Com 481 Assignment 2: Week 10, October 21

Social Justice 

Reading 1: Homeless ‘Journeyman Hacker’ Launches Eco-Friendly Mobile App 

This article is about the journey of a New York homeless man who chose to accept two months of coding lessons from a stranger rather than a sum of money. With this experience he was able to rather quickly release his app called, “Trees for Cars”. Two months wasn’t enough time and with the help of others Grand and McConlogue were able to spend five weeks tirelessly developing the app. I really enjoyed this because it showed how one man’s kindness led to a whole new life for another person. I found this very inspirational and very cool how much passion was show through both people involved. 

Reading 2: Can Life Apps Deliver Social Change 

This article is about how a group of filmmakers, broadcasters and developmentalists came together to bring together the diversity in our society. The goal was to create an application that would help the smart phone users in East Africa. This lead to the development of the Life Apps series of mobile applications. The developing team wanted to create a reach into the parts of the world who aren’t able to have access to mobile phone within their society. I found this to be a very interesting article and a very interested concept that I don’t think many developers have tapped into. The intent of the series is to not only help those in rural communities but provide them with a technology to help them better function in our technology advanced society which I thought was awesome! 

Technology Application/Example: 

I think this connects to what we have been learning about mobility in several ways, but I think the topic of social justice connects to creating apps for a greater good. With most of what I have read in these sections the goal is to use mobility and technology to create a larger outreach which I think is awesome. When I think about this I often think of large social media campaigns rather than an app, GoFundMe is a great example of this. After looking more into this, one app that is a great example of this is eGood. eGood allows users to check into business affiliated with the app that donate a certain percentage of every purchase to the charity of their choice. This is something I really like and since researching an app that I have downloaded. Knowing that a lot of business and corporations are taking part in creating a change within our community is something that I really like!

Discussion Questions: 

1.  Do have any apps that you use to create social justice? 
2.  Do you think that more apps can be used to start creating social change within our society? 
3. If you were to create a social justice application what change would it create?