Spark Plus from CBC Radio

Nora speaks with Jennifer Pahlka, the founder and executive director of Code for America, which she describes as a "Peace Corps for Geeks". Fellows spend a year working with city governments to create technology to make their communities better.

Nora Young speaks with Kelly McGonigal about her new book "The Willpower Instinct." Turns out we can look to science, not hunches, to help us boost our willpower.

Nora Young speaks with Jo Guldi, author of the book "Roads to Power." She thinks the history of roads in Britain has a lot in common with our current internet history.

Michael Cook is a PhD student at Imperial College's Computational Creativity Group in London, UK and he wanted to know if a computer program could create a video game starting from nothing. So ANGELINA was born - an artificial intelligence program who creates, from nothing, playable, simple games.

Nora speaks with Dr. Michael Gardam about new hospital surveillance technology that tracks the movements of health care workers. He's Director of Infection Prevention and Control at the University Health Network in Toronto.

Nora Young speaks with Gabriella Coleman about Anonymous. She's the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill and currently working on a book on Anonymous and digital activism.

Matt Ratto is an assistant professor at University of Toronto, and director of ThingTank, an experimental space for hacking electronics. He's a believer in what he calls "critical making" - the idea that we don't really understand our technologies just by reading or talking about them, but by making them. He takes Nora on a tour of the ThingTank, and explains why we just might be in the midst of a groundbreaking era for critical makers.

Nora Young speaks with Angel Gambino on stage at the Transmission Global Summit conference in Victoria, British Columbia. She’s a digital entrepreneur and co-founder of the Rosa Parks Project, a plan to revitalize the oldest neighbourhood in Detroit.

Nora Young speaks with David McCandless, a data journalist and information designer in London, England. He turns rivers of blunt data into beautiful, meaningful visuals.

Nora Young speaks with Edward Boatman, the designer and co-founder of The Noun Project. It's an ambitious initiative to design an internationally recognized symbol for every noun, to be used on the web.

Making wearable computers? A booster for your iPhone made out of a mint box? It doesn’t get more DIY than this. Limor Fried is the founder an lead engineer at Adafruit Industries. She’s one of the leading forces behind the maker movement - people who like to alter technology to better it, or make electronics at home from scratch. And she's particularly interested in making hardware that is open source.

Mazer is a brand new initiative coming out of the Japanese government as part of its "Cool Japan" project. The idea is to have leading creative lights in Japan post questions or problems, and crowdsource the answers. The winning ideas will be bid on by businesses to make them a reality. We expand the conversation for a look at how and when crowdsourcing can be effective, with digital culture writer, Don Tapscott.

In her new book, Consent of the Networked, Rebecca MacKinnon argues that it’s time to discuss the ways technology should be structured and governed to support the rights and liberties of all the world’s Internet users.

Nora sits down with the president and CEO of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) to talk about balancing copyright with the open internet in the wake of the recent protests against SOPA

As part of a larger look at cities and how to create creative hubs (aka the mythical next Silicon Valley), Nora Young speaks with Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla foundation who has a long history in working to build open, collaborative, creative environments.