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.

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.

(h/t Amanda Glassman)

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.

Recap: two key themes

Two themes from my previous post are directly relevant to the next steps for aid transparency.

First, transparency needs to be centred on users, not organisations.  Only a few people are interested in the details of specific institutions. Most users want to know about all the resources and activities in their country, their sector or their community. They are mainly not very interested in the distinction between aid and other sources of finance. They want comprehensive information about resources from all organisations, whether or not it is classified as aid, so that they can monitor and influence how that money is allocated and used.  This means that it is not sufficient for each aid organisation to be individually transparent: the information has to be accessible in a form which enables users easily to see in one place comparable, consistent information from dozens of different organisations which they can add up and use.

Second, transparency should focus more on execution and not just allocation. Many parliamentarians, NGOs and academics in donor countries are primarily interested in how aid has been allocated across countries, sectors and activities. They often want to ensure that donors are living up to their promises. But in our analysis of stakeholder needs, people in developing countries repeatedly told us that they want to be able to see how money is actually being used. They want to know how much money is really arriving in their country or town; how much is taken in overheads and by whom; which organisations are contracted to provide particular services and on what terms; what outputs are produced; and what difference all this makes to people’s lives.

Organisation-centred transparency

Meaningful aid transparency cannot be achieved in the way that many aid agencies previously assumed.  While it is a welcome step forward that some aid organisations are now publishing online databases of all their aid projects and programmes, this does not meet either of the two key needs described above.  Agencies’ online project databases are an example of organisation-centred rather than user-centered transparency. As anyone knows who has tried to analyse aid spending in a particular place or sector, it is not feasible for a user to trawl through the websites of dozens of bilateral aid agencies, hundreds of multilateral agencies and thousands of NGOs, to identify the relevant activities.  Even if you could assemble all the details published by different donors, you could not create any kind of meaningful overview. Every project is described in different terms by different donors, in different currencies, languages and time-frames.  Often you can’t even tell whether donors are reporting contributions to the same project or describing different projects.  There is no way to remove double counting when money flows from one organisation to another. Nor do these project databases give us enough information about execution: they do not tell us how much money has arrived in the country, how much has been given to each subcontractor or implementing agency, or what outputs and outcomes have been achieved; and they don’t tell us anything about the agencies’ plans for future projects and programmes.

The magic database?

So user-centred transparency cannot be achieved by individual organisations putting their own project databases online, because that information cannot be aggregated across donors.  An obvious alternative is to build a database, or perhaps a few databases, to bring together comparable information from a variety of sources.

I’m writing this blog post in a café in Addis Ababa which is much frequented by ferenjis.  At the next table is Gary, a Canadian consultant who has been paid by CIDA and the World Bank on behalf of the donors to build a bespoke database of donor projects in the rural livelihoods sector in Ethiopia.  Gary has done magnificent work over the last year, visiting donor offices to collect information from each of them about what they are doing, and entering it manually into his database.  It has been an expensive exercise for donors but they already think it is has been well worth the investment to be able to have an overview of all aid-financed activities in the sector.

There are at least three other aid databases which already collect information about livelihood projects in Ethiopia. Yet Gary’s database does not draw information from any of them: he has had to construct it from scratch.  Why can’t he use the existing databases?  Because one of them is not publicly available, one publishes information with a 2 year lag, and the third was built three years ago and has not subsequently been maintained.   None of them meets exactly the needs for which Gary’s database has been designed.

Gary’s story is not unusual. There are probably other consultants like him in Ethiopia working in other development sectors, and there are hundreds more like him all across the developing world.  Donors are spending a lot of taxpayers’ money on consultants to do this kind of work again and again; and donor staff are also having to supply the same information repeatedly, in slightly different form each time, to each of these databases which one of them has commissioned.

It would be nice to think we could replace all this effort by building a small number of comprehensive and authoritative databases to meet all these different needs.  That would save everyone a lot of time and money.  But sadly it is not practical to build a one-size-fits-all database that does anything.  Any database primarily serves the perceived needs of the institution that built it, at the time it was built.

The OECD-DAC maintains the two aid databases which provide the most authoritative source of aid information.  (The DAC CRS database used to be the most comprehensive too, but in this respect it has been overtaken by AidData which contains everything in the CRS database and more).   The DAC databases were built for a particular purpose: for donors to share information with each other so that they can be held to account for meeting their promises. The DAC has never asked governments or citizens in developing countries what information they need about aid, because it is not part of their mandate to meet these needs. As a result, the DAC databases are not designed to provide even very basic information needed by developing country governments and stakeholders, such as the amount of aid which is actually spent in the recipient country, or donors’ plans for the coming year.

The introduction of country level aid management system in around fifty countries has been a welcome advance in recent years; but these too have only limited use.  They are generally designed to facilitate relationships between governments and donors, and they oftern serve this purpose perfectly well.  But there are many other important information needs which they do not serve. For example, they are not usually designed to be consistent with local budget classifications, so they cannot be used by finance ministries to support domestic budget planning.   Still less do they contain the level of detail needed by line ministries, for example to enable them to plan their activites to complement the investments made by donors.  Furthermore, the majority of country level aid management systems are not accessible by the public, so they do not meet any of the needs of parliaments, civil society, the media or individual citizens to enable them to hold governments and donors to account.

The education ministry in Cambodia told us that when they asked donors for detailed information about aid projects in the education sector many donors refused to supply the data on the grounds that they had already given a lot of aid information to the Cambodia Development Council database and they did not have sufficient resources to respond to multiple information requests. But the CDC database, which is among the best in the world for what it does, does not contain the level of detail needed by the education ministry, such as where donors planned to build schools or the type of text-books they proposed to supply.  These details were not needed by the Cambodia Development Council, and so are not included in the database, but are essential for the education ministry to manage their programmes well.

This is no criticism of the DAC database, or the aid management systems in developing countries. It just isn’t possible for a single database, either globally or for each recipient country, to meet the needs of every different stakeholder. That is why we end up with many ad-hoc databases built by consultants like Gary.   But if all those databases have to be built and maintained manually, the cost is prohibitive.

In the face of a growing proliferation of requests for data for different purposes many donors have, not unreasonably, decided they have to focus on priorities. They supply data to the DAC databases, because this is the donor club of which they are members.  They also generally supply data to the aid management systems, because these databases are clearly a priority for their partners in developing country governments.  For many donors, anything else they provide is on a ‘best endeavours’ basis – some donors do what they can to provide information in response to reasonable requests, but this manual exchange of information by fax and email, or by sneaker-net (i.e. a consultant going by taxi from one office to another) is slow, patchy and expensive.

This partial access to informatioin tends to reinforce existing power imbalances.  In 2008 civil society organisations from both donor countries and developing countries met in Accra and compared notes.  Representatives from northern NGOs reported that they generally could, with some effort and sufficient time, get information they needed from donor agencies in response to specific requests. By contrast the southern NGOs reported that when they asked donors for the same kind of information they often did not even enjoy the courtesy of a reply.

Meaningful aid transparency will occur when information is available in many different forms, in the detail and form required for particuar users, often combined with data from other sources. We can’t achieve this with a single international aid database, or a single database for each recipient country.  But if we build many separate bespoke, manually-populated databases to meet the needs of different users, we are left with a nightmare of duplicate reporting and inconsistent, incomplete and out of date databases which are too expensive and difficult to maintain.

