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 so 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.

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.