico is a Republican Senator, just not the ones from Arizona...

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has asked the bureau for detailed answers about its gun smuggling investigation, known as Project Gunrunner. In a letter to the bureau, Grassley said there are "serious concerns that the ATF may have become careless, if not negligent, in implementing the Gunrunner strategy." Grassley has focused on allegations that two AK-47s purchased with cash from a dealer in Glendale, Ariz., on Jan. 16, 2010, were then used in the Dec. 14 firefight that left Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry dead. Federal sources said agents were notified about the sale of the guns several days after the purchase.

The article goes on to note that there has been some controversy regarding Operation Gun Runner, particularly critics note that the program does an excellent job of monitoring the flow of guns but much less in actually stopping the guns from heading south of the border. 

These accusations seem somewhat disingenuous given the size of Operation Gun Runner, whose yearly budget is only $10 Million Dollars. If law makers where serious about this perhaps Congress should provide more resources for stopping the flow of guns across our border.

The plan out of the House GOP to cut around $40 billion from domestic agencies in the next few months ($32 billion net, but an $8 billion addition for the Pentagon and Veterans Affairs) would be laughable, except cuts like this are no laughing matter. There's a simple reality at foot here: these cuts have nothing to do with putting America on sound fiscal footing, nothing at all. Furthermore, they have nothing to do with job creation.

The nation's fiscal picture is clear - growing Medicare costs are the largest contributor to our long-term fiscal problems. Yet the plan out of the House does not address these costs. (The House did that the other day, by attempting to exacerbate healthcare costs by repealing the Affordable Care Act.)

Additionally, the economic problems facing the country mainly stem from a shortage of demand in the economy. Pulling roughly $40 billion out of the domestic economy removes demand from the economy. It's not yet clear where exactly the $40 billion would come from, but it is likely that some of it comes from programs that either have strong multiplier effects on the overall economy or are the engines of future economic growth. These cuts, especially, must be fought.

By commonly held metrics, these cuts do not contribute to growth or put the nation on a meaningfully better fiscal path. Because of these two facts, it is incumbent on their proponents to explain why they matter. Changing a "culture of spending," as Rep. Paul Ryan purports to do, is not real economic policy. Conservatives clearly hold a faith that less government is better. They should be asked to make that case when they propose such cuts, instead of getting to hide behind a vale of fiscal responsibility or economic literacy.

At times it's difficult to keep pace with the latest global mobile developments. I hope this selection of news stories from the past week will help you navigate the growing global network of connectivity:

• As Sam explained, the under-fire Egyptian government forced mobile operator Vodafone to send pro-Mubarak texts to its consumers in the country.

• Cisco released its Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast Update, 2010-2015, reporting that global traffic grew 2.6 times in 2010 over the year before.

• To spread word of the Egyptian protests, one American with close Egyptian ties spoke over the phone with friends in the protest-stricken country and relayed updates via Twitter, reported TIME. Google also established a speak-to-tweet service.

• Google’s Android mobile operating system overtook long-established leader Nokia’s Symbian O.S. in terms of global units shipped in 4Q2010, reported Canalys.

• Worldwide broadband-enabled mobile subscriptions will surpass one billion in 2011, reported ABI Research.

• Iran’s chief police official announced the launch of the country’s first cyber police unit to prevent “anti-revolutionary groups” from gaining force through social networking sites.

• Chinese authorities blocked the word “Egypt” from searches on microblogging sites amid concerns that the Egyptian protests could spark similar unrest, reported WSJ.

• In June 2011, 500 African films will be made publicly available online via a global, legal, commercial downloading platform that guarantees fair revenues to the filmmakers.

• MobileActive’s Anneryan looked at how Sudan Radio Service utilizes mobile phones to conduct surveys and gain insight from field staff.

• Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch launched The Daily, a much-anticipated iPad-exclusive newspaper, but will it be successful?

• Smart phones, mobile apps, and mobile Internet have entered the mainstream in South Africa, indicative of a transformation in the cellular habits, reported IT News Africa.

• Kenya’s Central Bank threatened mobile operators offering mobile money transfer services, accusing them of not reducing prices despite having had their limits increased.

• Breaking from tradition, the British House of Lords recommended that M.P.’s be permitted to “use electronic devices to access Parliamentary papers.”

• Facebook Messenger powered 2.8 billion minutes of Facebook chat, with a 75% increase in useres from November 2010, reported Windows.