A public data infrastructure

Fortunately there is a solution which – in common with many of the best solutions in life – lies somewhere in between.

If donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and implementing agencies publish all the up-to-date information they have about their aid projects, online in a common, machine-readable format, then it is possible for everyone to access that information easily, and to collate information from many sources, and to add up and compare across donors.  The reusable data format makes it possible to turn donor-centred information into user-centred information.

Once we have this information in a reusable format, any number of databases  and websites can be built quickly, and can be easily maintained.  Instead of spending a year building a database of livelihoods projects in Ethiopia, Gary could have done it in an afternoon; and the information would stay current automatically.

That is why the International Aid Transparency Initiatve is so important.  It solves the problem of turning donor-centred transparency into user-centred information. It is neither a new database, nor merely an encouragement to publish project details online.  It is an international public infrastructure for reusable data.  Donors accounting for for two thirds of global aid have now said that they will, during 2011, publish their data online in this common, reusable format.  (My former colleagues at aidinfo have done a very good short video explaining how IATI works.)

This will bring about a revolution in aid transparency.  If a country chooses not to open its aid management system to the public, that won’t be a problem any longer for citizens who want to know what is happening in their country, because it will be easy for anyone to build a copy of the database and populate it with exactly the same information from the same source.

More importantly, the creation of an international public data infrastructure for development unleashes possibilities which we could not even contemplate today. It will become easy to connect aid information to other kinds of data, such as government budgets, the distribution of poverty, or feedback from citizens.  It will unlock new analysis and insights, and allow different, less controlled, more user-centred ways of increasing accountability.

That’s why the most important step organisations can take towards meaningful aid transparency is to sign up to and implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative.  The UK has already started to publish its data in the IATI format, other donors are expected to do so in the near future.   Donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and private contractors should all follow suit voluntarily, or be required to do so by the people who fund them.  Government donors should make it condition of eceiving a grant or a contract that the organisation must itself implement IATI.  Bilateral agencies should not put money into an international organisation or multi-donor trust fund that does not comply with IATI.  Citizens should refuse to put money into a collecting tin unless that charity implements IATI.  And charities should not expect to continue to benefit from tax relief if they are not prepared to adhere to this international transparency standard.

Dogfooding

The raw information is not, by itself, very useful.  As well as pumping out data in a reusable format, it is right and understandable that many donors will want summarise and synthesize, to highlight key trends, draw out key lesssons, and tell their story.

As Ranil said on AidThoughts:

By all means, publish the data to allow people to interrogate it themselves. But also provide high-quality, penetrative analysis in a simple, easily understood form to support their understanding. They can always go beyond that if they wish.

I largely agree with this (notwithstanding Ranil’s suggestion to the contrary).   But I would add an important qualification: the principle of ‘dog-fooding’.

Donors should be mindful that the public increasingly expects the authorities to show rather than tell. Though most members of the public will never look at the information which underpins the summaries and narratives, they will trust the summaries more if they know that the underlying information is available for anyone who wants to check it and perhaps to construct an alternative interpretation.  So while donors should be encouraged to provide easy-to-understand analysis, they should also publish the raw data which supports it.

Furthermore, in the must-read paper Government Data and the Invisible Hand, Robinson et al from Yale proposed the following principle:

The new administration should specify that the federal government’s primary objective as an online publisher is to provide data that is easy for others to reuse, rather than to help citizens use the data in one particular way or another.  The policy route to realizing this principle is to require that federal government Web sites retrieve their published data using the same infrastructure that they have made available to the public. Such a rule incentivizes government bodies to keep this infrastructure in good working order, and ensures that private parties will have no less an opportunity to use public data than the government itself does. The rule prevents the situation, sadly typical of government Web sites today, in which governmental interest in presenting data in a particular fashion distracts from, and thereby impedes, the provision of data to users for their own purposes. [My emphasis]

This is a principle which can and should be applied to aid information.  If donor agencies were to agree that the information and analysis that they publish on their websites and elsewhere would be retrieved entirely through the publicly available IATI infrastructure, this would incentivise them to maintain their IATI data up to date and in good order; it would ensure that their analysis can be reproduced (and challenged) by others; it would increase public trust in the analysis; and it would reduce the risk of inconsistency between the summaries produced by donors and the analysis done by others.

Donors who resist the principle that they should ‘eat their own dogfood’ by using the publicly available data infrastructure for their own website and analysis have to explain why they think that the information they use is sufficiently important to be included in their analysis but should nonetheless not be publicly available for others to use.

The dogfood principle is famously practised at Google, which uses its own products internally, both before and after public release, to eliminate bugs and to make sure the organisation is always aware of the limitations of its products so that they remain focused on priorities for new features and improvements.

Helping citizens to use data

The Robinson et al paper quoted above argues that priority for government should be to publish reusable data, rather than to help citizens to use data in a particular way.

Perhaps it is reasonable to expect that the wealthy, educated citizens of America, supported by the technology of Silicon Valley, will be able to interpret and government data.  But is it sensible to expect that citizens, civil society organisations and parliamentarians in developing countries will be able to do the same?

Here’s Ranil again:

In recipient countries, both civil society and the Government needs to be helped to use the data available to work out how far the aid received in total and from each country deviates from their needs, and this again needs to be backed by a real form of accountability – and this is the hardest part of all.

I agree with this, of course.  The publication of raw data is no use unless citizens and their representatives are able to use it and to exercise real accountability over their governments, donors and service providers.  This will require investment in tools and technology and in capacity and skills, and we should expect a period of only partial success while we learn what works.

Perhaps I am more optimistic than other people because I believe that, once there is an infrastructure of publicly available reusable data, people will work out to use it.  I have a great deal of confidence in the energy and capacity of people in developing countries to sieze the opportunities of freedom when they can.

Perhaps I am too cynical in observing that many of the people – and Ranil is an exception to this generalisation – who argue most passionately for donor funding of capacity building and pilot projects and the like are also people who might expect to secure lucrative contracts from such efforts.

My anxiety about putting donors under too much pressure to focus on this is that it may reduce the priority that donors give to what only they can do, namely making available up-to-date, disaggregated, comparable, information about their aid projects.   If a donor doesn’t fund work supporting civil society groups to use aid information, then someone else can fill that gap.  But if a donor doesn’t make their information publicly available in a reusable format, nobody else can do it for them.

Furthermore, the most valuable contribution that donors can make to making it possible for citizens to use aid information is to reduce the costs of accessing and using it, by making the reusable data easily and cheaply accessible.   A modest investment which sharply brings down the costs for everyone of accessing data will have a much higher return than spending the same money enabling one particular group to assemble and use information for a particular purpose.

This means that I am in favour of encouraging donors to do what they can, with funding and expertise, to enable people to use aid information to increase accountability and so improve services; but I think it is a lower priority for donors than getting a comprehensive public data infrastructure working properly.

This means that donors should:

a. First, implement the International Aid Transparency Initiative so that there is as much information as possible freely available and meaningfully accessible to everyone;

b. Then use exclusively that public data infrastructure for their own websites, analysis and publications (the dogfood principle); this will create incentives for donors to ensure that the public information is up-to-date, comprehensive and accurate;

c. Then – and only then – invest in helping citizens to use the information in different ways.

This is a lexicographic ordering of obligations, meaning that no item on the list should be considered until the obligations above it have been discharged in full.

