We're celebrating our third birthday, and the PSD blog continues it's inexorable climb to the top! The blog now has nearly 3,000 RSS subscribers, and that's definitely something to celebrate. The other big news is no more Terrible Twos: Some signs that your toddler is in the terrible twos are temper tantrums, screaming for no reason, banging head on things and plain old not listening.So no more not listening - we'd like to hear from our readers! The comments section is open; what topics would you like us to focus on in the next year? The food crisis, education, privatization, climate change? Are there any new topics you have in mind that we haven't picked up on yet?
One topic that has been catching more and more attention is Development 2.0. Fellow PSD blogger Giulio Quaggiotto first...
Looks like the Globalization Institute, which once upon a time styled itself “Europe’s Favourite Think-Tank blog”, is no more. I guess employing Paul Staines and Tim Worstall will do that for you. Fortunately Alex Singleton, ex of the GI, has not deprived us of his wisdom forever and blogs for the Telegraph here. Good luck to him....
For one, they can start a Google Africa Blog (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). Google announced the release of this blog earlier this month. So far there are stories on an open source prize, World Environment Week, and a gadget competition (in English and French, of course). From Google's announcement:We believe that the Internet is a transformational force for societies. And it's making us all much more powerful as individuals, regardless of whether one is in New York, Stockholm, Bujumbura, Ouagadougou, or Cape Town. Regardless of background, education, social status, gender, age or economic situation, online access to information enables people to create opportunities for themselves. Seeing a student in a cybercafe doing his research using a search engine, a businessman chatting with a...
Arctic Economics, courtesy of long-time economics blogger Ben Muse. It’s pretty good, too - I particularly like the post about a company called Skyhook International promoting dirigibles as the Arctic transportation mode of the future....
Bearing in mind my previous post, I’d like to take on Patrick - in fact, I’d like to take on his entire Global Voices love-in. First, though, a word from our sponsors!
Global Voices Online, Ushaidi and the range of similar projects using the web in novel ways are fantastic initiatives that have already started to [...]...
Yesterday in a post on the UNDP's growing inclusive markets initiative, I mentioned a debate taking place on Creative Capitalism. Here's what the debate is all about:Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book -- a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development -- to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world's problems are too big for philanthropy--even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.It sounds like an interesting experiment (although the...
Here’s some worthwhile, illuminating and interesting pieces to check out:
Seth Godin talks about marketing nonprofit causes. He’s worthwhile reading on anything, essential on nonprofits.
The Agitator on the latest research on improving the effectiveness of donation landing pages.
The ever-excellent Ben Goldacre, meanwhile, has unearthed a document by the (UK) charity commissioners which tries to argue that blogs - yes, all of them - have no educational value! Ben, as usual, demolishes this with aplomb.
Piaras and Richard Delevan both have good pieces on the appalling failures of the Yes to Lisbon campaign. Plenty of lessons for nonprofits: tell stories (about real people) and do it with passion and conviction.
‘No stamp required, but using one will save us money’ -...
An interesting visualisation of the shift from development 1.0 ("high peaks of bureaucracy, with the sight blurred by the disconnection between grassroots and policy making") to the development 2.0 world ("sustainable, collaborative, entrepreneurial and not aid dependent"), for the benefit of budding social......
New business models, crowdsourcing data, falling IT costs - all represent different facets of the potential for web 2.0 applications to the development sector.
In a recent seminar at the Bank, Dion Hinchcliffe pointed me to a new item to be added to the list, borrowed from Clay Shirky: namely, "cognitive surplus". Wikipedia is one example of the surplus in action:So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of...
Clumsy, clumsy, clumsy. It seems Ammado has managed to create completely the wrong sort of buzz among Irish bloggers by spamming them with bulk unsolicited emails. It doesn’t matter how important or deserving you cause or issue is - sending bulk, unpersonalised, unsolicited email to anyone (especially vocal and widely read bloggers) is stupid and will be viewed as spam.
Technorati Tags: ammado, spam, blogging, marketing, email...
In my conference about Digital Citizens vs. Analogue Institutions I spoke — among other things — about the importance of blogging for democracy, human rights and the development of the Information Society. And I stated that, even if we could not draw a direct relationship between all these variables — which we cannot so far —, we could set up a path where all these concepts formed part of the same equation.
Now Víctor R. Ruiz asks me to elaborate this idea.
First things first: with the data available at the moment (in this case from UNPAN — UN e-Government Survey 2008. From e-Government to Connected Governance — and Universal McCann — Wave 3 —) we cannot state that there is a close or strong relationship between blogging and the development of e-Government. In the figure...
