I just came across this TED-Talk by Sanjay Pradhan from the World Bank. It’s about how open data can improve international development. I particularly like his point how digitization of information makes information not only public but also accessible – and he illustrates very nicely why this is not the same thing.
I just came across a really excellent post by Ushahidi’s Patrick Meier: “A List of Completely Wrong Assumptions About Technology Use in Emerging Economies”. If you have anything to do with using digital tools in a development context, I highly recommend you read this post. Though, of course, the problem is not limited to using web tools.
“So … how is Haiti these days?” – this is probably the question I have been asked most since I’ve come back. The problem is: the question is misleading because it assumes that it’s possible to make significant changes in a couple of months.
I’ve recently come back from Haiti where I trained the Haiti Red Cross webmaster on WordPress, the CMS which we had agreed on. I was there for one week and Haiti Red Cross now finally has its own website and email.
What would you do if you could build a non-profit website from scratch without worrying about any integration issues? That’s exactly what I’m doing at the moment. In this post I’m sharing my ideas and I’d love to hear your’s.
Recent announcements by Google make me think, that the company might go down a path that would ultimately mean more inequality, a worse position for developing countries and a widening digital divide. I’m referring specifically to Chrome OS, Google’s new operating system, and the announcement that Google would dump Google Gears, a service that makes it possible to use services like GoogleDocs offline. In both cases, Google emphasized the importance of cloud computing as opposed to working offline. The idea is[...]
I find it surprising that there are not more good distance learning and e-learning programmes for aid workers and that the ones that exist are so hard to find. Here is a number of courses and programmes that I know of. Please leave a comment if you know of any others. In this list I am focusing on courses that offer specific skills for humanitarian aid workers and not on more general courses that can also be useful for people[...]
The Swedish International Development Agency has launched “The World Log” a new catalogue for web content related to aid and development content. It lists blogs, videos and photos by geography and topic – and it looks really pretty! Great chance for high level exposure The site is still a bit buggy (sometimes the user interface switches to Swedish so you have “Läs mer” instead of “Read more”) but if you have anything to do with aid or development, then you should definitely[...]