I do not mean to claim that helping citizens to use the data is objectively less important than getting the data out there; but I am saying that it is less important for donors to address this, since other entites can help citizens but only donors get the data published.

Budget classifications

By putting in place a public data infrastructure for development (namely IATI) we have opened up almost limitless opportunities to make more information more accessible at little cost to donor organisations and data users.  So now let’s ask how we should use these opportunities.

A key priority must be to make sure that aid information is categorised according to local budget classifications.  This has been agreed in principle in the IATI data standard, and the IATI Technical Advisory Group has identified several possible options for how it might be implemented.   The TAG should be asked to come to an agreement quickly on this so that donors can make it happen.  (The reasons why it is essential to be able to read aid information alongside national budget information were were set out in my earlier post so I won’t repeat them here.)

Information about planned future aid

The DAC databases are designed to keep track of what donors have spent, rather than future plans, reflecting their primary role of allowing donors to hold each other to account for keeping their promises.  Country aid management systems usually have more forward-looking information, reflecting their function as supporting the dialogue between government and donors.  But the forward looking information they contain is frequently patchy and incomplete.

Homi Kharas, in Measuring the Cost of Aid Volatility, estimates that the cost to aid recipients of historic unpredictability of committed aid flows is 15 percent.  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.   It seems so obvious that it is scarcely worth saying, but it is preposterous that a government cannot make an informed decision about where to supply new water points because they don’t know where donors and NGOs are already planning to provide services.  Lack of information about current and future aid spending leads to duplication and overlap in some places, and woefully under-served communities elsewhere.  We miss the synergy of complementary investments (investment in agriculture together with rural feeder roads, for example), and we create uncertainty for the private sector.

Furthermore, for people in developing countries, know what donors are doing and planning to do is a critical first step in injecting some local accountability.  The people we spoke to were not mainly interested in the past: they wanted to be able to find out what is planned and how they can become involved.

This is a challenge for many donors, for two main reasons.  First, aid projects often don’t get into their systems until they are into the implementation stage and beginning to disburse.  Before that, plans are often held as less structured information – such as in planning documents or email exchanges, and these plans are rarely collected into a central repository.  Finding a way to get this information systematically into IATI is therefore a non trivial task.

Second, some donors are worried about saying too much about their plans until they have considered their options in some detail, secured high-level or political approval within the agency, obtained approval from legislators who must appropriate the funds, and reached an agreement with the host country.  Donors do not want to announce the budget for a project before they put it out to tender,  as they don’t want the bids to congregate around the budget ceiling.

Neither of these problems is insurmountable, and given the importance of forward looking information we should aim to make it a priority to address them.  Concerns about pre-empting the decisions of the legislature seems to be a case of inventing obstacles (it is easy to include disclaimers, and governments talk about future spending plans all the time).  The genuinely hard problem is logistical: most donors don’t have much of this information is a reusable form.

The IATI mechanism is designed to enable users to collate information from many different sources.  This may be the solution for some organisations who do not keep forward looking information in their management information system.  These organisations may find it most practical to publish information about actual spending from their central finance system, while decentraliszing publication of planned spending to country offices or embassies.

The people and organisations who want information about future aid plans – such as developing country partners, NGOs and civil society organisations in developing countries – are not the most powerful stakeholders, and so it is no surprise that our existing systems are not designed to meet these needs.   Our systems are mainly designed to record and report past spending, because that is what donor countries have decided to monitor, and that is what they need to report to parliaments and auditors.

Organisations should adopt the principle (proposed to us by a statistician from a donor aid agency) that ‘if anyone knows it, everyone should know it’.  Though this is the part of the agenda that may require the most administrative change,  the benefits of sharing forward looking information are potentially huge.

Traceability

This is a simplified diagram by Homi Kharas of how aid flows. There are many more layers than depicted here.

When courier companies introduced barcode systems to track envelopes and parcels, they faced non-trivial implementation costs, but the savings have been enormous.   Barcode scanning has replaced a lot of manual recording, so streamlining administration, and has enabled companies to trace missing items easily.  It has provided management information to identify bottlenecks and so drive performance improvements. It has hugely reduced the companies’ customer support costs, since customers can see for themselves where packages have reached through self-service websites.  Perhaps more importantly, the fact that customers can track packages themselves has increased customer trust in courier companies, and some larger customers have integrated the tracking information from their courier company into their own management information systems.

A system of aid traceability is technically feasible, and while the implementation costs would not be negligible, the savings would be huge.  There is a placeholder for such a mechanism in the IATI standard waiting to be fleshed out.  My view is that this should be a very high priority.

How would it work? The underlying design principle is that each organisation disbursing money would report the details of its spending and that this would include the transaction identifier (or identifiers) corresponding to the source of funds for that spending.  For example, a multi-donor trust fund would publish each item of spending and include an attribution of that particular expenditure to the fund’s various income from donors.  Some spending would be linked to particular grant (e.g. where a donor had made a grant to the trust fund for a particular purpose), and other spending would be attributed pro-rata to various general sources of funding.

Once implemented, a system of traceability would not be a significant burden on aid recipients and implementing agencies. Each organisation and agency would be asked to publish information it already has: the source of the money it spends. If this is done consistently and the data published through IATI, it would enable any stakeholder to cumulate the information across the aid system and so obtain an overall picture of where aid is actually going.  It would be possible for the first time to trace money from taxpayer, through donor agencies, trusts funds, NGOs, governments and private contractors to implementation on the ground.  It will become possible to compare overhead costs and margins, to see whether supply chains are unnecessarily long, and to establish how much money actually reaches the intended destination.

The same traceability standard would also solve completely the problem of checking whether donors are living up to their multiple spending pledges on aid – for example to create new sources of finance for climate change.  (I’m largely hostile to these spending pledges, but that is a different matter.)  All a donor would need to do is designate each spending pledge as a different “source” of their money, and it would then be possible for anyone easily to trace whether each donor had in fact spent the money they promised and to see what had eventually happened to it.  This is a much simpler and more effective solution to ensuring that spending pledges are kept than the leading alternative, which is to set up brand new global funds for the sole purpose of enabling the money to be accounted for separately.  Traceability is a much cheaper, more efficient way to track spending pledges and prevent double counting.

Indeed, a standard for traceability could greatly simplify aid management and reduce the bureaucratic burdens of the aid system.  Intermediary organisations already have to provide information in considerable detail to their donors, to enable the funders to see how the money has been used and whether it has been spent in accordance with various constraints.  An NGO might have to comply with a rule from one funder its money is not used to finance capital equipment, and a different rule from a different funder that the grant is not used to finance travel to and from the United States.  (This is a real life example.)  So all organisations in receipt of grants or contracts are already having to apportion their spending across various sources of income so that they can show they have complied with the different obligations imposed upon them in grant agreements and conracts.  Traceability would greatly simplify reporting by NGOs and implementing organisations. Instead of manually completing forms and spreadsheets for each funder, they would simply publish the details of their spending electronicallly, with all their spending attributed to particular sources of income.  Donors would be able to access the information electronically through the IATI data infrastructure to confirm that their particular grants or payments were being used by grantees and contractors in the agreed way.  This would both simplify and streamline reporting by NGOs, contractors and other implementing agents, and streamline compliance monitoring by donors.

