#awaaz.de

[nikhilnavadiya]

Started with python and django! feeling awesome..!

I am very existed to be part of  Awaaz.De family. At Awaaz.De, our technology stack is including GWT(Front End), django(python), Freeswitch and Lua(IVR). 

We all know that web development is an exciting, creative act; at its worst, it can be a repetitive, frustrating nuisance. Django lets you focus on the fun stuff – the crux of your Web application – while easing the pain of the repetitive bits. In doing so, it provides high-level abstractions of common Web development patterns, shortcuts for frequent programming tasks, and clear conventions for how to solve problems. At the same time, Django tries to stay out of your way, letting you work outside the scope of the framework as needed. 

Django is a web application framework and its having some of cool inbuilt features which leads to rapid development of web application. Its having awesome community and projects around the language and framework and this is the main reason why I like developing web applications with Python and Django. Every time I search for something there’s always a Django or Python project available to make my life easier.

Its inbuilt feature list included, object relational mapper, automatic admin interface, caching and template system and elegant url management. Also there are many other python projects are available for django which makes your like much easier. It would a long list but I just want to higlight some of them only

1. South

South brings migrations to Django applications. Its main objectives are to provide a simple, stable and database-independent migration layer to prevent all the hassle schema changes over time bring to your Django applications.

2. Django Haystack

Haystack provides modular search for Django. It features a unified, familiar API that allows you to plug in different search backends (such as Solr, Whoosh, Xapian, etc.) without having to modify your code.

For our application we have used haystack to provide search functionality to our users. I'll post another blog post which would highlight more on it.

3. Django Celery

Provides Celery integration for Django; Using the Django ORM and cache backend for storing results, autodiscovery of task modules for applications listed in INSTALLED_APPS, and more.

4. Django Userena

Userena is a Django application that supplies your Django project with full account management. It's a fully customizable application that takes care of the signup, activation, messaging and more. 

[camila-espina-blog]

#SM4DPS

Tuesday marked the last day of #NewhouseSM6, the Social Media Theory and Practice course at Syracuse University.

I decided to explore social media for the digital public sphere (#SM4DPS) as my multi-media “deep dive” case study. This project included researching the topic, interviewing four experts and using social media tools – namely Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pearltrees, Storify, Slideshare, Google Drive and Google + to design, implement and present the in-depth analysis of a particular digital tool.

Here is a screenshot of my Google+ hangout with Professor Ward:

The public sphere is a concept elaborated by Jürgen Habermas to describe the discursive space where private people come together to debate “the general rules governing relations.” With the emergence of new technologies, some of the debates and discussions started taking place in a new environment dubbed “the digital public sphere.”

In order to explore the role of social media as a space to identify and discuss societal problems, I decided to interview four journalists that deal with participatory media on a daily basis – Marcos Pérez-Ramírez, Lillian E. Agosto-Maldonado, Myladis Soto and Greg Munno. The interview highlights are available in my Slideshare below.

There are several examples of how social media can serve as conduits for political action – namely, the role of Facebook and Twitter in events like the Arab Spring uprisings and the Occupy Wall Street movement. However, using popular networking sites like Facebook and Twitter requires certain technology that most people don’t have access to. Thus, the main question guiding my case study is as follows: How do people without access to the Internet get their stories across and participate in the digital public sphere? 

Here is the Pearltress of all the materials I used for my teaching presentation:

Challenged to talk about something other than Facebook or Twitter, I actually found a lot really cool initiatives and projects geared towards helping marginalized, disenfranchised and/or remote communities engage with technology to organize and ultimately influence political action involving the issues that concern them:

Textizen: “asks questions on posters in public spaces, then collects citizen feedback via text message. Anyone with a minute and an opinion can reply.”

Awaaz.de: “is a software platform enabling organizations to engage with poor, remote, and marginal communities by providing on-demand, many-to-many information access through mobile phones.”

Vojo.co: “is a hosted mobile blogging platform that makes it easy for people to post stories from inexpensive mobile phones via voice calls, SMS, and MMS. Our goal is to foster greater inclusion in the digital public sphere.”

The presentation was a great experience where I really had a chance to harness all the different tools I’ve been taught to use during the semester. Below is the Storify of all the social media activity during the presentation – a big thanks to the class for being a great audience:

Lastly, we had to perform analytics to gauge how far our social media engagement had resonated. I was very impressed with the results, below a screenshot of the tweetreach analytics results:

Finally, attached is the Slideshare of my #NewhouseSM6 presentation #SM4DPS – Social Media for the Digital Public Sphere:  

#SM4DPS from Camila Espina