I recently ventured that "real simple reporting" could be the killer app for development 2.0. At that time, I had project reporting to donors in mind. But what about corporate social responsibility and sustainability reporting: Is there a role for web 2.0 there?
Simplicity, if we are to listen to the HBS folks, is what will drive the success of social media applications. They call for companies to develop "a dashboard of simplicity that is open to the whole Internet." As if heeding that call, Sun Microsystems recently launched a revamped version of OpenEco.org, a collaborative platform that allows companies to track their greenhouse gas emissions and, interestingly, develop a "top-level organization dashboard where users can track a broad spectrum of emission sources to provide a...
As I mentioned not too long ago in Women doing business, the World Bank Group has released a database of laws that entail differential treatment of women and men in business called the Gender Law Library, pictured here:
I hadn't gotten full background about the new database when I first wrote about it. Penelope Brook, World Bank-IFC Director of Indicators and Analysis, explains a bit more about the rationale behind the project:This new resource is a starting point for governments, civil society, and researchers to get a better picture of the legal framework shaping a woman’s ability to do business. The library will be a baseline for researching which reforms of business regulation will have the most beneficial impact for women.And why does all that matter? Because better economic...
How many mobile phones are sold in a second around the world - and how many trees are cut in the same fraction of time? What if you could dynamically visualise these statistics rather than just reading about them - would they have a greater impact?
"So_many_a_second" is a visualisation tool that displays world statistics "on a human scale" by getting users in touch "with the emotional actuality of ... objective data" (hat tip: Flowing data). The visualisation for plastic cups usage by airlines should be enough to convert even the most skeptical environmentalist. Interestingly, the website allows users to create their own data flows: it's easy to envisage plenty of applications for education and advocacy purposes.And while we are on the topic,...
The Financial Times today reports that China does U-turn on online money-making. Making 'real' money by trading virtual currencies earned from online gaming was banned two years ago, but it looks like the Chinese government has changed its mind. China will now collect a 20 percent tax on income earned from online gaming.
As I point out in a post on The end of Doha and the World of Warcraft, gold farming and trading in virtual currencies is "largely under the radar of the World Trade Organization and, to some extent, government tax collectors." The FT cites an online contributor with a slightly more poetic take on the issue: "If they successfully implement this tax, I will jump over Mount Everest."...
I just stumbled upon the BBC's Common Platform blog. Here's how the blog's author describes the purpose of the website:The BBC is opening up to the people and communities that fund it—sharing content, code, talent and resources. At Common Platform I'm documenting the changes as they take place, talking to the people making them happen and asking questions of those who'd rather they didn't.Although still in its early days, the blog already reads like a fascinating diary of an organisation's attempt to open up and become more transparent and accountable to its constituencies. It is particulary refreshing to read interviews with "real" BBC staff, see their pictures and read their views about barriers to sharing content and resources with the external world.
When shall we see an equivalent...
For the second time in a row, the Doing Business team is venturing into Second Life - an online virtual world - to release its annual report. I'll be assisting Dahlia Khalifa with the presentation on October 30th, 2pm EST. If you want to join in, you can watch streaming video of the event. The more adventurous among you can get an avatar - registration on Second Life is free - and teleport to our 'build' on this island.
To get a feel for Second Life, check out Dahlia's interview yesterday on the upcoming virtual release of Doing Business 2009 on the Real Biz in SL show. (Dahlia handled the interview like a pro, this being her second year in Second Life.) The interview appears after the jump....
Thanks to Euan Semple, I recently learned about Akvo.org, the self-styled "open source for water and sanitation."
Part of the project, Akvo Direct, looks like a niche version of Kiva.org: an attempt to connect directly water and sanitation projects from around the world with potential donors, cutting out the intermediaries (and associated overheads). The web at its best.
But what I really liked about the site is the attempt to apply the concept of Real Simple Reporting (RSR):Funding large numbers of small projects has always been considered too expensive. A big reason is that too much time and money is spent reporting on each of them. We simplify but improve reporting with Akvo Really Simple Reporting (Akvo RSR). This is a web and SMS-based reporting system that lets project...
Some time ago I blogged about different connotations of the phrase "development 2.0."