A system of tracability would also eliminate double counting by implementing agents.  I know a former MP from Mozambique who was asked to officiate at three separate opening ceremonies for the same school in his constituency, each with a different donor as the guest of honour to view the school for which – according to the invitation – they  had paid. Each donor was able to report to its headquarters that the money had been properly used for the purpose intended, and the result was this new school.

This scam is widespread in the aid industry and without traceability there is nothing in the system which prevents it.   Traceability would make transparent where administration overheads are too high.  It would show which organisations are not disbursing money, whether through incompetence or graft, and it would narrow the scope for corruption and waste.

The system of traceability proposed here would not require a central database or a complicated new set of reporting requirements.  All that is needed is that  implementing agents should have to identify the source of each transaction in a consistent way.  Donors could simply require this in their contracts and grant agreements.  Far from adding to the workload of NGOs and contractors, such a system could greatly reduce reporting and bureaucracy. And the IATI information infrastructure is ideallly suited to enabling these fragments of information reported by many different decentralised organisations, each individually meaningless, to be added up into a overall picture which is not only useful but potentially game-changing.

Geographical coding

The Ethiopian Government – one of the poorest countries in the world – has a GIS database of all the public health facilities in the country.  But there is no equivalent information about the location of health facilities provided by donors and NGOs.

World Bank health projects in Kenya overlaid on a map of poverty levels

The technology for geographical coding has changed out of all recognition in the last few years.  Everyone with a smartphone has the technology in their pocket to record the location of a piece of a school, a well or a clinic and to add it automatically to a database.

When aid projects in Nepal were geocoded, and then compared with a map of where poverty is most acute, the donors and government found there was no correlation. The aid projects were all concentrated around the offices of the NGOs and along the tarmac roads, far away from the people living remotely in mountains whose need is greatest.

AidData has a very useful summary of the benefits of geocoding and mapping.  More and more donors are seeing its value. I’m told that when the US Embassy in Yemen geocoded its projects it rapidly found that this was the framework they used most often for planning and mointoring their aid.  The Gates Foundation has similarly found it useful to geocode all its agricultural projects.  Yet neither organisation has chosen to publish this geographical information for others to use. The World Bank, working with AidData, has geocoded all of its active projects and made this information publicly available (see http://geo.worldbank.org/).   Their Mapping for Results programme is at the forefront in the development industry.  (I thought I saw a recent announcment by the US Government that it was moving to geocoding in ten pilot countries, but I can’t find any trace of that now.)

This is an example of increasingn returns to information.  The addition of geographical information to aid data enormously increases the value of the information that is already being collected.  Geographical information offers one of the most useful and intuitive way of organising information, and opens the way to new platforms for information sharing and gathering.

It is important that as more and more donors move to geocoding information, they do so in a consistent way.  That will increase the value of the information, and reduce the burdens on implementing organisations who will otherwise find themselves having to report the same information in multiple formats.  The IATI standard does not yet include a requirement to geocode data, but it does set out a common format for voluntarily doing so.

An important step towards meaningful aid transparency would be an agreement among all donors, NGOs, and implementing agencies to geocode all their activities from now on, and to publish that information through the IATI infrastructure.

Outputs and outcomes

The discussion so far has been mainly about spending, and the need to keep track of how money is spent.  But none of us thinks that is what is ultimately important. What we all really care about is what outputs are produced as a result of all this and what difference they make to people’s lives.

Some donor agencies have realised that it is very helpful to have standardised measures of outputs within their organisation. This enables them to compare performance across projects and programmes, and so learn what works best.  It enables them to identify wasteful or expensive programmes and put more aid into the most effective programmes.  It enables agencies to estimate totals of the outputs which their work is supporting across the world, which is useful as part of their accountability to taxpayers.

When the World Bank looked at the different ways it was measuring its textbook programmes, it found a vast range of different output measures (including, in one case, a text project whose outputs was specified in metric tonnes).   When one bilateral agency put together comparable measures of textbooks purchased by different programmes in different countries, it found that the difference in unit costs between the cheapest and the most expensive programmes was substantial – a discrepency of two orders of magnitude which could not be explained by differences of circumstance between the countries.  (Sadly this analysis was never published.)   We can only make these comparisons when we standardise measures of outputs.  In practice the process of arriving at standardised indicators has been fairly boring, but they have not been particularly difficult to implement.

Common output measures would be even more useful if they were standardised internationally across aid agencies. Then we could compare the cost effectiveness of different international organisations, including comparing bilateral donors, development banks and NGOs.   We could learn not only within aid agencies, but between them.

Internationally comparable output measures is, in my view, the most important step on the road to a sensible division of labour in the aid industry.   Specialisation will only increase the productivity of the system if organisations specialise in what they are good at, and we can’t know that until we have comparable measures of their cost-effectiveness.  When it is apparent to everyone how much it costs for different organisations to provide the same outputs, there will be public pressure on the worst-performing organisations either to raise their game or to focus instead on the things which they can do better.

There are inevitably squeals of protest from the aid industry about all this.  In part this is the modern equivalent of political pressure which led to the Calico Acts: vested interests resisting any kind of competition which might undermine their privileged position. Competition reduces the producer surplus, so you should expect incumbent producers to resist it.

But there are more creditable worries about introducing standardised output measures: that they may push donors to funding what can be measured rather than what is important, or that they will undermine the principle of country ownership by defining a rigid, global idea of what is ‘good’ in development.

I don’t find either objection persuasive.

I have no difficulty accepting that there many activities in development which have rather diffuse, difficult to measure and unpredictable benefits which are nonetheless worth doing because the potential benefits are large – I have, after all, spent the last three years of my life promoting aid transparency, which is an example of just such an activity.  But I don’t think the advocates of spending part of the aid budget in these ways should expect to be funded without having to make a robust case.  If we have good measures of the benefits of alternative uses of aid – such as vaccinating children – then someone who thinks that aid should be spent on capacity building or public sector reform should produce the evidence and analysis which justifies their view.   We should not be subject to levelling down, in which we refuse to do the best we can to quantify outputs whenever possible on the grounds that it might make other kinds of investment look relatively less attractive.

Nor do I believe that standardised output measures will undermine country ownership.  Aid donors already require recipients to provide a raft of information which they say they need for their domestic accountability.  Recipient governments, NGOs and implementing agencies would be overjoyed if donors could get their act together and ask for reports on the same, rather than slightly different, measures of output.

Some donors have shown that they understand this by moving to internal standardised output indicators. Before they become too attached to these, they should make a big effort to get international agreement to a common set of indicators which they are all willing to use. This would be a big step forward towards meaningful aid transparency, especially for those people whose primary interest is in understanding what aid achieves, and not simply in tracking how it is spent.

Citizen feedback

The aid industry has relied for too long on monitoring and evaluation by so-called experts, brought in from donor countries to conduct stakeholder interviews and review logframes.  The real experts on whether an aid programme is working are the people who are supposed to be benefiting from it.

Can we link information about public services to the aid programmes which funded them?

As we implement a public data infrastructure for aid, one of the most exciting new possiblities is that this will help us to find out, for the first time, information from citizens about their experiences of how aid is used and their priorities for the future.