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Boy with serious expression, Fataki, Ituri, northeastern Congo
On BBC Radio 5 Live’s coveted Monday night/Tuesday morning 2am slot is a show called Pods & Blogs (also available as a podcast), ‘dedicated to covering the news as seen by bloggers, podcasters and the citizen media’. Like Radio Open Source, they like to involve listeners in shaping the show’s content.
Why am I mentioning this? Because a) it’s a fine show, and b) Extra Extra may get a mention tonight. (Thank you, Jamillah and Chris!)
So, a special welcome to any new visitors. Extra Extra is back in London now, so I foresee fewer close encounters, but strange things happen here too, and the neighbours are anything but dull, so you never know....
Conor Byrne has a great new blog on fundraising. Finally, the beginnings of an Irish fundraising blogging community!
Technorati Tags: conor byrne, fundraising, blogs, ireland, charity...
What are you reading? What are the most popular blog and feed stories on this site? As part of our efforts to understand and track the use of this blog and its primary RSS feed, we dived into Google Analytics (see related posting on the basic metrics).The top twenty most viewed blog postings in 2007 and 2008 are:IAALD World Congress 2008e-Agriculture Week in RomeThe agricultural information specialist of the future?Conference: Participatory Web for DevelopmentICT and Agriculture sessions at WITFOR 2007Analyzing agricultural ICT projects in IndiaUSAIN 2008 ConferencePlanning Iran's agricultural Information SystemLifelong learning with farmers in Madurai, South IndiaAgricultural knowledge and development in a new age and a different worldWeb 2.0 for participatory development: Notes from...
In September 2006, we published a posting on IAALD blog metrics and use. We were proud to record 7,851 unique visitors and 18,500 page loads in the first year. How are we doing now?For this blog in 2007, 'StatCounter' recorded 36,000 page loads and 12,800 unique visitors (28,800 page loads and 10,800 visitors in 2006).Our RSS feeds and email alerts (that combine the blog posts with del.icio.us tagged items) were viewed 78,800 times in 2007, generating 2,500 clickthroughs to news items (this is sure rise in 2008 as we already recorded 22,000 views and 3,000 clickthroughs!).What are you reading? See the most viewed blog postings and feed items (at April 2008).Where are visitors coming from?ClusterMaps shows a truly global readership, except China, large chunks of Russia and Brazil, and some...
Following up on today's theme, it's worth adding the recent addition by the Wall Street Journal - it's own blog about the business of the environment. Here's more from the editors themselves:
"[This blog] tracks how growing green concern, particularly over climate change, is roiling established industries and spurring new ones – and how that shift is affecting investors, consumers and the planet."...
The makers of the World Bank's flagship report ranking 178 countries on their business environment, the Doing Business team, enter today a new realm – the blogosphere.
Meet the Doing Business Blog and the personalities behind the ten indicators, credited with inspiring 115 reforms worldwide....
Marc is back!
Houtlust may be gone to the great online archive in the sky, but Marc has returned with a bigger, better, more 2.0 site - osocio. And it’s full of ambition:
Osocio is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns. It’s the place where marketing and activism collide. Formerly known as the Houtlust Blog, Osocio is the central online hub for advertisers, ad agencies, grassroots, activists, social entrepreneurs, and good Samaritans from around the globe.
Good to have you back, Marc.
Technorati Tags: houtlust, osocio, social marketing, non-profit, charity, advertising...
One form of optimism
Did you hear about the Week of Positive Blogging? I did, by chance, when Global Voices mentioned Omodudu’s optimistic letter to Mother Africa. (An extract: “…The Sudanese, a funny bunch, there is no divisiveness amongst the Arabs and the Blacks anymore, as a matter of fact I attended a mixed wedding on a boat at the banks of the Nile the other day. Oh yes the Americans are still there dancing to country music at the international club, but now the Sudanese are allowed in, sans bomb detectors at the entrance. Isn’t that wonderful ma…”)
In that spirit, I have three bits of good news in relation to earlier posts here at Extra Extra:
Firstly, do you remember the family who mounted a legal challenge to evict an army Colonel from their...
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What opportunities are opening up for the UN (and, one might add, the World Bank) in the web 2.0 era? What is the long tail of human rights? What is the potential of crowdsoucing for development?
An inspiring post from the Internet Artizans blog has some suggestions. While the UN is thinking about it, the latest web 2.0 platform for development has been launched. For budding social enterpreneurs, more Development 2.0 ideas can be found here....
Not to be outdone by their UK counterparts, George Mason University has recently published a paper on "Crowdsourcing Government Transparency." The author notes that the US government data is often not online, and, when it is, it is seldom easy to access or use. The solution? "Hack, mash & peer."
