This blog post first appeared on the Center for Global Development Views from the Center on March 30, 2012.
The World Bank has responded to concerns about its recent agreement with Google with a welcome announcement that it will only support mapping collaborations which make crowd-sourced data publicly available – and that means not collaborating this way with Google.
This is important because the World Bank is a leader in the use of maps and geospatial data for both humanitarian relief and for longer-term development. It aims eventually to map the world’s social infrastructure, and it is a leading member of the Open Aid Partnership. The World Bank’s announcement that it will not work with closed systems is a big boost for advocates for open mapping.
There was concern about their announcement in January of a new agreement with Google giving the World Bank and its partners access to data from Google Map Maker. Questions were raised by members of the open data community including Patrick Meier from Ushahidi, Nathaniel Heller from Global Integrity, and me. Our worry was that this arrangement would mean that the World Bank would encourage the use of the Google Mapping Platform. This is a problem because information contributed by users to applications using Google cannot be freely downloaded into other platforms.
The World Bank has now published a very helpful clarification of its position. The important sentence is this:
“the World Bank only supports citizen-mapping efforts that give users free access to the map data they create”
In plain language the World Bank will not support the use of Google Map Maker for citizen-mapping efforts, unless and until there is a change in its terms of service for user contributed information. This means, for example, that the World Bank would not repeat the ‘Mapathon’ it organized with Google in April 2011 to improve the mapping of South Sudan.
So what should we make now of the January agreement between Google and the World Bank? The agreement itself remains unpublished so we cannot be entirely certain, but with this clarification the agreement now sounds pretty good. The World Bank says:
The single goal of this joint project is to provide UN agencies and governments faster access to Map Maker data for humanitarian, development and disaster preparedness efforts. Access to Google’s map data is an important resource for the World Bank and our development partners and the agreement simplifies this process.
So Google has agreed to provide its proprietary data more quickly for humanitarian efforts, but does not get privileged access to community mapping efforts in future. What’s not to like?
I applaud the World Bank for its leadership on open data and use of geospatial information; for finding ways to work with private sector partners and non-profits; for listening when the open data community raised our concerns; and for making the necessary adjustments to make sure that it lives up to its commitment to open and equitable access to data.
Alternative platforms, such as Open Street Maps, have been proven to be effective and flexible in humanitarian situations, for example in Haiti immediately after the earthquake. Open maps are also increasingly being used by mainstream commercial applications. Foursquare switched from Google to Open Street Maps last month. This month Apple switched to Open Street Maps for its mapping layer in iPhoto, which may signal the beginning of a broader move by Apple away from Google Maps.
So the World Bank ‘gets’ open data; Google not so much. I understand why Google wants to (or has to) limit access to the proprietary mapping data it has assembled or purchased at considerable expense, but it should open up community-contributed data for everyone to use in any way they want. We are gradually learning about the enormous potential economic and social benefits of open access to geospatial data. The Google of a few years ago would have understood that too.
I am a generally a fan of both the World Bank and of Google, but we should all be worried about their recent deal.
The intention is good: it is to promote crowd-sourcing of maps, to improve planning in disasters and to improve the planning, management and monitoring of public services. This is an important goal, which is now being made possible by new technologies and the spread of the internet. The deal is sufficiently important for World Bank Managing Director Caroline Anstey to write about it in the opinion pages of the New York Times:
Under the agreement, the bank and its development partners — developing country governments and U.N. agencies — will be able to access Google Map Maker’s global mapping platform, allowing the collection, viewing, search and free access to data of geoinformation in over 150 countries and 60 languages.
This is all consistent with an admirable push in the World Bank towards ‘democratising development‘, including becoming more open about its own activities and promoting open data. Indeed, this effort has come to be a defining achievement of Robert Zoellick period as World Bank President. As Sebastian Mallaby said in the FT the other day,
Where [the World Bank] once imposed prescriptions on the Third World, it now shares knowledge with respected clients from the new world. Where it once hoarded data, it now displays it on the web. … One decade ago, the Bank was routinely accused of indifference to the views of local people. Today Mr Zoellick talks of empowering the most humble netizen to provide feedback on projects.
So what is the problem with the deal? The problem is the way the data is licensed: once any data goes in to Google Map Maker, it all becomes the property of Google. If governments and citizens choose to use the Google Map Maker platform to contribute their information, then the data will only be available through Google’s own mapping system, and the data will be available under conditions specified by Google. At least, that is what we believe: ironically, given that both the Bank and Google are trying to market themselves as leaders in transparency and openness, they have refused to publish their agreement. The Bank has said that they ‘want a blanket permission from Google to provide NGOs, humanitarian groups, and other non-commercial entities with the data whenever they need it’ – though we do not know if this has been written into the agreement (and if so in what terms) or is just wishful thinking. Even if this concession were secured, it would not be enough. Open data offers opportunities for everyone – not just NGOs and governments but social enterprises and businesses too, and they should all be allowed to use the data which governments and citizens have contributed.
There is an alternative platform – Open Street Map – which proved its value in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake. Data in Open Street Map is all available to everyone to use for any commercial or non-commercial purpose. So if the data were contributed to Open Street Map, it could be used by Google Map Maker, but not the other way round.
The World Bank defends itself by pointing out that the deal is non-exclusive – that is, everyone is free to give data to anyone else as well as to Google Map Maker. But that misses the point. Citizens will in practice contribute to one platform. If an organisation as prominent and powerful as the World Bank encourages governments and citizens, and UN organisations, to use Google Map Maker, then that becomes a de facto global standard.
I have no problem with Google, or any other company, making commercial use of this data. I have no ideological objection to the profit motive. On the contrary: having businesses looking for ways to make the best use of the data is a great way to generate innovation and improvements. We want businesses to try to make money by competing to serve the customer better – by providing better tools and services to access and use data. But we don’t want businesses to try to make money by restricting access to the information, which is a public good in every sense of the word, because this reduces, rather than improves, services for the public. By entering into this partnership on these terms, the World Bank is backing closed instead of open; monopoly instead of competition; corporate fat cats instead of upstarts.