The Maji Matone (‘Raising the Water Pressure’) programme in Tanzania  enables  citizens to use their mobile phones to give feedback on the state of rural water supply. The information is then forwarded to the relevant government authorities – thus enabling them to respond quickly – as well as to the media.  This kind of feedback is a great way to improve public services in developing countries.  But it will do nothing to improve the quality of aid unless this feedback about services can also be linked back to the specific aid programmes that supported those services.  If the information coming from Maji Matone about which water points are working can be mashed up with information coming from donors about which of those water points they paid for, then we can find out which donors’ provide the most useful and functioning water points.  It is ironic that the part of this jigsaw that is missing is not real-time  feedback from rural water point users in Tanzania, but the necessary information from donors to connect that feedback to their aid programmes, despite the money and technology at their disposal.  When donors move ahead with detailed geocoding, and publishiing that information through IATI, a big part of this problem will be solved.

The examples so far – from crowdsourcing in disaster relief to citizen report cards in health clinics – suggest that when citizens are able to get engaged, the benefits can be enormous.

A public data infrastructure for aid creates a platform which makes this possible on a large scale. Together with with growing access to mobile phones and the internet, it will change the power dynamics in the aid industry forever.  For the first time, it will be possible on a large scale for citizens to set priorities and give feedback about what is working in development.

Conclusions

The emergence of an open data infrastructure for development has huge potential to enable us to use aid much better.  I’ve proposed ten steps to improve that infrastructure, and to begin to take advantage of the opportunities it offers.   Here they are again, in short form:

1.  Putting a database of aid projects online does not result in user-centered, meaningful aid transparency unless the information is online in a common, machine-readable, reusable format.  Donors, foundations, international organisations, NGOs and aid contractors should implement the IATI standard.

2. Donors should require NGOs and and implementing agencies to implement the IATI standard as a condition of grants and contracts.  Citizens should demand it of charities.

3. Organisations should use the publicly available data infrastructure of IATI to power their websites and for other publications (the ‘dogfood principle’).

4. Helping citizen country citizens to use this data is important, but donors’ top priority should be getting their own data into the IATI system and using that public data infrastructure themselves.

5. Aid spending should be published categorized according to recipient country budget classifications (as well as the agreed international classifications).

6. Forward looking information about aid is administratively challenging for some donors, but hugely important.  If the donors have forward looking information then (apart from a few exceptions) they should publish it.

7. Donors should implement a global system of traceability in aid.

8. All organisations should start to record geographical information, in the agreed common format.

9. We need an international agreement on a common set of standardised ouput indicators.

10.  We need to connect feedback from citizens in developing countries to this public data infrastructure about aid.

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.

Read the whole thing here.

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• 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Twitter

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.

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 …

In this first post in a series, I’ll look at the basic set up.

What computer should I use?

If you are travelling a lot, you probably want a computer that is light, not-too expensive, with a good battery life and reasonably robust.  You might want to look at the new generation of netbook computers – these are less powerful than more expensive laptops, but perfectly adequate for writing documents, doing email and surfing the web; and they can cost as little as £200.  The Samsung N220 or the HP Mini 110 are both good options.   The other disadvantage is that they have small keyboards and screens: but you could quite cheaply add a monitor and keyboard to use at home.

If you want something a bit bigger or faster (which you would need if you want to edit photos or video) then you won’t go far wrong with a Dell or an HP laptop.   If money is no object (unlikely for most development workers) then get a solid state disk – they are much less likely to break down in hot and dusty climates.

Should I use Windows?

Most people use Windows, because it is so universal.  You’ll be able to share files easily and get some basic support.  If you go with Windows, then use either Windows XP or Windows 7 (not Windows Vista, which is slow and unreliable).

Lots of people prefer Apple Mac.  Lots of Windows users who try Macs never want to go back.  You can get Microsoft Word and Excel for the Mac, and you can swap files without problems with Windows users.  Most people find Macs easier to use and more reliable than Windows; and the design is beautiful; but they are a bit more expensive than their Windows equivalents.

Most normal people wouldn’t use Linux software: so I’m not recommending it; though if you fancy a walk on the wild side, the latest version of Ubuntu (10.04 – Lucid Lynx) installs very easily and is very easy to use; and of course it is completely free and much more secure than Windows.  It is what I use on my main computer at home.  OpenOffice is a powerful, free alternative to Microsoft Office.  If you are technically minded this might be a good cheap alternative – especially if you want a second computer.

What office software do I need?

For your work lots of people need Microsoft Word and possibly Powerpoint.  The latest version is Office 2010, and this enables you to read files from, and create files that can be read by, earlier versions.  But there is not much new in Office 2007 and Office 2010, so if you already have Office 2003 you can stick with that for now. If you stick with Office 2003  you may want to download and install a compatibility pack which enables you to read documents and spreadsheets created with later versions of Office.  You can get Office for the Mac or the PC; but if you are going to do presentations with a Mac, use Keynote rather than Powerpoint.

If you don’t need Microsoft for work reasons, consider getting OpenOffice instead.  It is free and it works well with people using Microsoft. UPDATE: Cato in the comments points out that OpenOffice for the Mac is called NeoOffice.

How do I stay secure?

Computer viruses are a big problem in developing countries, even more than in rich countries.  Here are four things you should do to stay secure:

• First, you should use registered software, especially Windows. If you use unregistered or pirate software, it won’t update itself automatically to close any security loopholes, and that will leave you vulnerable.
• Second, install a virus checker and keep it up to date.  AVG Free is, er, free, and perfectly adequate.
• Third, don’t use Internet Explorer for surfing the web.  It is very insecure. Use Chrome or Firefox instead. I am using Chrome all the time now because it is so fast.
• Fourth, if you can, choose a Mac or Linux rather than Windows.

Making backups

Everybody using a computer should have backups; and that is even more true if you are living in a developing country where something is more likely to go wrong (e.g. hardware failures because of heat and dust; software failures because of viruses; theft  etc).  Concentrate on backing up your data – documents, photos, music etc, rather than software which you can always install again if you need to.

Ideally you should use the 3-2-1 rule: you should have three copies of everything, on two different types of media (eg hard disk and DVD), of which one should be stored off-site.

I have an external hard drive which I use to back up all my documents, photos and music.  I also make occasional DVDs of important stuff.   Try to buy one that does NOT need an external power supply, because then it is easy to pop into your travel bag. This Freecom drive is 320Gb for £50, which is not bad.  If you use a Mac, set up Time Machine to make backups.

In addition, consider using an online backup service such as Dropbox.  These services make copies of particular folders on your computer onto a password protected disk online.  They work in the background, copying changed files when your internet connection is available and not otherwise being used  They enable you to get those files back whereever you can get online – very helpful if you are travelling and need to get hold of a file from your computer.

Email

I use GMail for everything.  I’ve got several different email addresses, but they all go in to the same GMail account which I can access anywhere. (You can use free Google Apps to have your own domain name – that looks more professional than using a gmail address.)

A good idea is to use Outlook on your computer, connected to your GMail account.  Here is how. (Use IMAP rather than POP, because that way any change you make in GMail will be made automatically in Outlook, and any change you make in Outlook will be automatically reflected in GMail.)  With this set up, you can work offline (eg on a plane, or when the internet is down) in Outlook, or use Gmail or Outlook to work online.