By providing information through the web in the form of structured data, government agencies can increase transparency and open up opportunities for citizens to interact with data in innovative and useful ways. Mash-ups such as Maplight.org, a website that "illuminates the connection between money and politics," are a point in case.
Even more telling is the example of a blog that recruits hundreds of volunteers to sift through 3,000 pages of a "document dump" from the Department of Justice...
The Undercover Economist and the co-father of this blog, Tim Harford, has done it again. He has created yet another blog – this one is his second (as far as we know) and is hosted by the Financial Times. One of his recent posts is on the Doing Business report.
At the last weekend's annual meetings, Ideas4development had a premiere. Many of its bloggers need no introduction and include Pascal Lamy, Supachai Panitchpakdi and Josette Sheeran among others....
Always wondered what goes on in the World Bank's sister organization? Today the IMF launches its very own Public Financial Management Blog (PFM Blog). It is run by the staff from the Fiscal Affairs Department, responsible for the Fund's work on income distribution and poverty.
Despite the name, the topics are unlikely to include accrual accounting and medium-term expenditure frameworks but rather news, resources and ideas relating to financial stability....
Over the next two days, Alexis Sampson and Michael Jarvis, both from the World Bank Institute, will be your eyes and ears at the ongoing 12th International Business Forum (IBF) in Washington, DC. Here is their first post:
"The stakes for business are as enormous as they are complex," asserted Lenny Mendonca of McKinsey and Co. during this morning's opening session of the World Bank's IBF, "defining businesses' proper role will challenge business executives to adopt a new awareness of social problems in real time, even before they have fully emerged as critical issues in the public debate."
This was the challenge issued to the 300 leaders from 50 countries meeting here at the Bank today and tomorrow. The largely business audience agreed that the question is not whether the private...
How to end poverty in South Asia? No one knows for sure, but Shanta Devarajan wants his new blog to be a free market of ideas on the subject.
See his latest post explaining the impact of GDP growth on poverty in Sri Lanka....
Co-funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation the CGAP Technology Program is applying innovation to advance their ambitious agenda - this time with a new blog.
Among the six authors you will recognize Jim Rosenberg who also writes for us. The group uses their blog to communicate how the latest technology is making the broader access to finance for the poor possible. Read the latest post here....
So the latest social networking site is here. It is accompanied by a constellation of related platforms, including Speed Granting "an online and offline platform that encourages and rewards social entrepreneurs for their social initiatives, and allows their peers cast votes to determine the recipients of the grants." The associated Facebook application - yet another application of the decision market concept to the non-profit sector - is de rigeur.
But is the hype about social action networks justified? Dan McQuillan from Amnesty International argues in a recent post that we are still to understand and exploit their full potential. He invites people to explore the "possibilities that are more disruptive and creative than simply using social networks for social...
Development agencies have long accepted the need to prioritize medical aid to the sick, but Jonathan Legard, Africa correspondent for the Economist, argues it is high time that business expertise should also be available on call to boost local economies.
In August's Strategy + Business, Legard demands the establishment of an Executives Sans Frontieres (ESF) modeled on Medecins Sans Frontieres. Managers with relevant expertise would fly in to assist with market development and to build sustainable local businesses, staying up to 4 years with the program. He cites the Sahel as one region where this resource could make a difference – beginning with advice on how to bring goods to market more cheaply and profitably.
As proposed, ESF would be reliant on altruistic motivations of...
What a difference a month can make! Only a few weeks ago I was dreaming about the establishment of a decision market for development projects. As if to provide comfort to my employer that I was not hallucinating, Globalgiving have now launched a pilot online decision market "to help identify promising ideas and interventions in the arena of international development."
Those who decide to take part can trade their stock in 22 development projects and cast their vote on a project's likelihood of success. Check out their FAQ for a jargon-free explanation of how decision markets work. It will be interesting to see whether the model will catch on.
On a related note, the Philanthropy Journal recently featured an special on non-profits and technology, which looks at how these organizations...
It has been not one but two years since Marginal Revolution first wrote about us. On August 5, PSD Blog celebrated its second birthday.
In terms of what to expect in the future, development psychologists agree that: "emotions take on a roller coaster-like quality as 2-year-olds can go from excitement to anger to laughter within a few moments."
Reminiscent of the time past, we picked the blog's five most popular posts since its last birthday:
Mobile phone banking takes off
Special economic zone or land grab?
Why isn't Africa attracting portfolio investment?
Praise and criticism for the World Bank
Doctor, doctor, can't you see I'm burning, burning?...