I do not think that Google is evil (not yet, anyway). I admire what Google has done to make mapping available more widely, and to promote crowdsourcing of maps. While I was living in Ethiopia, they put online some of the best available maps of many of Ethiopia’s towns and cities, drawing in large part on citizen cartographers. But the fact that I am broadly sympathetic to Google does not mean that they should have sole control of this data.
The World Bank is trying to do the right thing. Their approach to opening up their own data has been exemplary. Caroline Anstey’s article in the New York Times makes a powerful and persuasive case for open data. But the article makes a stronger case for working with Open Street Map, whose work in Haiti she specifically praises, than it does for a partnership with Google.
The World Bank has been listening to the concerns that have been raised, and it sounds as if they have realised that they have made a blunder. They have recently met with key groups in Washington and, according to Nathaniel Heller from Global Integrity, they are going to take ‘concrete steps’ to address these concerns. We don’t know what these are going to be, but it seems to me that there are only two possible satisfactory resolutions. The first possible solution is for Google irrevocably to change the terms of the license for all the data in Google Map Maker to allow commercial and non-commercial use. I think that is unlikely (which should tell us something about Google’s assessment of the possibility that they may want to do something in future with their control over the data). If Google will not do that, then the second solution is for the World Bank to terminate the agreement and instead encourage citizens and governments to contribute to Open Street Map, or some other genuinely open system. Google Map Maker can then use that data if they wish, like everyone else. Anything but these alternatives is likely to be an unsatisfactory fudge. Furthermore, the full terms of the agreement must be published.
The UK Government is increasingly a world leader in promoting open, reusable data, transparency and accountability. As a major shareholder in the Bank, and one of the largest contributors of funds for the World Bank’s concessional lending, I hope the UK Government will put pressure on the World Bank to accept that this agreement does not satisfy their aspirations for open data, and instead to promote genuinely open sharing of mapping information which, as both Google and the World Bank rightly say, could make a significant contribution to humanitarian relief and to development.
Further reading:
- Caroline Anstey – Empowering Citizen Cartographers
- Patrick Meier (Ushahidi) - Google Inc + World Bank = Empowering Citizen Cartographers?
- Brian Timoney - World Bank Empowers Citizen Cartographers to Enrich Google in Developing World
- Global Integrity – Why We’re Worried about Google’s Deal with the World Bank
- Jon Mitchell – World Bank Assumes Control of Google Map Data
- Nathaniel Heller - Google, the World Bank, and Public-Private Data Partnerships
h/t @ithorpe
On which subject, I’m amazed by how many international development organisations do not make effective use of video conferencing, either by using commercial systems (eg Polycom, Tandridge) or Skype or (my favourite for low bandwith settings) GoToMeeting.
This blog post first appeared on the Media and Government site.
The Institute for Government is hosting a panel debate on ‘Policy by Twitter’ today with Tom Watson, Tim Montgomerie, Alberto Nardelli and David Babbs, chaired by Jill Rutter. It is part of the Media and Government series in collaboration with Fishburn Hedges.
Online engagement may have bigger implications for politics than many commentators, journalists and politicians have yet realized. The generic description ‘new media’ could lead to a false sense that little has changed by implying that facebook, twitter and blogs are just a faster, less professional version of the ‘old media’. But perhaps they are the early signs of a form of social engagement which is qualitatively different from old media, in ways with important implications for government and policymakers.
Consider the demise of the News of the World. The paper was not killed by competition from new media: it brought itself down by a failure of journalistic integrity, and by management which either did not know or did not care how journalists were getting their scoops. In the past this might have been a survivable incident: it would merely have joined a long litany of press misjudgments, alongside the Sun’s coverage of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster, Piers Morgan’s anti-German Mirror headline and the Daily Mail’s support for Hitler and Mussolini. But this time the error was terminal for the News of the World. What has changed?
The collapse of the News of the World is partly the result of a new understanding by British politicians that their political future no longer depends on the patronage of Rupert Murdoch. David Cameron and Ed Milliband realized that they not only could but should disown their relationships with him – an act which would have been considered political suicide only a few years before. And it was not just that the stranglehold of newspaper proprietors over politicians had been relaxed. The final nail in the coffin for the News of the World was a short campaign on twitter which persuaded companies to withhold their advertising from Britain’s biggest highest-circulation newspaper.
This suggests that new media is not just a faster and 24 hour news channel. The political economy of media is changing in three important ways.
First, the economics of media are changing in a way which could shift political power. The old media required expensive equipment for printing presses and broadcasting studios, and income from advertising revenues or governments to cover significant running costs. Wealthy individuals and business provided the capital for old media, and often subsidized loss-making newspapers. The wealthy owners acquired political influence through their ownership of limited means of mass communication. By contrast, new media requires no capital. From Mumsnet to the Huffington Post, everyone now has the tools of mass communication in their hands, irrespective of wealth. The decision of British politicians to ostracize News International appears to be an unconscious recognition of a new world in which wealth no longer buys control of mass communication, and so buys less political power too. If so, this will have significant implications for the way that policy is made in future.
Second, the new media is a conversation not a broadcast. This is more than a difference in form: it is a difference in attitude and meaning. For digital natives the impact of the internet on media is analogous to the impact of the enlightenment on science: the authority of a message is not derived from the position of the person from whom it comes, but from it being exposed to human interaction, review and scrutiny. Digital natives increasingly do not rely on a newspaper editor to curate news stories, but on their extended social network which guides them to interesting news and commentary. They expect articles to be followed by user comments, which draw attention to errors of fact and weaknesses in reasoning. This combination of social filtering and the wisdom of crowds draws good content to the surface in a way which is both more reliable and more democratic than the old media. The government is at risk of treating new media as if it were a new way to transmit information to the public, without being willing (or knowing how) to engage in the conversation which for digital natives is the essence of its legitimacy.