If you rely entirely on GMail, then you run the risk that you might be locked out one day. This does happen, either because of a cockup at Google, or because your account gets hacked.  Would you be OK permanently losing all the mail you have ever sent and received?  That is probably not as much fun as it sounds.  If you use Outlook connected to your GMail then you’ll have a local copy of everything.  Alternatively, you can use a service like Backupify which makes backup copies of all your online services such as GMail, Facebook and Flickr in case they go down.  I use Thunderbird (made by the same people as Firefox) because I like the fact that all my mail is downloaded in a standard format; but most people are comfortable with Outlook.  I have it installed on a USB stick, so all my mail is backed up on that.

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You’ll have noticed that I am quite focused on staying secure by avoiding viruses and having good backups. This is because  I know too many people who have seen their hard disk fail in a dusty city, or found their computer so comprehensively infected with viruses that there is no option but to wipe the hard disk.   You really want something that you can set up and then forget – which is why online services like dropbox or carbonite are a good idea, but they may not be much good for you if your internet connection is very slow.

In the next installment, I’ll look at software for the non-technical development worker.

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.

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.

I’ve been playing with it this morning and I find it captivating. Perhaps that just shows that I’m a data geek.

Gapminder on my PC

This is a great example of intermediaries (in this case, Google) creating applications that people can actually use, based on raw data published by government.  Governments and international institutions could never do something like this.  That is why they should focus on liberating the data, in a free, open, standardised way, so that more applications like this can be developed.

Not only has the World Bank made this data available, it has created interfaces that enable programmers to access the data automatically (in technical language, they are providing an API).  That in turn means that individuals and organisations can create programmes, websites or visualizations that use the data and enable them to mash it up with other information.

This data does not yet included detailed World Bank project data.  But the World Bank is part of the International Aid Transparency Initiative, IATI, through which 18 donors are working together to put detailed aid data online.  When that is up and running, it will be possible to access aid data in the same way as the development information being put online by the World Bank today.

This is a huge step forward for open access to development data.  Well done the World Bank.

Development blogs you should be reading

To make this pleasingly controversial, I’ve also put them roughly in order, from “must read” at the top to “probably should read”.  I’m not going in for that “in no particular order” fence-sitting stuff.

• Chris Blattman
• Duncan Green
• Bill Easterly (and colleagues)
• Aid Thoughts
• Karen Grepin
• Blood and Milk and everything else by Alana Shaikh
• Texas in Africa
• Global Dashboard
• Wronging Rights
• Tales from the Hood
• Transitionland
• White African
• Good Intentions Are Not Enough
• Hand Relief International (spoof)
• Wandering Thoughts
• Rethinking Development Economics
• Aid on the Edge of Chaos
• last and least, me: Owen Abroad

If you want an email whenever this blog is updated, please put your email address in the box top right.

Development organisations and think-tanks

Here are some blogs from development organisations and think tanks – some of them can err on the wrong side of the blog/flog boundary from time to time.  Again, best ones are first.

• Center for Global Development(disclosure: I work here)
• Shanta Devarajan at the World Bank
• Global Economic Governance group at Oxford
• Aidinfo (disclosure: I work here)
• Development Initiatives (disclosure: I work here)
• Publish What You Fund
• Danny Kaufmann at Brookings
• UK Department for International Development bloggers
• Ideas 4 development
• Overseas Development Institute (ODI) Blog

Development podcasts

Here are some development-related podcasts. (I’m about to start a new series of Development Drums, by the way).

• Development Drums (self publicity alert!)
• The Center for Global Development Prosperity Wonkcast
• Think Before You Give
• BBC Africa Today
• Peterson Perspectives
• PRI: Global Health and Development
• The World Bank Podcasts
• Philanthropy This Week
• PRI: The Changing World

Bubbling up: newer development blogs

Here are some more you might want check out – they are too new (to me, at least) or slightly off-topic to be included in my “must read” list, but they look promising:

• Access to Action
• Do No Harm – by folks at the London School of Economics
• Waylaid Dialectic
• Lindsay Morgan’s Despatches
• Wait  … What?

And of course there are more also-rans and off-topic blogs on the right of the screen.

On Twitter

If you are a Twitter user, you might be interested to add these to your list of people you follow:

• A list of Center for Global Development Fellows on Twitter
• Jim Cashel’s list of global development types on Twitter
• Mike Gechter’s list

Who are we missing?

I’m looking forward to being introduced to new blogs, and being reminded of blogs I’ve forgotten, in the comments.

A national identity register of unique personal identifiers could make a significant contribution to improving government services.  We could introduce such a register without allowing the establishment of a surveillance state. The following five conditions would help to protect our liberties:

• government data should be stored in decentralized databases, not in shared data warehouses;
• citizens should have access to all data held about them by government
• citizens should be able to see a log of all government access to their data
• an independent information security ombudsman should police the systems
• there should be no identity cards and no collection of biometric data

If all these protections were put in place, I would welcome a national identity register. If the Government will not implement any of them, I should like to know why not.

Roll on four years, and the Labour manifesto published yesterday says:

We will explore how to give citizens direct access to the data held on them by public agencies, so that people can use and control their own personal data in their interaction with service providers

The Conservative manifesto published today says:

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves.

Just sayin’, they should listen to us geeks and we wouldn’t have wasted the few years arguing about an identity card database.  (h/t mydex.org/blog)

While we are on the subject, Tom Watson seems really to understand the internet.  He says he wants to “stand on a platform that is avowedly supportive of the generation that seek to use the Internet to make the world a better place”, and he has drafted a digital manifesto for comments:

1. I will support and campaign for more transparency in the public and private sector.
2. I will oppose measures that unjustly deny people’s access to the Internet.
3. Whilst noting the acknowledged limitations, I believe people have the right to free speech on the Internet.
4. I will support all measures that allow people access to their personal data held by others. I further support restoration of control over how personal data is gathered, managed and shared to the individual.
5. I will use my role as an MP to support international free expression movements.
6. The Internet shall be built and operated openly and without discrimination.
7. I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain.
8. I will support all proposals that lead to greater numbers joining the digital world and oppose measures that reduce it.
9. I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age.

So in response to a few requests, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” box on the top right of the my blog. If you want an automatic email every time a new blog post appears here, please put your email address into the box and press the subscribe button. You’ll get an email asking you to click a link to confirm that you really do want to receive updates. Once you’ve pressed OK on that, you’ll get every new article by email.

Please let me know if you experience any problems making this work.

You can also follow me on twitter (@owenbarder).

(For the technically minded, I’m using the Subscribe2 WordPress plugin.)

We got the text of the budget documents as ASCII files on 3.5″ disks from the typesetters, and I worked through the night, using a basic text editor to put the HTML codes into the files manually. I finished marking up the pages about an hour before the Budget Speech began; and we went live as the Chancellor of the Exchequer sat down at the end of his speech.

Not only was the Treasury the first UK government department to have a website, the UK was the first country anywhere in the world to put its budget documents online.  Today, of course, it is inconceivable that this information would not be available online. We could see then that the World Wide Web, invented three years earlier by Tim Berners-Lee, would change the way people access information, and we were proud to be part of that change.

In 2009, Tim Berners Lee (now Sir Tim) described in a TED talk his vision of a new internet, that will do for numbers what the web has done for words, pictures and video. He called for data to be unlocked. A year later, in a short 5 minute talk, he shows what can happen when the data are liberated.  It is well worth watching:

Once again I find myself persuaded by Tim Berners-Lee’s vision.  With an ace team at aidinfo,  we are working to see it applied to information about foreign aid.  We are working with donors to help them to work out the best way to put their aid data online in a common format (vision paper here – pdf) so that anyone with access to the internet can take that information from many donors, mix it together, and use it to help change their world.