A recent report by the US Chamber of Commerce, Development 2.0: Changing the Way Globalization Works adds yet another dimension to the debate (fellow PSD blogger Michael Jarvis contributed one chapter to the publication). The report focuses on the role of multinationals in emerging markets and argues that "development 2.0 is about blended value - finding ways to promote both social and economic development." Hybridization, partnerships and crossover planning are the strategies to be adopted in this emerging paradigm. The recently launched "e-co Hub" NGO Connect Africa seems like a good example of this approach at work.
Earlier this year, a Brooking Institution report on Global Development 2.0 also...
Prediction markets have been a popular theme on this blog (see for example here and here). We also talked about the lack of reliable performance data as a factor that deters potential investors into social innovation.
A short piece in the Harvard Business Review now suggests that prediction markets could be a way to mobilise the wisdom of the crowds to predict which projects will have the highest social return on investment. This would have the effect of providing guidance to potential investors, on the one hand, and creating incentives to non-profits to report on their performance, on the other.How would one go about launching such a market? This, the author suggests, could be done in stages: [F]irst, controlled private experiments with sophisticated investors and social entrepreneurs...
After the UK's Social Innovation camp, the development 2.0 competition wave has crossed the pond (ironically, all of this happens as talks of the "madness of the crowd" seem to be far more popular than any reference to its "wisdom"). USAID has just announced the launch of the "Development 2.0 Challenge" to award innovative uses of mobile technology to maximise development impact. The initiative's tagline: "Your best ideas can help USAID develop innovative technological solutions to issues related to poverty in developing countries."
I hope the focus will be on business models as much as on technology....
Last week saw an interesting videoconference at the World Bank on aid effectiveness and e-government (here are the schedule of events and a blog post from the new e-Development blog.) The event was a joint effort of GTZ and the World Bank e-Development Thematic Group. I'll spare you a summary of the introductory remarks other than to note that many of the speakers stressed the importance of e-government in reaching the goals set out by the Paris Declaration and recently evaluated and reiterated at the 3rd High Level Forum on Aid Affectiveness. Anyone who left after just these remarks would have learned little - the meat of the videoconference came when speakers from government agencies talked about their own on-the-ground attempts to utilize e-government. Most interesting among these was...
If you graduated from college in the last couple of years, you will have heard of a gamut of social networking sites: Friendster, Myspace, and Facebook, to name a few. Even for those without freshly minted college degrees, these websites are hard to ignore - Facebook claims to have at least 90 million active users, and organizations as diverse as Amnesty International and Apple have established social networking presences. And while they're great for certain purposes - what did your friend do last weekend? which NYT's op-ed is he reading - they go only so far in connecting communities with very specific interests. Thus enters Business Fights Poverty, a website that aims to connect professionals who work on the business side of international development.The trick for any social...
Looking back at this post on E-government - another chance to leapfrog?, I now realize I may have gotten it wrong. The real opportunity for some governments is not to develop more participatory and easy-to-use websites. Whatever solutions a government comes up with - even one as cool as Estonia's TOM that allows citizens to comment on laws and propose new legislation - will quickly become outdated by the development of new and better internet tools. Why not get the public sector out of the business of creating end-user internet solutions and instead get the private sector to do it?
At least, that's the proposal offered in a new paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology called Government Data and the Invisible Hand (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). While David Robinson et al. focus on...
While we may not be ready to announce victory in the digital war on poverty, there are definitely battles that are being won. And the most recent battle is that over text messaging. Cell phones have spread like wildfire across Africa and many other parts of the world. But these are basic handsets - no internet access, no videos, no maps. These phones do, however, have short message service (SMS), aka text messaging. And while the capacity to send 160 characters by phone may not be a revolution, it is definitely having a positive impact.
Jim Witkin, writing at Triple Pundit, discusses one of the most interesting efforts to apply this technology to the developing world (Hat tip: Giulio Quaggiotto). Kiwanja.net, a non-profit, has developed a program called FrontlineSMS that allows NGOs to...
The Doha trade talks failed this week...and Dani Rodrik asks so what? In his view, the probable gains from this further trade liberalization were not significant. I would add that at least in some sectors, formal trade liberalization is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The internet has created the possiblity for ever greater amounts of trade in services that are largely under the radar of the World Trade Organization and, to some extent, government tax collectors.
One example is that of outsourcing of tutors. India now supplies online tutoring help for many of America's struggling high school students. But tutoring may be just the tip of the iceberg. One estimate has it that gold farming - the practice of earning virtual currency in an online game and exchanging it for real currency -...