Third, digital citizens engage in a long tail of conversations. Chris Anderson explained in 2004 how online businesses such as Amazon and Netflix make money by selling a large number of distinct items in relatively small quantities to consumers with specific interests. For bricks-and-mortar stores the costs of distribution and inventory made it impossible to serve this ‘long tail’ of niche interests. Similarly old media, with high marginal costs, has only ever been able to serve a narrow range of topics which they deem to be of wide appeal. This has led to a conceit that they are the centre of the ‘national conversation’, as if popular interests were normally distributed along a bell curve and they were able to serve people within one or two standard deviations of the typical citizen. But the public’s appetite for engagement is not normally distributed: it follows a power law (or ‘long tail’) distribution. With zero distributional costs, new media can serve small groups of people with deep interests in niche topics in a way that old media never could.
These three characteristics of new media – low capital needs, a culture of engagement and the long tail distribution – could have profound implications for policy making and especially the way that the government interacts with citizens. The public will increasingly expect to have a conversation with government, not a one-way transmission of information. They will be less inclined to accept the authority of pronouncements from the government, unless they are confident that it can be the subject of detailed scrutiny. They will expect engagement on a wide range of topics previously regarded as of interest only to a limited few, not a focus on a single issue of the day.
This could bring about considerable changes in the way policy is made and communicated. For example:
a. The government will have to become accustomed to publishing all the data it holds, and the analysis which underlies its policy choices, to enable calculations to be reproduced and judgments scrutinized. The public will be less and less inclined to take the government’s word for it. (Examples: OBR, ICAI)
b. Social media strategies will have to mean more than employing someone in the press office to post press releases online and link to them on twitter; government departments will have to become part of the online conversation. (FCO Ambassador blogging is moving in this direction).
c. The long tail of public interests means that most public communication can no longer be channeled through ministers and press offices. Guidelines requiring officials to refer all enquiries to the press office will need to give way to new rules which allow technical experts across the range of subjects to engage directly with citizens, in the way they have in the past through meetings with lobby groups.
d. The erosion of the political power of media proprietors may democratize policy-making to a broader cross section of society. It will be harder to sew up a consensus among the political classes.
None of this means, of course, that government will make policy or have conversations with the public in 140 character tweets. Twitter is merely the dial tone of new media. It is the background hum which confirms you that you are online. It is increasingly the gateway to interesting content and conversations. Policy by new media – including Twitter – could look very different from today’s world.
David Cameron said in the House of Commons that the Government is going to consider a social media kill switch:
Mr Speaker, everyone watching these horrific actions will be stuck by how they were organised via social media.
Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill.
And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.
So we are working with the Police, the intelligence services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality.
I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers.
This has all the hallmarks of a Dangerous Dogs Act response. (That is Whitehall slang for a piece of poorly-conceived legislation which is implemented hastily to respond to a public outcry.)
There are many reasons this is a bad idea. Here are two.
First, in a year in which social media has played an important role in enabling citizens in Tunis and Egypt to overthrow their governments and, we all hope, move towards greater freedom and dignity, this would set an irresponsible precedent internationally. Which dictator or autocratic regime does not accuse protesters of ‘plotting violence, disorder and criminality’? Do we want to make it harder for citizens around the world to organise themselves to overthrow repressive governments?
Second, social media has also played a positive role over the last few days. Twitter was used to organise groups of responsible citizens who went out on the streets to clean up after the riots. (David Cameron called the ‘broom army’, organised through social media, ‘the best of British’). Pledgebank is being used to raise money to rebuild the iconic Reeves Corner building which was burned down in the riots. I’m told that switching off the mobile phone networks after the 7 July bombings contributed to the chaos.
When the Egyptian government was reported to have shut down social networking sites in a bid to stop the unrest there spreading, the UK Foreign Secretary William Hague said:
I would urge the Egyptian government, and I have urged the Egyptian government, to respect rights of freedom of assembly and freedom of expression. It would be futile over time to try to suppress such things.
Perhaps when the Government reflects on the overall balance sheet of the impact of social media over the last year, they will conclude that on balance it has been a force for good.
What a contrast to Jens Stoltenberg, the Prime Minister in Norway, who said this after the (much more tragic) violence there:
The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.
Update: Here is Jeff Jarvis in the Guardian.
I’m back from holiday, so here is the promised second of a pair of posts reflecting on three years of working on aid transparency. In the first post I talked about eight lessons mainly about why different kinds of aid transparency are important. In this post, I’m going to look at the next steps, particularly focusing on how we can provide meaningful transparency for citizens in developing countries.
There is a lot of detail below, so for busy readers here is a summary of the proposed ten steps for aid transparency.
1. Donors cannot achieve meaningful user-centred transparency just by putting project data on their websites. Users need information which comes from many different organisations simultaneously. Yet it is not realistic to try to maintain lots of different manually-updated databases which collate information for users. The answer is for organisations to publish online all the information they have about aid projects and programmes, in a common, reusable format, which can then be used as the basis for user-centric databases and applications. The International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) is the best chance for a generation of creating such a public infrastructure for information about aid. All donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and aid contractors should implement the IATI standard as the key first step to meaningful, user-centred aid transparency.
2. Any organisations which do not implement IATI voluntarily should be pushed to do so by the organisations and people who fund them. For example, official aid agencies should require every organisation to whom they give a grant or contract to implement IATI as a condition of handling public money. Citizens should refuse to put money into a collecting tin if the charity is not implementing IATI. Governments should consider making IATI compliance a precondition for charitable status and tax relief. Developing country governments should make IATI compliance a precondition of local registration by international NGOs.
Google has a policy that it should eat its own dogfood
3. Donors, foundations and NGOs should ‘eat their own dogfood’ – that is, any information on their website and any analysis and data that they publish about aid should use be based on the publicly available data infrastructure. This will give the organisations an incentive to ensure that the information they make available through IATI is up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate and that the system is fit for purpose.