If you want to hear more about why aid transparency is important, listen to this Center for Global Development “wonkcast” – a 20 minute interview with me.  And if you want to hear more about how citizens in East Africa are using information to increase “social accountability”, listen to the subsequent wonkcast with Rakesh Rajani.

Obviously I don’t use Internet Explorer because it is (a) not compliant with standards; (b) not safe; (c) Microsoft.  And I don’t use Safari because Steve Jobs is a control freak and I don’t wish to be locked up in his world.

So like most geeks I’ve been using Firefox, which is faster and safer than Internet Explorer and has great add-ons. But I’m finding Firefox is becoming a little sluggish as it gets more bloated, and perhaps it is becoming a little unstable. For the time being  I have now switched my default browser to Google Chrome, because it is quite a bit faster than Firefox. (I’m writing this in a Chrome, for example).  I’m keeping Firefox because I like some of the plugins (such as S3Fox and Scribefire) but I reckon I’ll only use it when I need one of those.

But, I hear you cry, what a pain switching between different browsers!  It means your bookmarks and logins are never in one place, and they are never there when you want them. Well that is where Xmarks comes in.  This nifty add-on which is available for Firefox and Chrome (and indeed IE and Safari, if you like that kind of thing) synchronises your bookmarks to a central server on the interwebby.  (Securely, we hope.) Once you have installed Xmarks in your various browsers you can forget about it.  Whenever you bookmark something in one browser, that bookmark will appear the same everywhere.  (Ditto stored passwords, if you want.) So whether I am using my home computer, my work laptop or my Linux server, and whether I am using Chrome or Firefox, my bookmarks and logins are all the same in every broswer without me having to copy them over.  Which is nice.  Even if you don’t use more than one browser, Xmarks is pretty handy if you use more than one computer.

</geek stuff />

As well thiking it was the wrong decision in principle, I worried that a company that says one thing (“Don’t Be Evil”) and does another will eventually suffer from the contradiction between their values and their actions.

So I applaud their announcement today that they are taking a new approach in China and their threat to pull out of the market.

(Ironically, Google’s own blog is censored here in Ethiopia. You cannot access blogspot blogs.)

Google is standing up to dictatorship and speaking out for free speech, and putting this ahead of their immediate commercial interests.

It is hard to imagine other companies standing up for their – and our – values in this way. (Can you imagine Microsoft withdrawing their Bing search engine instead of producing sanitized results?)

Bloggers are quick to criticise when companies do the wrong thing.  So let’s be equally unstinting in our praise when they do things right.

Good on yer, Google.

The 6" Kindle, with a Bishoftu lake in the background, January 2010

I’ve had a Kindle here in Ethiopia for a few weeks now, and I’m lovin’ it.

I bought the international edition, with a 6 inch display (the Kindle DX with the larger 9.7 inch display is expected to be available in an international edition some time in 2010).

Update (6th January): coincidentally, the international edition of the DX has just been announced, and it will be shipping from 19 January.

Because it is an international edition, it works wirelessly in the UK and many other countries, using the mobile phone network.  There is no additional charge for this.  It means, for example, that you can subscribe to the Financial Times or the New York Times, and the latest edition is automatically delivered to your Kindle each day.  You can also browse for books and periodicals on your Kindle, and there is limited web browsing.

In Ethiopia the wireless does not work (presumably Amazon does not have an agreement with the Ethiopian mobile phone company, ETC).  So periodicals do not arrive automatically, and you cannot browse for new books on the Kindle itself.  But it is very easy and quick to download the latest edition of a newspaper or to get a new book from Amazon on a computer connected to the internet (it takes about 30 seconds to download today’s edition of the FT) and then to transfer it via USB cable to the Kindle.

I was able to update my Kindle to the latest version of the software by downloading it to my computer and installing it over a USB cable.  That worked fine. (If it were in an area with wireless coverage, the software would update automatically.)  The new software allows the Kindle to display .PDF files natively (i.e. without converting them to Kindle format) and apparently improves the battery life when wireless is turned on (I’ve not tested this last point, because my wireless is turned off.)

The 6″ version is a very good size for carrying around, especially when on the road or for plane journeys. It can store a thousand books, so you can be sure you won’t run out of reading material.  The screen only uses power when the page changes (it doesn’t use power simply to display) so power consumption is low – a couple of weeks with the wireless turned off.

I find the screen easy to read, even for long periods. It works well in bright sunlight.  The font size is adjustable (which is apparently one reason for very high sales among older people, some of whom like being able to increase the size of the text).  The slight drawback is that there is not very much on a single page, so you have to change the page often (especially if you read quite quickly).  Some people have commented unfavourably on the screen flicker as the page changes; I don’t find it a problem.

When the Kindle DX has an international edition, I think I may buy that as well.  (I had a chance to look at the US version of the Kindle DX when Chris Blattman was visiting Addis Ababa but I failed to take a side-by-side photograph).   Why would I want both?  The larger screen looks good for reading PDFs of academic journal articles and especially for newspapers.  But the smaller format is very good for having your books with you in your shoulder bag and when travelling.   I gather you can put the same content on both machines provided they are both registered to the same account.

So I think the advantages of a Kindle for people who work internationally, even in places where the wireless doesn’t work, are:

• Being able to carry a good collection of reading material with you while travelling – so you can travel light and you still won’t run out of things to read when stuck in an airport or at the border on a bus
• Getting today’s newspaper (e.g. New York Times, FT, Economist) delivered electronically (via a PC)
• Being able to buy the latest books without having to rely on the post (especially useful if you are in a book club!)

I’ve not tried the Sony eReader, and of course Apple may yet produce a tablet that blows the Kindle out of the water.

In this first episode, host Lawrence Macdonald talks to Todd Moss about his new paper, Saving Ghana from Its Oil: The Case for Direct Cash Distribution.  Todd proposes ways for the citizens to have more oversight of Ghana’s oil revenue, and to contain oil-induced patronage, by distributing the benefits of oil directly to the citizens.

The podcast lasts about 20 minutes, and you cou listen directly on line or subscribe on iTunes.

As you would expect from CGD, this first episode sugests that the wonkcasts will be essential listening.  CGD has a knack of addressing important developing issues in interesting and innovative ways, and basing its ideas on thorough research and evidence.

And if CGD’s wonkcast doesn’t satisfy your entire appetite for podcasts on development, there is always Development Drums.

He gives a bunch of reasons – to paraphrase, they are: (a) it is way to have influence; (b) it is probably a good career more; (c) it forces the author to think more carefully about the issues and to think about the big picture; (d) it acts as a an academic memory or diary; and (e) it subjects the author’s thinking and arguments to the wisdom of crowds.

These are all good reasons.

I started to blog because I wanted to stand up and be counted on the things I think are important.  Because I work at home on my own most of the time, blogging lets me get things off my chest without bothering my long-suffering partner about every issue.

I am very glad that Chris has decided to continue to blog.  I learn a lot from what he writes, and I can hear his voice in every post.

Fall classes have started again so my time on the DC metro has increased greatly. The commuting has meant that I’ve been blowing through podcasts at an alarming rate, and I’ve come across a few that are worth sharing. These links are to the webpages of the podcasts, but all of them can be found in iTunes as well.