• Despite strong sales, Apple’s share of the tablet market dropped 18 points to 77% last quarter, while Google’s Android-based tablets grew to 22%, reported Strategy Analytics.

• 50 billion networked devices will be in consumers’ hands by 2020, reported mobile operator Ericsson in its launch of a new mobile money service to rival Western Union.

A Times article last Saturday gave a pretty harsh critique of Google.org, the search giant's philanthropic wing. Begun in 2004 with grand dreams of reinventing philanthropy and revolutionizing the non-profit world by leveraging Google's powerful technological assets and unconventional approach to problems, DotOrg has foundered. Today, it operates not unlike a "conventional corporate philanthropy," doling out cash to big nonprofits, with occasional cool, innovative projects like Flu Trends and Earth Engine. The article blames this on shifting, sometimes undependable leadership, and a disconnect between the social types of DotOrg and engineers of the DotCom.

The more core problem with Google.org, it seems, is their engineering-centric approach to social change. This is a widely-known, and yet very common mistake in the tech-for-development world. People get a powerful tool in their hands, and start looking for problems it can solve, rather than the other way around: addressing a specific problem, and thinking about how to solve it. To be sure, mobile phones and other new technologies have proven valuable tools for solving certain types of social problems, but only by taking a problem-centric, rather than solution-centric approach is any progress likely to be made. Google.org has been a consistent offender of this rule; after their brilliant algorithm solved the problem of search, it was easy to think that Google engineers could tackle any problem, provided they coded hard enough. But in the words of Professor Laurence Simon, quoted in the article: "there isn't any algorithm that's going to eradicate guinea worm."

To put it another way, Google's approach to philanthropy and global development was top-down. They thought that by creating super tools and technologies while sitting in Mountain View, lives in Haiti, Liberia, and India would be transformed. But solving vexing global problems doesn't usually work that way.  Usually, development is successful when it happens bottom-up: when communities or countries identify problems, imagine solutions, and implement their ideas. The does not describe the DotOrg approach to date. From the article:

Some DotOrg staff members with traditional nonprofit backgrounds proposed a system to track drugs for diseases like malaria and tuberculosis through the supply chain...

The plan never went anywhere, however, because text-messaging was not sophisticated enough to challenge Google's engineers.

In other words, the approach was too bottom-up to appeal to Google's tech-centric sensibilities.

But the good and well-meaning Googlers shouldn't be discouraged. Provided they are willing to re-think their approach to development, Google.org can offer, at once, a bottom-up, problem-centric approach to global challenges, while at the same time leverage Google's formidable monetary and technological assets in unconventional ways. What follows is one idea for how DotOrg can do this.

About a year ago, a group of Kenyan technologists got together and founded the iHub, a place for techies to come together in Nairobi, share workspace, collaborate, learn, and find investment for their ideas.  With initial funding from the Omidyar Network, and riding high on the growing success and global recognition of Ushahidi, the successful SMS-based mapping application developed in Kenya in 2007, the iHub has helped knock down the perception of Africa as strictly a consumer-but not producer-of technology.  Since its founding, the concept of the iHub has been mimicked across sub-Saharan Africa, with similar collaboration spaces established in Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, and elsewhere, all helping promote and encourage African technologists and connecting them with capital.

Last summer, in partnership with the iHub and Appfrica Labs, a Ugandan technology and innovation space, the U.S. State Department ran an app contest called Apps<4>Africa, in which they challenged African software developers to write mobile phone apps that would benefit the people of Africa. The winning app, written by a member of the iHub, was called iCow, and is a voice-based mobile app that "helps farmers track the estrus stages of their cows," with the hopes of allowing them to better manage breeding in their herd. Other apps took on problems of governmental corruption, maternal health, small-scale finance and banking, among a wide array of very real challenges in everyday life for African citizens.

These tech hubs are remarkable not just as technology institutions, but as institutions of civil society and entrepreneurial vibrancy as well. For any developing country to overcome poverty and emerge as a successful middle-income state, a strong civil society and a robust economy are two essential ingredients.  By serving as places for tech-savvy citizens to come together and vectors for investment to reach entrepreneurs and the iHub and its followers are incubators for both of these things. If Google.org wants to create a meaningful impact on global development while leveraging their position as one of the world's premier tech companies, these technology hubs are one very unconventional way to go about it.  Here's how:

- Building Hubs: Right now, the iHub is supported financially by Ushahidi. Not every developing country has such a successful project so well positioned to be the convener and financier of a technology hub. DotOrg could help finance existing hubs, while creating and building new hubs throughout the developing world, bringing together local developers, business interests and social actors to innovate and collaborate.