4. Once donors and foundations are (a) publishing their data through IATI and (b) using IATI for their own websites and analysis, they should consider (c) helping other users, especially in developing countries, to make the best use of this information. But donors’ priority should be getting their own house in order by publishing their information in a reusable format, since this is something only they can do, and using that public data infrastructure themselves, before they help others to do so.
5. One of the highest priorities for new information about aid is that all aid spending should be classified in future according to the recipient country budget classifications as well as agreed international classifications. The Technical Advisory Group for IATI should agree the mechanism for this as soon as possible.
6. It seems so obvious that it shouldn’t need saying, but aid would clearly be more effective if we had more information about the future plans of donors, foundations and NGOs. Homi Kharas, in Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, estimates that the cost to aid recipients of historic unpredictability of committed aid flows is at least 15 percent. It could be much higher. Finance ministries, line ministries, the IMF, other donors, NGOs and the private sector would all do a better job with their money if they knew what was planned by others. Organisations should publish whatever they know about their future aid plans, generally (with some possible exceptions such as for procurement) at the level of detail they know it. This is likely to be the hardest part of IATI for many organisations, as few have mechanisms to keep systematic track of their forward spending plans.
7. A global system of traceability in aid, enabling money to be tracked from taxpayer to services delivered, via multiple layers of multi-donor funds, international and local NGOs and private sector contractors, is less difficult and expensive to implement than you might think. Traceability of aid would bring about a huge step forward in efforts to make aid more effective and less prone to corruption and waste, and for building public support for aid. Done right, it could also substantially alleviate the reporting burdens of aid recipients, NGOs and implementing agencies, and reduce donors’ costs of monitoring compliance. Priority should be given to implementing this part of the IATI standard.
8. Donors, foundations, NGOs and implementing organisations should start recording and publishing detailed geographical information about aid projects and programmes using the newly-agreed IATI standard format for geocoding of aid, and they should require their implementing partners to do the same.
9. Some donors and agencies have defined, or are in the process of defining, their own internal standardised output indicators. Organisations should now make a big effort to reach an international agreement on a common set of standardised ouput indicators to facilitate international comparability across organisations. This information can be reported through IATI.
10. When we connect feedback from citizens in developing countries to a rich public data infrastructure about aid, we will have a much more realistic inderstanding of the impact and effectiveness of aid. That day is coming sooner than most of us realise.
You will doubtless think me guilty of hyperbole when I say that the emergence of an open, international infrastructure for development information has the potential to transform the development business, much as the internet has transformed so much of our society, and for similar reason. I’m sorry that this is an absurdly long blog post, but I hope it will convince you of the amazing opportunities which are there if we seize them.
Here is part of my piece on the Guardian website today welcoming moves from the US and Europe towards a global standard for publishing aid information:
Go to the website of any aid agency and you’ll find a cornucopia of information about the good work that it is doing. The problem is that it doesn’t publish this information in a usable form. Visibility is not the same as transparency.
Members of the US Congress rightly complain that they cannot get a complete picture of US foreign assistance, which is delivered by 26 government agencies. As Congress has discovered, to get a complete picture of what the US is doing you need up-to-date, comprehensive data from each aid agency in a common format that enables it all to be added up, reconciled and compared. It is very welcome that the US government is putting a system in place to do this.
Now put yourself in the shoes of ministers or parliamentarians in a developing country. They face the same problem as members of Congress, writ large. Aid to their country is channelled through bilateral aid agencies, multilateral organisations and thousands of NGOs. Aid goes from one organisation to another – minus a “haircut” at each stage – before any services are provided to anyone. How can officials or MPs get useful, up-to-date, comprehensive information about all this spending and all these activities? Certainly not by trawling through thousands of separate donor websites.
A View from the Cave has a survey on the best blogs on aid and development.
This is the fourth post in a series providing non-technical advice about affordable and practical IT for people working in developing countries, especially where internet access is not great. The previous posts have been:
- tech tips 1: the basic set-up – getting a computer and setting it up.
- tech tips 2: blogs – easy ways to read blogs.
- tech tips 3: computer software – what software should you have installed on your computer.
This fourth post looks at online services, such as for mail, backup and online media.
Online services are a mixed blessing for people who live in developing countries. On the one hand, it is helpful to use services which you can access from an internet cafe or from an office PC. This means you can travel light but still get hold of the resources you need. On the other hand, services which only work when you are online are not much use in a place where internet access is expensive, unreliable, or unavailable; nor if you want to use those services on a plane or in a 4WD on a long road trip. This blog post looks at how you can use these services even if you don’t have a great internet connection.
Online mail
The big three webmail services are Hotmail (from Microsoft – 364 million users), Yahoo! Mail (280 million) and GMail (from Google – 191 million). I use GMail all the time, because it has the most features of the three, and I find that the spam filter is very reliable. There are lots of other webmail services, but few are as reliable or have as many features as the big three. If you are worried about privacy and security, either because of the work you do or to protect yourself from financial fraud, you might consider Hushmail, which focuses on security and encryption and is also free for personal users.
If your internet access is intermittent, you probably want to be able to read and manage your mail when you are offline. Fortunately you can do this, while still being able to use webmail from an internet cafe when you are on the road. The best way to achieve this is to enable IMAP on your webmail, and then use Thunderbird or Outlook on your computer. IMAP is the technical name for a clever protocol which means that any changes you make to your mail (move, delete, reply etc) on your computer will be reflected in your webmail when you are online, and anything you do in webmail will be reflected on your computer when you next connect. This is vastly preferable to using POP. With both Thunderbird and Outlook an additional advantage is that you’ll have a backup of your mail on your computer.
A few tips about online email services:
- Use a different password for your webmail than you do for other online services and keep it secure. You may not think your email is particularly important, but if a bad guy has your webmail password, they have access to almost all your other online services because they can simply tell those services to reset the password and send it to your (compromised) email account.
- If you are a freelancer, set up your own domain name (mycompany.com) and have emails to that address go to your webmail account. This looks more professional than having a webmail address (studmuffin@hotmail.com).
