It would be invidious to recommend particular blogs, and what’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be invidious? So, if you only read a few development blogs, here is my list of who I think you should be reading. I expect I have embarrassed myself by leaving out somebody crucial – if so, please tell me in the comments and I’ll fix it. I’ve also updated the blogroll on the right of the page.
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.
Back in 2006, I blogged saying that I am in favour of better use of data by government, provided that there is a shift of control of personal data back to the individual. Here is what I said then:
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:
- I will support and campaign for more transparency in the public and private sector.
- I will oppose measures that unjustly deny people’s access to the Internet.
- Whilst noting the acknowledged limitations, I believe people have the right to free speech on the Internet.
- 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.
- I will use my role as an MP to support international free expression movements.
- The Internet shall be built and operated openly and without discrimination.
- I will support all measures to bring non-personal public data into the public domain.
- I will support all proposals that lead to greater numbers joining the digital world and oppose measures that reduce it.
- I believe that copyright and software patent laws should be reformed to reflect the needs of citizens in the Internet age.
I generally assume that people who read blogs use an RSS reader, like Google Reader or FeedDemon (which is what I use), rather than hopping from one website to another in your web browser. You can even use Outlook 2007 or 2010 to gather blog updates automatically. But talking to friends and acquaintances leads me to suspect that not many people are using feed readers.
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.)
Seventeen years ago this month, I set up the first British government website. I was a young economist at the UK Treasury, and I thought the budget documents should be available online. I proposed this to the Treasury Management Board, most of whom had no idea what I was talking about, but Terry Burns was into computers and to his credit he backed the idea. I chose the domain name “hm-treasury.gov.uk”, a burden which they still bear today.
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.
<geek stuff>
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 />
When Google decided to set up a censored version of its search engine in China in 2006, I was among those who criticised the company for its decision (here and here).
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.
Good news: the Center for Global Development has started a new podcast series, the Global Prosperity Wonkcast.
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.
Chris Blattman has a thoughtful post about his decision to continue blogging.
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.
Ryan Briggs has a good round up of development-related podcasts
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.
Peter Mandelson has not thought this through:
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.
Bizarrely, the BBC online magazine has an excellent article on “The problem with PowerPoint” with some tips for giving presentations that many people in the development business and in government would do well to heed. Here is the main point, as far as I am concerned:
… all too often the slides are verbal crutches for the speaker, not visual aids for the audience.
The BBC reports Gordon Brown’s speech at the TED conference today:
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.
If you are a geek who is into development, and you are somewhere near Washington DC, you are going to want to come to the International Development Data Barcamp. In fact, even if you are not near DC you may want to come – I’m flying all the way from Ethiopia for it. Here’s the blurb:
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
Forgive the puff for my day job – aidinfo works to make aid more transparent and accountable.
Our web guy has done a great job on our website: http://www.aidinfo.org.
Also you can subscribe to our RSS feed.
My day job is leading the aidinfo team working to improve the transparency of international aid. Why? Because we think that when aid is more transparent it will be more effectively used and it will help people in developing countries to hold their governments to account. We also believe that if taxpayers can see where aid is really going, and see what a difference it makes, they will support more of it.
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.
A friend visiting from the UK brought a CD-ROM with the new version of Ubuntu Linux. Those of you with better bandwidth than we have got in Ethiopia (which would be pretty much everyone) can download it here. And another friend brought over a 1TB hard disk (that is 1,000 Gb) for my Shuttle XPC computer.
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.
Here is a job I might have applied for if I were in London: Director of Digital Engagement:
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!
- Ngaire Woods on what Africa needs from the G20
- Bill Easterly’s new AidWatch blog
- The Global Crisis Debate in the run up to the G20 (moderated by Dani Rodrik)
- Simon Maxwell’s reflections on Davos
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