from the horizon

On the final day, we presented our Information Management track project. It was decided that our project would look into social networking at the camp, so a questionnaire was prepared and distributed, asking various questions about the number of friendship people had before during and after the camp, and the best activities for making new friends.

I made a simple Access database to enter the data, while a number of others started planning the project presentation. As the presentation started becoming more of a performance (before the results of the questionnaire were finished), I began to worry that the medium would become the message – but isn’t that always the case?

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On the fourth day I ran my session on Database Design. As I was only asked to present this session three days previously, I hadn’t had any spare time to put together anything other than an outline and make rough notes. Fortunately this is a topic which I’ve spent far too much time thinking about, so I was fairly well prepared.

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Day 3 became more interesting, but also further increased my information overload, not only from all the new material which I was being exposed to, but from all the new ideas which it was spawning!

The first session introduced the Visualizing Information for Advocacy booklet, which covered different ways to design information. The booklet was produced by Tactical Technology Collective who were helping to run the camp, and I would highly recommend it for a clear, simple and short (43 pages) introduction to information design. It can be downloaded for free.

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I don’t know how people live-blog from conferences and workshops. When I haven’t been in the various sessions, I’m talking interesting people, and when I’m not doing that I’m exhausted. Hence this rest of the posts about the camp are several days late! I have also been trying to get some work sorted out, and have felt guilty whenever I’ve been anti-socially hiding behind a laptop. I’m not convinced that having laptops at Conferences/Workshops/Camps is a good idea.

Never-the-less laptops are a handy resource. A Wiki (website which can be editted by anyone, like Wikipedia) was set up for the camp, which allowed people to created the following report, of all the activities in our track. Read the rest of this entry �

Today was the first day of the Mekong ICT (Information Communication Technology) Camp which I am attending in Thailand. The camp is for people from Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Myanmar, and despite that I am neither from this region, nor working in the region, I felt that Indonesia was close enough, and it sounded interesting, so here I am. The camp is along the lines of a BarCamp, which means that it doesn’t have a ridged schedule and participation is encouraged.

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I would like to take some of the principles of Web 2.0 and apply them to International Aid, to look at how technology can flatten the hierarchical systems, engage people and bring them close together.

First of all I would share my idea of how Aid works (or doesn’t work, as some may argue). I wouldn’t call myself an expert, but I have some experience on the subject having worked for the Aid Industry in Indonesia, Pakistan and Uganda. I’ve also talked with the people in the industry, and read up on the subject.

I say Aid “Industry” quite deliberately, because it is huge. There are billions of dollars floating around, hundreds of different organizations, all trying to get their cut, and thousands of people who have built careers in the industry. The following diagram is a simplified view of the flow of Aid.

I should emphasize that the majority of Aid, isn’t given directly by people in developed countries, but instead comes from their governments, often giving grants worth millions of dollars.

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I introduced the concept of Web 2.0 in my last post (link) so I could talk about how some of the principals and technology is being carried over the not-for-profit organizations (NFPs) world. The internet is providing new tools for organizations to use, and is leveling the field for smaller organizations to compete on the same level.

Many of the things which organizations used to do in the real world can now be done virtually. Petitions, advocacy campaigns and even fund raising is now done online. Because of the scale of the internet, specialized sites such as JustGiving and FirstGiving have been set up to help any sort of raise funds online. MSF (Medicins sans Frontiers/Doctors without Borders) even has its own podcast! Read the rest of this entry �

Although this may have appear to have little to do with the regular subject matter on my blog, it’s a hot topic at the moment and I want to write about some related stuff, so I thought I’d write a brief intro piece about it.

What is Web 2.0? That’s actually a good question. There is no clear answer, and many people have different ideas about what it is. Web 2.0 is used to describe new uses of the internet, where users participate in generating the content, not just as passive consumers. Blogs (such as this one), Wikipedia, TradeMe/EBay, YouTube and MySpace are all examples of websites which exist because of the regular internet users posting information on them. This is significant enough to inspire Time magazine to name Internet Users as the Time Person of the Year for 2006 (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html).

I think Web 2.0 is all about dequantization. Traditionally information was quantized, coming from a limited number of sources, due to the costs involved in publishing/distributing/broadcasting. Now thanks to the internet we are getting an explosion in the amount of information and the sources from which we can get that information.

There are a number of key ideas behind Web 2.0, and I’ll go through them with some examples: Read the rest of this entry �