- Set up a honey trap email account for use for online services that need an email address. I use a hotmail address which I regard as disposable. That way, I don’t have to give my real email address to websites. I only log in to that hotmail account when I need to click an authentication link
Read more: What’s new in Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo mail – The Times of India
Online office applications
Google Apps is now clearly the leader in online word-processing, spreadsheet and presenation software. These are free, and they provide almost all the functionality you need, though less than the more feature-laden but expensive Microsoft Office applications. Google Apps are a great way for a team to collaborate on the same document or spreadsheet.
Free is good, but if you don’t have ubiquitous cheap and fast internet access, then this stuff isn’t much use. But Google is in the process of rolling out a free service that enables you to use your Microsoft Office software on your computer, with the files saved into Google Apps automatically. This offers the prospect of the best of both worlds: online collaboration and backup when you are online, but the ability to work offline using Microsoft Office tools.
Online backup and file sharing
Dropbox is an excellent service for (a) backup; (b) sharing files across more than one computer; and (c) transferring large files from one place to another, especially with slow or intermittent internet connections. It is free for accounts of up to 2Gb.
When you install Dropbox, it creates a folder on your computer which is just like a normal folder as far as your computer is concerned. You can copy or move files into it; edit them; or delete them. In the background, when there is bandwidth available, your computer will silently and invisibly synchronise those changes to your online dropbox space, and to any other computers on which you have dropbox installed.
I have two computer with Dropbox installed, and on each I have moved the “My Documents” folder into my Dropbox folder. This means that whenever I create or change a file, Dropbox updates the online version, and synchronises the changed file to the My Documents on my other computer. This means I always have the most up to date version of every document on both computers, without having to think about it. If the computers are connected to the same local network, Dropbox is smart enough to transfer the files across the local network rather than download the file from the online version.
I can also access all my files via the web from any other computer (useful if you are travelling and need a document you don’t have with you). If you accidentally delete something or change it and want to go back, you can recover old copies of all your files from Dropbox for up to 30 days – or if you pay $39 a year for Packrat, you can have Dropbox store an unlimited archive of your old files.
If you are considering putting a lot of data into Dropbox, and your internet connection is slow or you are charged by the Mb, you may want to consider doing this when you are next travelling.
One particular challenge in low bandwidth environments is sending very large files from one place to another. It is especially frustrating if the internet connection drops when you have downloaded 90% of a large file over several hours and you find you have to start again. Using Dropbox you can create a folder which is shared by the recipient and the sender. The sender copies the large file into the shared folder on their computer, and Dropbox will then synchronize it to the shared folder on the recipient’s computer. Because this all happens in the background, you can get on with doing something else; and the synchronisation will take up where it left off if the internet connection drops half way through.
There are alternatives to Dropbox which provide a similar service. Live Mesh provides 5 GB of free online backup space, as compared with 2GB of Dropbox. SpiderOak, Syncplicity and SugarSync all provide 2GB fee. Syncplicity is Windows only.
Online backup
If you start to use online services such as GMail, Google Apps, Flickr or even Facebook, you should consider making a backup of your data. Google does not seem likely to go bust or lose all its data but people do sometimes find that their account is compromised and they are no longer able to access it. If it would be a problem for you to lose all the photos you have stored on Flickr or Facebook, or of all the emails in your GMail account, Backupify might be for you.
You can download all your mail or all your photos to a backup on your computer, but that is not going to be feasible if you are in a low-bandwidth environment. Backupify backs up your data from one part of the internet “cloud” to another, so it doesn’t matter if the bandwidth where you are is not very good.
Online media
In some developing countries, or when you are in the field, you cannot easily access international media or the latest Stieg Larsson book. Often the internet may be too slow to be able to stream radio or TV programmes. But there is a lot that you can download for later, even if your internet connection isn’t all that great.
Here are some ways to use online media even when bandwidth is low:
a. buy Kindle books from Amazon. You can read your book on a Kindle, if you have one (I really like my Kindle). But you can also download free software to your PC, to an iPad, iPhone or Android phone to read your book. (Once you have paid for the book, you can read it on any platform that suits you). There are lots of free books (eg Shakespeare, Dickens) available. And you can also use the Kindle to get daily newspapers from many countries round the world. The books download very quickly, even on a slow internet connection.
b. listen to audio books. The market leader is Audible. This is a great way to “read” while you are travelling, such as on long car journeys if reading in cars gives you travel sickness, or on long flights.
c. listen to podcasts. This is a great alternative to radio if the local radio isn’t very good. You can download lots of shows from e.g. the BBC. I host a free development podcast called Development Drums. There is a list of other development-relevant podcasts here. You can get these, and lots of other podcasts, free on iTunes.
Even if you don’t have an MP3 player, you may be able to transfer audio books or podcasts to your telephone and listen to them on that.
Conclusion
Internet access in developing countries is improving fast, and many development workers now have either mobile internet access or access through their office, though it is not always very quick or reliable. The online services described above may be useful for you, even if your internet connection is unreliable.
Here are the previous posts in this series:
- tech tips 1: the basic set-up – getting a computer and setting it up.
- tech tips 2: blogs – easy ways to read blogs.
- tech tips 3: computer software – what software should you have installed on your computer.
Disclosure: I don’t have any interest in any of the services mentioned here. But if you click on the link for DropBox above and use that to sign up for DropBox, you and I will both get a little extra free online storage space.
Surprisingly many people prefer to receive this blog by email than to visit the website or use the RSS feed. (You can sign up for the email on the blog page or here.)
For the last two bog posts there has been a glitch with my website software which sent up to ten copies of the same blog post to some unlucky subscribers. (One of them emailed me to say: “the content is great, but once is enough”. Quite so.)
I spent some hours last night reading through pages of code, and I think the spamming problem is now fixed. I certainly hope so. (The problem, if you are interested, was a hyperactive WordPress Cron function.)
Please let me know if you have any problems with the email list. If you want to stop getting the emails, there is an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email.
