Contrary Valley

American Ingenuity, One Woman's Idea Takes Off

Read about how a Maine woman, Katherine Freund, turned her personal tragedy into a creative, successful organization to help people who can't or shouldn't drive:

Launched a decade ago, the Portland area's Independent Transportation Network provided 15,200 rides to senior citizens last year with no taxpayer money for operations.

From the Associated Press, in the 12/17/06 issue of The Hartford Courant.

Freedom of Expression on the Internet

Ran across a fantastic blog called Global Voices Online, sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. The header contains a cloud of all different countries as tags, so you can find out what citizens are saying all over the globe. The project's goals are:

1) To call attention to the most interesting conversations and perspectives emerging from citizens’ media around the world by linking to text, audio, and video blogs and other forms of grassroots citizens’ media being produced by people around the world.

2) To facilitate the emergence of new citizens’ voices through training, online tutorials, and publicizing the ways in which open-source and free tools can be used safely by people around the world to express themselves.

3) To advocate for freedom of expression around the world and to protect the rights of citizen journalists to report on events and opinions without fear of censorship or persecution.

I can't wait to check out some of these posts, especially from Cameroon and Ghana, homelands of some of my good friends here in the States.

New driver's license!