First, taking something for nothing, without permission, and with no compensation for the person who created and owns it, is wrong. Simple as that.

With respect, it is not as simple as that.

The reason this looks plausible is the use of the word “taking”.   If I take something from you, that implies that I now have it and you no longer do.  If it was yours to start with, that would be unfair (or, in Mr Mandelson’s word, “wrong”).  But the challenge for making good policy about intellectual property is that the goods in question are non rival – meaning that one person’s consumption does not come at the expense of another person’s consumption of the same good.  If I make a copy of a song and listen to it on my MP3 player, that in no way reduces your ability to listen to it.   So I have not “taken” it from you.  We can both listen to it.  The marginal cost to society of my listening to the song is zero.

Mr Mandelson may have meant by “take” the idea that if I neglect to pay you for something, you lose out.  But this isn’t necessarily wrong.  As Chris Dillow points out, if I give a lift to a friend, I deprive a taxi company of revenue.  The taxi company might not be very happy about that. They might lobby the Business Minister over cocktails on a yacht, requesting that taxi companies be given a monopoly on giving rides in the area they serve.  (After all, they have spent a lot of money on cars and offices.)  The Business Minister should tell them to get stuffed.   There is no basic right to make money on your investments, and being deprived of potential revenue is not the same thing as a cost.

As I explained in more detail here, the economics of non-rival goods is quite different from the other kinds of goods.   Intellectual property rights are a social construct to create temporary monopolies which, unlike other forms of property, worsen rather than increase static allocative efficiency.  For non-rival goods, allocative efficiency requires that the price is zero, but dynamic efficiency may require some sort of remuneration for the creators of the products.  A society may choose to restrict access to a product as a way to create financial incentives for innovation. This may be worth doing if the welfare gains from the incentives to innovate exceed the welfare costs of reducing access to the products.  But that trade-off does not automatically and necessarily come down in favour of having intellectual property rights, nor is the creation of intellectual property rights the only or the necessarily the best way to create incentives to innovate.

This is not a wholesale argument against intellectual property rights.  But it is an argument against the daft claim that intellectual property rights are just the same as rights to rival goods such as physical property.   Property rights for rival goods increase, or at any rate do not diminish, allocative efficiency and hence welfare;  property rights for non-rival goods decrease allocative efficiency, and that is a welfare loss that has to be justified by a welfare gain elsewhere.

We do need to reward and incentivize innovation and creativity appropriately.  But I am struck by the lack of imagination and innovation in the current debate about how we do it.  Intellectual property rights are one approach, but they have important drawbacks.  We should not forget other possible approaches – such as prizes, buy-outs, or public funding – which might secure many of the same benefits without the costs.

… all too often the slides are verbal crutches for the speaker, not visual aids for the audience.

The power of technology – such as blogs – meant that the world could no longer be run by “elites”, Mr Brown said.

Policies must instead be formed by listening to the opinions of people “who are blogging and communicating with people around the world”, he said.

Mr Brown’s comments came during a surprise appearance at TED Global.

“That in my view gives us the first opportunity as a community to fundamentally change the world,” he told the TED Global (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference.

“Foreign Policy can never be the same again.”

I agree with that.  I’m very proud of my team’s work to develop and promote open data standards for aid and other resources for poverty reduction, to enable everyone in the world to engage on how resources for poverty reduction are used.   It ensures that the world is not run by elites, whether in developing countries or donors.

There are a number of emerging activities focusing on improving the transparency of aid and allowing organizations, projects, researchers, practitioners, and clients in developing countries to have improved access to aid information, data on outcomes, knowledge, and tools. We are getting closer to the day when anyone can easily determine who is doing what, where they are doing it, what they have learned, and who is funding them. Come join a group of interested organizations to brainstorm about how to advance the conversation about making aid more transparent, improving access to data, and making knowledge and tools related to development easier to find on the internet.

Sign up here: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/366214357

Our web guy has done a great job on our website: http://www.aidinfo.org.

Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed.

So I was dead pleased to see this by David Cameron in today’s Guardian

Transparency tears down the hiding places for sleaze, overspending and corruption. Soon enough all MPs’ expenses are going to be published online for ­everyone to see: I and the rest of the shadow cabinet are already doing it. And if we win the next election, we’re going to do the same for all other public servants earning over £150,000. Just imagine the effect that an army of armchair auditors is going to have on those expense claims.

Indeed, the promise of public scrutiny is going to have a powerful effect on over-spending of any variety. A Conservative government will put all national spending over £25,000 online for everyone to see, so citizens can hold the government to account for how their tax money is being spent. And we will extend this principle of transparency to every nook and cranny of politics and public life, because it’s one of the quickest and easiest ways to transfer power to the powerless and prevent waste, exploitation and abuse.

Yes, yes, and thrice yes, as Mark Kermode would say.

What’s more, with current technologies, we can do this quite easily, and unleash the creative power not only of armchair auditors, but of millions of people who are not in armchairs but are directly experiencing the effects of that spending and who can help us to understand what is working and how it can be made to work better.

So I fitted the hard disk (which took about 30 seconds), stuck the Ubuntu CD in the drive, and the install was going nicely until about 54% of the way through, when I got this error message :

[Errno 5] Input/output error

This particular error is often due to a faulty CD/DVD disk or drive, or a faulty hard disk. It may help to clean the CD/DVD, to burn the CD/DVD at a lower speed, to clean the CD/DVD drive lens (cleaning kits are often available from electronics suppliers), to check whether the hard disk is old and in need of replacement, or to move the system to a cooler environment.

I tried again; tried a different copy of the install CD (my friend had helpfully brought two copies); and tried installing from the Live CD.  Nothing worked.   So, on a hunch, I tried removing all but one of the RAM sticks in my PC (I have 4GB of RAM).  With only one RAM stick, the install worked perfectly.  I then reinstalled the RAM and rebooted.

I then followed these instructions to install additional software that I wanted.

First impressions: I much prefer the look and feel of Ubuntu to Windows.  I enjoy the combination of simplicity and ease of use, with the knowledge that there is power under the hood to do what I want.   I am in complete control, with no digital rights management restrictions trying to stop me from doing what I want.

Ubuntu is normally very easy to install and use. It is disappointing that there seems to be a problem with the installation programme for Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 – I guess a lot of people would be put off by having to remove the memory chips from their PC, so I hope it is fixed soon.

Because I now have two hard disks, I’ve kept the old version (Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn) on the old disk for now.   Ubuntu is smart enough to configure my PC to give me an option at boot time to decide which version I want to use.  So I can easily go back if there is something I don’t like in the new version.

Develop a strategy and implementation plan for extending digital engagement across Government

But I’m quite glad not to be eligible. Here are some phrases from the job description that should give pause for thought to anyone with experience of Government:

… You will manage a small team, directly, but will have to manage relationships with a wide group of senior officials across Government. This will require developing working arrangements in which departmental officials feel they are accountable to the Head of Digital Engagement without the benefit of a formal line management arrangement…..

… you will have to develop these relationships from scratch in a pressured environment in which Ministerial expectations of delivery are high.

… You will have a small budget

… Within two years the use of world class digital engagement techniques should be embedded in the normal work of Government

Or, in plain English, the post will have no staff, no budget, no power, and yet Ministers expect you to see to it that within two years the UK Government will make world class use of digital engagement.

Good luck to whoever gets this job!