Walking home today after having lunch in a nearby cafe, I was asked for money by a middle aged man suffering from podoconiosis, sometimes called Mossy Foot.
The foot of a person suffering from podoconiosis
I bet you are thinking: podo-what?
Podoconiosis is a disease of people who work barefoot, particularly on red clay soil in the neighborhood of volcanoes, especially at altitude. Tiny micro particles of silica from the volcanic soil penetrate the skin and inflame the lymphatic system. (As a layperson, I think of podoconiosis being to feet what asbestosis is to lungs.)
This disease affects millions of people around the world, including in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Cameroon, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, northwest India, and Sri Lanka.
It is a disease of poverty: it can be completely prevented by wearing shoes, and by providing basic information to the people who are at risk from it.
We could eradicate this disease altogether. It would not be very expensive, and it doesn’t require new medical technologies. So why don’t we? The problem seems to be that the people who suffer from this disease are poor and marginalised. There are powerful AIDS lobbies in industrialised countries ensuring that we spend billions of dollars on antiretroviral therapy for people with HIV. But almost nobody is working to highlight the plight of people suffering from podoconiosis and ensuring that we put in the modest resources needed to bring it to an end.
A British academic, Gail Davey, now working in Brighton but formerly living here in Ethiopia, is an exception to this. She is working to get the disease recognised, as step towards getting the disease tackled and eventually eradicated. You can read more about podoconiosis, and the work that Gail does, in a recent article on Humanosphere. Humanosphere is an interesting new blog by Tom Paulson, a journalist based in Seattle, about global health and poverty, and it is well worth including in your regular reading.
Social media
I can think of a couple of organisations which have embraced social media exactly like this:
New aidinfo website
In work-related geek news, my team has a brilliant new website: http://www.aidinfo.org. (I can call it brilliant without immodesty because I had almost no part in it.)
The internet in Ethiopia
If you live in Ethiopia, you’ll have noticed that the internet got a lot faster from the second week of July this year. I wondered at first if this was for the same reason that the Addis roads are relatively clear of white 4x4s at this time of year: all the ferenjis go on an extended holiday to avoid the rainy season. But I now know that there is a better, and more long-lasting reason: there is now a fibre-optic cable to Djibouti, connecting Ethiopia to the Seacom submarine fibre optic cable for the internet. This has completely transformed internet speeds in Ethiopia (I can now stream BBC Radio 4 on our home broadband connection).
Shared items
If you read things on the internet via an RSS feed reader (if you don’t, see here for an explanation of what you are missing) then you may be interested to know about shared items feeds. These are RSS feeds containing items that someone has tagged as interesting (that is, not articles that the person has written, but articles that they are recommending).
My shared items feed is here. Chris Blattman’s shared items feed is here.
Guardian Development Pages
Let me be the thousand and first person to point you towards the new development section of the Guardian online. I admire the Guardian for putting so much effort into this, and giving it so much prominence. But so far it feels a lot like white middle class people, mainly men, talking about development. I’d like to hear more from the citizens of developing countries.
Here is a really nice animated talk by Dan Pink on what really motivates us.
For those who can’t play the video, he says that monetary incentives work for simple, straightforward tasks, but they don’t work at all well for tasks that require conceptual and creative thinking. According to him, what motivates people is autonomy, mastery and purpose.
One conclusion I draw from this is that there are probably a lot more people than you might think who would be willing to spend a lot of time and effort helping to make the world a better place by reducing poverty, if we did a better job of enabling them to give their time and abilities. According to Pink, what will motivate them is the challenge, the opportunity to develop mastery, and the knowledge that they are making a contribution to a purpose they believe in. Those of us who work in development need to do some more thinking about how we can provide more platforms on which those contributions can be made, rather than just asking people to pay money in taxes or in donations.
In a more satirical vein, if you work in the aid business I think you’ll enjoy the “Hand Relief International” blog. Here’s the latest post, on innovation in development:
Speaking about thinking – I have been thinking about “innovation” a lot lately, as I noticed the word is all the rage these days. The challenge in our sector is how to “integrate innovation” in our language without changing much about the way things work. … Passing innovation in a world dominated by career professionals with many years in the business and certain ways of doing things is a pretty tall order but then donor’s don’t really want to see much rocking of the boat happening either – that would force them to change their ways, which always makes them uncomfortable – they want to see the word used a lot, and they want to hear the occasional 300-words story about it, that can be put in a neat textbox in a report.
(Thanks to @AIDSPolicyProj for the link to the Dan Pink video)
This is the third post in a series providing non-technical advice about affordable and practical IT for people working in developing countries, especially where internet access is not great. In the introductory post, I talked about the basic set-up – getting a computer and making sure it is secure and properly backed up, and getting basic office software and email. In the second post I talked about easy ways to read blogs.
This third post looks at the software on your computer. It does not deal with online services (such as Gmail or Dropbox) which I’ll cover next time.
Web browser
Many people use Internet Explorer because it is already set up on their computer. But Google’s Chrome (free) is faster and more secure, and it just works. I also have Firefox (free) installed, mainly because there are some plugins that I like and which are not yet available for Chrome; but for day-to-day use Firefox is getting too bloated and slow. (The beta version of Firefox 4 seems to be faster.)
Because I use a couple of different computers, I use Xmarks (free plugin for both Chrome and Firefox) to synchronise the web browsers across computers and across browsers. As well as synchronising bookmarks it synchronises passwords and it can even open the same tabs for you when you move from one computer to another.
Player for videos and music
I use VLC media player (free) because it seems to be able to play just about anything I throw at it. Lots of people like MediaMonkey (free).
Communications:
Skype (free) is very useful for people who travel. Skype-to-skype calls are free of charge; and you can use Skype to call people in other countries very cheaply (because your call goes over the internet to the destination country and only goes into the telephone network for the last part of the journey). The latest version of Skype supports 5-way videoconferences; but that isn’t going to work if you are on a dial up connection.
