Web 2.0

Development and the death of Aaron Swartz

Published January 15, 2013 | By Owen Barder

Aaron Swartz, who died on January 11th, worked and fought for key freedoms of our time: the right to information, to share knowledge and ideas, and to speak freely. This blog post considers the importance of these issues for development, and what we might do to continue his fight.

Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Open Source, Technology, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments

How to get feedback from aid beneficiaries?

Published April 30, 2010 | By Owen Barder

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? Over at Virtual Economics, Matt is interested in good examples to learn from. Continue reading →

Posted in Aid effectiveness, Web 2.0

Gapminder on the desktop

Published April 29, 2010 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Technology, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

Government on the web: the next revolution

Published March 30, 2010 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Technology, Transparency, Web 2.0 | 7 Comments

Development & Geeks. Cool.

Published June 18, 2009 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Development, Technology, Transparency, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

aidinfo spiffy new website

Published June 3, 2009 | By Owen Barder

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.

Posted in Aid, Aid effectiveness, Development, Transparency, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment

Armchair auditors

Published May 26, 2009 | By Owen Barder

David Cameron is right to call for transparency in public spending. Continue reading →

Posted in Aid, Aid effectiveness, Trade, Transparency, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments

Will the net generation suffer in the recession?

Published January 4, 2009 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Economics, Technology, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments

Google Alerts: now by RSS

Published November 1, 2008 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Technology, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

The Digital Generation Divide

Published September 14, 2008 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Web 2.0 | 2 Comments

Guidance for civil service bloggers

Published June 19, 2008 | By Owen Barder

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… Continue reading →

Posted in Blogging, Politics, Technology, Web 2.0 | Leave a comment

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