As one of the founding organizers for Maker Faire Africa, I’ve had the privilege to be a part of this unfolding maker movement in Africa. To be honest, it’s been going on for a while, so I guess what we’re really doing is just aggregating it in a country, and shining a spotlight on some of the great practical innovation on the continent.
At the October 17, 2012 Technology Salon NYC, we focused on ways that ICTs can be used for qualitative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts that aim to listen better to those who are participating in development programs.
At the October 17, 2012 Technology Salon NYC, we focused on ways that ICTs can be used for qualitative monitoring and evaluation (M&E) efforts that aim to listen better to those who are participating in development programs.
New technologies are opening up all kinds of possibilities for improving monitoring and evaluation. From on-going feedback and crowd-sourced input to more structured digital data collection, to access to large data sets and improved data visualization, the field is changing quickly.
I’ve been told that mention of the term ‘governance’ makes people want to immediately roll over and fall asleep, and that I’m a big weirdo for being interested in it.
At Ushahidi, we have interacted with various organizations around the world, and the key thing we remember from reaching out to some NGOs in Kenya is that we faced lots of resistance when we began in 2008, with organizations not willing to share data which was often in pdfs and not in machine readable format.
Almost a year ago, I met Ernst Suur (@ernstsuur) for the first time. We bonded in frustration over the irony of not being able to find any on-line courses to study ICT4D.
Scenario 1: Five hundred people gather together for three days. They talk, they discuss, they share and they learn. And then they leave. Some stay in touch, others have picked up enough to start a project of their own. Others just leave with a satisfied curiosity, others with the odd new blog post behind them Scenario 2: A charitable foundation funds the creation of a new mobile tool. Over a one year period there is software development, a new website, user testing and roll-out
Fortunately for us, many of the day-to-day technologies which drive large chunks of our on-line lives quietly tick away in the background, only reminding us of our total dependence on them when something breaks or goes wrong. We take the complex ecosystem which drives much of this for granted.