However, for technical reasons that are too boring to explain, Skype can be a pain if you don’t have good bandwidth. A good alternative is Google Talk (free) – but it does not do conference calls, and you cannot dial out to normal telephone numbers like you can with Skype.
I’ve also heard good things about Oovoo for multi-user videoconferencing.
Podcasts
I love having podcasts to listen to – I subscribe to podcasts ranging from film reviews to politics and technology. Many mainstream radio servicies, especially the BBC and NPR, are making their programmes available and there are specialist programmes (such as my Development Drums podcast). Podcasts are a great way to keep in touch with what is happening back home: you can listen to them on long plane flights and car journeys, or in the gym.
Many people will already have iTunes (free) installed on their computer and this provides an easy way to download podcasts automatically. And if you have an iPod or an iPhone, you can set them to transfer the downloaded podcasts to your device automatically. I don’t use iTunes for my podcasts, partly because I don’t like Apple’s attitude to controlling its users.
I use RSSRadio to manage my podcasts – it has really powerful controls (for example, you can decide which directory you want the podcasts to go into, and how many back-episodes you want it to keep). I then use a utility called SyncBack (free) to keep my MP3 player up to date automatically.
Other people recommend Juice (formerly iPodder) or MediaMonkey for downloading podcasts. A new option which is growing in popularity is DoubleTwist – particularly valuable for people with Android phones.
If you like Twitter, you’ll like Tweetdeck (free) which makes the flow of your twitter feed manageable. I find this much easier than using the website.
Faster downloading & file sharing
In developing countries, downloading from the internet can be slow. It can also be irritating if the download breaks half way and you need to start again from the beginning. Free Download Manager (er, free) can help you with this.
Proxy service
Another way to overcome a slow internet connection is to use a proxy service such as OnSpeed. These typically charge a fee. You set up your computer so that you get your information via this service, which get the data on your behalf and compress it before sending it to your computer.
These services can also be useful for getting round blocks imposed by some countries on access to particular websites.
Utilities
For compressing and uncompressing files: 7-Zip (free)
For managing photos: Picasa (free)- this is both a website for storing photos, and photo management software you can install on your computer.
Privacy and cleaning computers (important to avoid identity theft): C-Cleaner (free)
Turn your computer into a wifi hotspot: Connectify (free, but Windows 7 only)
Next time, I’ll look at online services relevant to development workers.
… is here. Simon’s stuff is always well worth reading – he has an enviable ability to synthesize ideas from across disciplines, and explain them with a coherent narrative.
Every time I add a new blog post, several hundred people now receive it automatically by email. (If you would like email updates in future, just type your email address into the box at the top right of the page. You can also remove yourself from the list at any time in exactly the same way.)
It isn’t surprising that people prefer to have blog posts come to them, rather than to have to make the effort to visit every blog they want to read. This is especially true if you have low bandwidth or if internet access is expensive, as is often the case in developing countries. I guess that’s why some people like the email option. But most blogs do not offer email subscriptions; and if you follow several blogs you might find it a bit of a pain to have your email clogged up with this stuff.
So you don’t to want to visit each blog individually, and you can’t or don’t want to get them all by email. Not everyone knows that there are some good solutions to this problem, especially if they are not all that interested in technology. So here’s a quick guide to how to read blogs and other websites easily.
I read over 250 blogs regularly, because I find them informative, entertaining and interesting. I get more diversity of opinion and ideas from those 250 blogs than from reading one or two newspapers; and often you get the chance to learn from real experts in their fields, without the casual mistakes, prejudices and dumbing down that you get when those views are intermediated by lazy journalists.
But I don’t want to visit 250 websites each morning. Nor do I want all that stuff arriving in my email each day. I don’t want to read everything that they all write: I want to skip through the headlines, or a brief summary of each article, so that I can see which ones I want to read properly.
Fortunately there is a wonderful behind-the-scenes feature of almost every blog – and many other websites – called RSS. I’ll spare you the technical details, but this stands for “Real Simple Syndication” and it means that you can pull the contents of a blog or website to another place. And that in turn means you can get all the blogs you want to read in one place.
The simplest and most widely-used solution is Google Reader. This is a website which lets you read blogs, rather like Hotmail or GMail lets you read your mail. You tell Google Reader the addresses of all the blogs you want to read, and it pulls all the posts to one place. It looks a bit like an email programme: you can easily see what’s new, and skip through the headings until you find something that looks interesting. When a blog post is new and unread it shows up in bold.
As well as blogs, you can subscribe to the feeds of other websites, such as the BBC Africa News or DFID Press Releases. You can even set up a Google Alert for a specialist subject – such as your own name! – and have that appear among your feeds. You can have all your friends’ Facebook statuses in a feed. This means that you can decide what you are interested in, all over the net, and bring it all together in one place.
You can put the blogs in folders – mine are grouped into “Africa”, “Development”, “Technology” and so on. Some people put their “must read” feeds into one folder, which they look at each day, and their occasional reading in another folder for when they want to do some browsing.
However, Google Reader is an online website, and that may not be ideal for you if your internet connection is slow, or if you are on a plane. One solution to this is Google Gears, which is a way to access Google services like Google Mail and Google Reader if you are not online. I have found Gears a bit unreliable in the past, so it is not my preferred solution.
There are many other ways to have your computer fetch the information from these feeds when you are online. (These programmes are technically called aggregators or feed readers.) Some of them can be set to download the content to your computer so that you can read it later offline, like you can with your email.
If you have Outlook 2007, then you have a feed reader right in front of you. You can tell Outlook which RSS feeds you want to read and they will appear in a separate folder underneath your Inbox. To use this, you can go to the Tools menu, choose Account settings, then RSS feeds. Paste in the address from the blog or website you want to subscribe to. (Use Ctrl+V to paste into the box). Apparently you can also add feeds to Outlook automatically from Internet Explorer.
I prefer not to use Outlook for reading blogs, however. I use FeedDemon instead, which is a free download. This is very easy to use, and it has the neat feature that it synchronises with Google Reader. So if I add a new subscription to Google Reader, it is automatically added to FeedDemon. If I have read something in FeedDemon, it is marked as read in Google Reader.
