Friday, February 03, 2006

Technology: mashups


I summarized the discussion on mashups in CPsquare (see picture, if you want to read it you may have to save it and enlarge it). I feel like I summarised something I don't fully understand, but maybe that's also a function of a CoP to learn about completely unknown waters. When I feel I just start to grasp blogging, talks move to mashups.

It's hard to decide if this is important when talking about communities of practice for development. But I guess the concept in itself is useful: making a hybrid of two applications, and that it's within the reach of non-developers. So ample scope for more appropriate and tailor-made applications I would say. Since a lot of mashups do a combination with maps, this leads to more visual representations and that may be very useful in development (eg. in PRA drawing and negotiating maps with farmers is such a powerful communication tool). Just don't know if you can do what is done in the US for countries in Africa. I have found the place in Mali where we lived in google earth, but it is quite at a distance .

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