- App Contests & More: An app contest is a cheap and easy project to run, but can serve as a valuable incentive for inexperienced developers to try their hand at entrepreneurship, while also making for great publicity-both for the sponsor and the winning developers. Small scale projects like app contests can help put technology hubs on the map, identify the most promising engineers, and launch a few useful new technologies, to boot.  

- Talent Sharing: From the inception of DotOrg, Google has sought to leverage the power of their staff: a collection of some of the best software developers in the world. But sitting in Mountain View, the developers themselves have had little connection to the challenges of people in the developing world. Why not create fellowships for their talented engineers to spend time in a foreign technology hub, teaching young developers and helping build and improve nascent projects.

- Venture Capital: Rather than seeking to build their own world-saving tools or pouring money into "conventional" philanthropic projects, DotOrg should invest in the best of the innumerable homegrown ideas for technology development. Active tech hubs are gold mines of entrepreneurs and ideas, and as a foundation, DotOrg can make more investments and accept a higher degree of risk than a strictly for-profit VC investor. If the successful projects are explicitly focused on improving social conditions, so much the better, but either way, investment capital is a key to economic development anywhere.

By engaging with the burgeoning technology hubs in Africa, helping to create new ones throughout the developing world, and using the hubs as platforms for sharing their technological and monetary assets, Google.org could have a very real impact in helping poor countries develop from the bottom up.  Supporting the private sector-whether tech-based social enterprises or straight-up for-profit technology companies-and helping strengthen civil society are two somewhat unconventional yet crucially important elements of global development. And DotOrg has a unique comparative advantage in doing so through technology.

What's more, Google can see this endeavor as beneficial to their bottom line. Robust technology hubs around the world will eventually yield products that the company may want to acquire for itself-so that it can build its own business in the developing world. Additionally, technology hubs will provide a valuable talent pool for future hiring. Google recently brought on Ory Okolloh as their policy manager for Africa; before joining Google, Ory was one of the founders of Ushahidi and involved with the iHub in Nairobi.  With a robust network of technology hubs around the world, Google will have early access to the best ideas and people, and DotOrg will live up to its promise of operating in part as a for-profit entity.

For many in the development world, Google.org has been a bit of a disappointment after the great hopes surrounding its launch. A few scattered projects have made an impact, and the company deserves applause for the level of its philanthropy alone-Google donated $184 million last year-but DotOrg has greater potential.  The iHub is already on the company's radar: Google is hosting a "mapping party" there next week for women working in tech and social development.  If the foundation can overcome its tech-centric, solution-oriented approach to global change, and instead leverage its advantages in ways that facilitate bottom-up development, Google.org could become a real leader in the field.

The United States Mexico Border Mayor Association have released a letter to Mike Hukabee regarding his remarks that the Obama Administration has failed to do enough on securing the southern border.

The letter is in response to an Op-Ed placed in the New York Post, Huckabee's editorial can be read here, with some key excerpts from the Op-Ed are below:

"Indeed, DHS efforts to secure our southern flank have failed miserably: In October, the department admitted that more than 1,000 miles of the 2,000-mile US-Mexico border were not under "effective federal control." Just after Thanksgiving, a 2,200-foot cross-border tunnel was discovered in San Diego, complete with lighting and ventilation -- and even a rail system."

The Border mayor letter puts things in perspective, and can be read in full HERE:

"As mayors of some of the largest cities along our border with México, we can tell you first hand that the Southwest Border Initiative is certainly working."

"The results of the Southwest Border Initiative speak for themselves:"

• Border cities are some of the safest in the nation. Border Patrol apprehensions,
• A key indicator of illegal immigration, have decreased 36 percent in the past two years.
• At the same time, we have seen increased seizures of southbound illegal bulk cash and weapons as well as northbound drugs. 
• Since beginning the Southwest Border Initiative in 2009, Immigration and Customs Enforcement removed almost 800,000 illegal immigrants from our country and almost 200,000 of them were convicted criminals.

Once again, we have an instance of an extreme view of the border being rebuffed by those who actually live on the border.

Lets hope that the next time Mike Huckabee decides to write an op-ed on how the border is out of control he checks his facts, and with the people who actually live in these areas.

Huckabees Editorial was in reaction to a speech by Secretary Napolitano, Simon's take on her speech can be seen here.

And the immigration blog's breakdown of her speach on border security can be seen here