There are other feed readers, such as SharpReader. (I use FeedDemon because of its synchronisation with Google Reader.)
If your office does not let you install new software, you may be stuck with Outlook (if you have Outlook 2007) or an online service like Google Reader.
Which blogs should you be reading? If you are in to development you may be interested in my list of the best development blogs – look at the suggestions in the comments, which include some important omissions from my original post. There is a longer list of what I am reading down the right hand side of my blog page.
How do you get started? Adding subscriptions manually is a bit of a bore at first. Fortunately there is a way to share subscription lists. To get you started, here are twenty two key development-related blogs in the form of an OPML file. Right click the link and download this file to your computer, and save it to your desktop. Then in Google Reader or Feed Demon you can import this file and it will automatically add these blogs to your subscriptions. (You can always unsubscribe if you don’t like them or if you find this too much). I can’t see a way to import an OPML file into Outlook, unfortunately. ** UPDATE: See the comments for how do to this in Outlook. **
The key point of all this is that there is a way to subscribe to blogs and websites, so that all the information you are interested in comes to you in one place, whether from blogs, newspapers, website, facebook or even search. This makes it really easy for you to see what is happening all over the world as you drink your morning coffee.
And if all that sounds terribly complicated, don’t forget you can get this blog by email by putting your address into the box on the top right of the page – or, if you must, send me an email and I’ll add you manually.
Happy reading …
Most of the people who read this blog are interested in development rather than computers. Many of you live in developing countries, where the internet can be slow and expensive, and computer support can be difficult. So I thought it might be useful to give you some non-technical suggestions for how to manage if you live somewhere where the computer facilities are rather basic.
In this first post in a series, I’ll look at the basic set up.
Continue reading
Terrific post by Giulio Quaggiotto at the World Bank PSD blog on the trend towards more publication of data, rather than or as well as information and analysis (and as well as spin). The key point is that organisations (such as government donors and international institutions) should focus on getting the data out there, rather than trying to intermediate it for their users. Giulio says:
If resources are limited, focus your efforts on making your data open rather than in producing generic “lessons learned” documents (or other knowledge management products) that have little contextual value for practitioners on the ground. In a world where SMS makes it possible to connect with affected communities even in rural areas, those products will sound increasingly hollow.
In our work on aid transparency, we’ve heard a lot of staff of aid agencies insist that aid agencies have to package the data, otherwise it will be no use to anyone. The charitable interpretation is that they want to make sure that information is useful; less positively, this impulse may come from the desire to avoid difficult questions that may arise from the raw data.
There is an excellent slide show by Chris Taggart at countculture on this latter point: the risk that open data will lead to the exposure of problems and to difficult questions being asked.
I do not have a problem with public authorities using data to present information and analysis that they think is useful and which will help build their reputation. But they should publish the raw, underlying data as well. Any services which they provide to information consumers – such as websites – should use the same data, and the same public access interface, as is available to everyone else. So if someone else wants to set up a different website, telling the story in a different way or mixing it up with data from another source, they can do so. There is no reason why the authorities should have privileged access to the data: it should be a common, universally accessible layer on which anyone can build their service or tell their story.
There is a particular challenge in publishing foreign assistance: the consumers of information want information from many different donor agencies and international organisations. In most cases, citizens in developing countries don’t want to know what a particular organisation is up to everywhere; they want to know what all organisations are up to in a particular place or on a particular topic. So information intermediaries serving these users need some way to pull together data from many different sources, and turn it into a single stream of comparable, consistent and coherent data. To a large extent information intermediaries could do this automatically, if the organisations publish enough detail about their activities to enable the data to be compared; but to some extent it requires that data is deliberately classified and structured to enable this kind of mash up. A good example is the ability to trace aid from one organisation to another: a lot of aid passes through many organisations before it arrives at its intended beneficiary, and even if every organisation is transparent about all its spending, there is no direct way to track the aid through this chain. That would need an agreed way of tagging the data so that we can all see how money flows through the system.
So for me, the key messages are:
a. publish the raw data, either instead of or alongside the information and analysis (and sometimes spin)
b. to the extent necessary, agree a minimal set of standards for the way the data are structured and the detail it contains to enable users easily to mix and mash the data so that they can use it. The International Aid Transparency Initiative has the potential to do this.
c. Aid agencies should not feel that they themselves have to meet the needs of information consumers; they should provide financial support to information intermediaries who will access this data, mix it with other data, and provide locally useful and relevant information which meet a wide range of needs. The more the donors make detailed, raw data easily available in a consistent format, the less financial support they will need to provide to information intermediaries enable them to use it.
What are good ways to get feedback from the intended benefiaries of an aid programme? Can we use text messaging and other technologies to crowdsource monitoring?
VirtualEconomics is an unusual blog because it is maintained by someone in the front line of designing and delivering an substantial aid programme in one of the big bilateral donor agencies: Matt is the head of economics for the UK aid program in India.
Matt is interested in how to get feedback from the people who are the intended beneficiaries of aid:
New technologies for crowd-sourcing significantly bring down the transactions costs for collecting and ‘mashing’ data from many stakeholders. Examples include SMS-based systems (e.g. Ushahidi’s crisis reporting), smart-phone systems (e.g. Kenyan crop insurance) and web-based systems (e.g. eMoksha’s Fix Our City). What other examples are there?
So a question for us all to consider, how would you go about designing a simple platform for the Papua New Guinea public to provide reliable feedback on whether kids have received their textbooks? What’s the best solution?
As well as Ushahidi, another promising approach is Daraja in Tanzania which is going to use SMS messaging to provide feedback about which water points are working (full disclosure: I am on the board of Twaweza which is a partner of Daraja).
With changing technology and attitudes, we seem to be on the brink of a revolution in getting information from prospective benefiaries of aid. Do you know of any existing, working programs like, or promising new approaches?
I’ve closed the comments here: if you have suggestions, please add them to Matt’s post.
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