Owen abroad

Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

What are good ways to get feedback from the intended benefiaries of an aid programme? Can we use text messaging and other technologies to crowdsource monitoring?

VirtualEconomics is an unusual blog because it is maintained by someone in the front line of designing and delivering an substantial aid programme in one of the big bilateral donor agencies: Matt is the head of economics for the UK aid program in India.

Matt is interested in how to get feedback from the people who are the intended beneficiaries of aid:

New technologies for crowd-sourcing significantly bring down the transactions costs for collecting and ‘mashing’ data from many stakeholders. Examples include SMS-based systems (e.g. Ushahidi’s crisis reporting), smart-phone systems (e.g. Kenyan crop insurance) and web-based systems (e.g. eMoksha’s Fix Our City). What other examples are there?

So a question for us all to consider, how would you go about designing a simple platform for the Papua New Guinea public to provide reliable feedback on whether kids have received their textbooks? What’s the best solution?

As well as Ushahidi, another promising approach is Daraja in Tanzania which is going to use SMS messaging to provide feedback about which water points are working (full disclosure: I am on the board of Twaweza which is a partner of Daraja).

With changing technology and attitudes, we seem to be on the brink of a revolution in getting information from prospective benefiaries of aid.  Do you know of any existing, working programs like, or promising new approaches?

I’ve closed the comments here: if you have suggestions, please add them to Matt’s post.

Gapminder Desktop has been released and it is free.  Now you can do the same kind of graphs that Hans Rosling does in his amazing TED talks (see here and here).

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.

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.

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.

The Economist has a stupid article, Managing the Facebookers which claims that the net generation will suffer int he recession:

Once again, the touchy-feely management fads that always spring up in years of plenty (remember the guff about “the search for meaning” and “the importance of brand me”) are being ditched in favour of more brutal command-and-control methods. Having grown up in good times, Net Geners have laboured under the illusion that the world owed them a living. But hopping between jobs to find one that meets your inner spiritual needs is not so easy when there are no jobs to hop to. And as for that sabbatical: here’s a permanent one, sunshine.

The article is unencumbered by evidence: it reads more like wishful thinking by some curmudgeonly old hack who resents the rise of younger, smarter, better connected and more self-confident rivals.

It is quite plausible that the exact opposite might happen and that the economic upheaval will accelerate trends in the workplace towards the tools and attitudes of the Net Generation.  It seems to be the industry dinosaurs that are going bust (think General Motors and Woolworths) not the new economy (Amazon is doing well).  At a time of belt-tightening and rapid change, there will be a premium for people who can collaborate effectively, are comfortable working in teams and multi-tasking, and able to adapt rapidly to new ways of working. 

Maybe the cosh is actually hovering over the gnarly old bosses who have resisted change for the last decade, not the facebook generation?

If you have Google Alerts for your own name, or your company or website, you can now get your alert by RSS not just email:

Until now, alerts have been delivered via email only, but those days are over. Now your News, Web, Blog, Video, and Groups alerts are more easily accessible than ever.

A deceptively small, but rather important, announcement.

Dan Kimmerling on Techcrunch says that Facebook is the new Outlook for the younger generation

for young people, who really only care about functionality, Facebook succeeds because it is the killer web application for communications and personal information management. Facebook Mail is not without its problems, but the combination of Facebook Mail, Facebook Chat, and what is functionally an auto updating address book, makes Facebook into the new Outlook not only for those who are inside of Silicon Valley, but for anyone of the millions of people who use Facebook as either their sole or their primary digital identity.

What I find interesting is that I know plenty of older people (ie of my generation and older) who have never used Facebook or Myspace, and plenty of younger people (ie younger than me) who never use email.

For people leaving university today, email is like carbon paper – it was used by their parents, and perhaps it is still used in a quaint way by their bank or tax office.

Meanwhile the people who run government departments in the UK, and who run private firms, reckon they are hip and down with the kids if they answer their own emails.

The Cabinet Office has now published guidance for civil servants for blogging and participation in online sites.

How the Civil Service Code applies to online participation

The Civil Service Code applies to your participation online as a civil servant or when discussing government business. You should participate in the same way as you would with other media or public forums such as speaking at conferences.

Disclose your position as a representative of your department or agency unless there are exceptional circumstances, such as a potential threat to personal security. Never give out personal details like home address and phone numbers.

Always remember that participation online results in your comments being permanently available and open to being republished in other media. Stay within the legal framework and be aware that libel, defamation, copyright and data protection laws apply. This means that you should not disclose information, make commitments or engage in activities on behalf of Government unless you are authorised to do so. This authority may already be delegated or may be explicitly granted depending on your organisation.

Also be aware that this may attract media interest in you as an individual, so proceed with care whether you are participating in an official or a personal capacity. If you have any doubts, take advice from your line manager.

Good luck to civil servants as they try to implement this. I had rather a torrid time when the Mail on Sunday chose to attack me for my previous blog.

Simon Dickson has more.