My first encounter with the optimism of Jack Layton was over 20 years ago, around 1990, when I was managing Innstead, a housing co-op in the east end of Toronto. We had just purchased a small apartment building to convert to social housing, and I had the crazy idea of turning the adjacent vacant rail side lot into an ecology park. I faxed a letter to the Mayor, all the councillors, and the various city department heads. I received one response: Jack, on the answering machine.

"Yodigo" (which means "I say" in Spanish) is a web application that delivers literacy, developed by Web Networks as part of its work supporting endangered Indigenous languages. Yodigo is structured as a game, that gives points that can be traded in for rewards. 

That most labour unions in Canada include in their service mandate education of members, as well as progressive public policy advocacy, has certainly meant everyone in Canada has benefited: our society is simply more caring (Canadian political rhetoric rarely reaches the idiocy we hear from wacky Americans like Ted Nugent: "I think that Barack Hussein Obama should be put in jail. It is clear that Barack Hussein Obama is a communist.)

One of the joys of working overseas for most of this year was snapping photos with my Panasonic TZ-5 digicam. A few hundred of the thousands of shots I took can be viewed on my travel blog. One of these photos, taken in the village of Edayapatty, near Madurai in Tamil Nadu India, just won telecentre.org's photo contest. It shows a couple of girls using the literacy application Yodigo on an Acer Netbook. Here's the photo:

I recall that prior to the introduction of cell phone services (yes, I can even remember the days prior to answering machines...), one of the arguments put forward against cell phone uptake was that the sound quality would be substantially inferior to the clear, crisp, noise-free  land line audio that people were used to, and that the public would never use these new mobile devices. Wrong.

Some of you may know me as that helpful young gentleman that speaks to you from our support line.  Always there to steer you in the right direction and help you out with anything that you may be pulling your hair out over. What you may not know is that I actually handle a few other duties here at Web Networks such as designing and developing some web sites for our clients along with building our soon to be released and revamped support site.

NGOs and other civil society organizations have done a great job of putting up websites rich with information and resources related to their mission and projects accessible by the general public, and, of course, Google's search engine. Web Networks' web servers pass huge amounts of data every day, comprising millions of people accessing even more millions of website pages.