PSD Blog - The World Bank Group

Random Hacks of Kindness is here!

As announced in a previous post, the Random Hacks of Kindness "hackathon" is officially under way today. Thank you to those of you who contributed ideas for issues to be tackled or helped spread the word in the developers' community.

The prospect of 200 programmers from Silicon Valley and around the world convening in San Francisco to work with international first responders and disaster risk management experts is mouth-watering. In the works are software solutions such as a system to submit found or missing people reports, a tool to determine the trustworthiness of crowdsourced data points, and a people-finder mobile-based upload, confirmation, comment, and inquiry system. These solutions will continue to be developed at subsequent events, and openly shared with the international community. So watch this space or the official Random Hacks of Kindness website for follow-up calls to action.

Kiva-mongering

David Roodman, a fellow at the Center for Global Development, set off a storm with a post on the popular microfinance organization Kiva. Many lenders on the sight probably had the impression this was a peer-to-peer lending sight, but David reveals this is not quite so. Kiva connects lenders to microfinance institutions, not individual microentrepreneurs. His post even prompted a piece in the New York Times yesterday that compares Kiva to partially discredited child sponsorship organizations. But make sure to check out CGAP's even-handed take on the whole issue.

On the heels of that controversy, Kiva finds itself dealing with another. Premal Shah, Kiva's president, apeared yesterday on Press: Here and discussed the concerns of some Kiva users over the site's expansion to include U.S.-based borrowers. Premal points out (in the very beginning of Episode 33 Part 2) that Kiva gives you choice: "The whole idea of Kiva is that it gives you, the person who wants to make a difference, choice. So if you want to lend to a goat-herder in Ghana, go for it. If you want to lend to a bakery in Oakland, California, that's your perogative."

The day you’ll be able to stumble upon development funds

Quite literally…

Imagine walking around the streets of DC with your mobile phone in hand. You "point" to, say, a building or a bridge and an application on the phone allows you to detect whether the project is a beneficiary of some of the $787 billion allocated by the US Government American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The amount of money spent for the building and the name of the beneficiary are also displayed. Public spending could not get more transparent – and tangible – than this. Science fiction? Not anymore, thanks to the augmented reality mash-up just released by the ever inspiring folks at Sunlightlabs (hat tip: David Osimo).

 

The Market for Aid 2.0: Collaborative markets

A couple of years ago, former PSD blogger Tim Harford and co-author Michael Klein argued for more market-like mechanisms in the aid industry in The Market for Aid. A new working paper by Owen Barder (Beyond Planning: Markets & Networks for Better Aid) picks up where Tim and Michael left off. Owen argues that aid agencies are stuck between a rock (donor countries) and a hard place (recipients and recipient country governments), in which the interests of donors and recipients don't fully align. Better planning alone won't make this problem go away. 

Owen offers up an alternative, something he calls a collaborative market. The concept draws on some of the ideas in The Market for Aid, but goes a step further:

A considered combination of market mechanisms, networked collaboration, and collective regulation would be more likely to lead to significant improvements [in the aid system]. A “collaborative market” for aid might include unbundling funding from aid management to create more explicit markets; better information gathered from the intended beneficiaries of aid; decentralized decision-making; a sharp increase in transparency and accountability of donor agencies; the publication of more information about results; pricing externalities; and new regulatory arrangements to make markets work.

World Bank gets its own data visualizer

Perhaps taking a page from Hans Rosling's extremely popular presentation of development data at the 2006 TED Talks, the World Bank now has its own publicly accessible tool for data visualisation. This first version of the tool contains 49 indicators for 209 countries taken from the World Development Indicators.

Just to get a taste of how the tool works, I looked at the number of internet users per 100 people (Y-axis) compared to GNI per capita (X-axis) and got the chart below. Each of the colored blobs represents a country, and the size of the blob represents total population. On casual observation, it looks like a lot of countries that are more wired than their income levels would predict are in eastern Europe.

For those who really want to get crazy, the tool also allows you to "play" the statistics over time. If you want to learn more about how not to bore your audience to death during your next Powerpoint presentation, check out this video tutorial. (Highly recommended for all development professionals.)

From Development 2.0 to Development Squared: what skills for the aid sector of the future?

It was O’Reilly’s seminal article on “What is web2.0?” that inspired my first Development 2.0 article and the subsequent Development 2.0 manifesto.

So it was with great interest that I read O’Reilly’s follow-up thinkpiece in preparation to the upcoming Web2 summit. The paper tries to anticipate what will be next in the evolution of the web (the era he dubs “Web Squared”). Once again, there are lots of interesting implications to be drawn for the development sector

To summarize, the key tenet of the Web Squared era is: “the web is now the world”. Thanks to the increased ability to process ever growing amounts of digital data that have a relationship to real world objects (the world’s “information shadow”), the web is “in a collision course with the physical world”: our cameras, and microphones are becoming “the eyes and ears of the web”, our GPS its sense of location and our sensors its sense of position. The web is a baby that is growing up and becoming increasingly sophisticated in its understanding of the various inputs provided by humans: as a result “we are all its collective parents”.

Interestingly, it is O’Reilly himself who now calls for applications of Web Squared to solve real-world problems: from energy to health care. So, here’s an initial attempt at looking through the crystal ball and anticipate what a Development Squared world might look like:

Hackers to help the World Bank manage natural disasters

Though "hackers" and "World Bank" in the same sentence might look like odd bedfellows, the term "hack" originally indicated a clever solution to a technical problem. Hackathons are becoming an increasingly popular way for organizations with a public remit to crowdsource the solution to technical problems that they might not be equipped to solve internally. My favourite example is the UK’s National Hack the Government Day: in 8 hours, 3 developers created "a much better website that cost the government over £5m to build, and added accessibility and mobile support" - and much more.

Not to be left behind, The World Bank, together with powerhouses Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, and Nasa will sponsor the Random Hacks of Kindness hackathon on November 12-14. The event will gather 150 top volunteer programmers from Silicon Valley and around the globe. For 2-3 days they will develop software solutions to the various challenges of natural disaster response. Technologists and disaster relief workers will jointly develop technologies that enable disaster victims to help themselves and help first responders/aid workers help victims--to reduce loss of life and to speed recovery. A long time dream of mine come true – kudos to the colleagues who made this happen!

Opening up development data: the hands-on guide

While my vision about opening up development data has been limited to rants, the much more practical folks at the International Aid Transparency Initiative have come up with a set of hands-on recommendations to make aid information 1) legally open (e.g. Creative Commons Attribution), 2) technologically open (going beyond APIs) and 3) easy to find (common metadata is not the only solution). The report, Unlocking the potential of aid information, is a vade mecum that takes the aid community a step closer to a common aid information standard (hat tip: Michel Bauwens). It also includes some recommendations for the World Bank! It is open for consultation until November 1st.

Twittering the launch of Doing Business 2010

As I posted on the blog last week, the Doing Business 2010 report launched on September 9th. While the report itself always contains useful information, what is often equally interesting is the response in the countries and economies concerned. As part of the launch every year, members of the Doing Business team travel around the world to discuss the results, appearing at very well attended events like Poland's Economic Forum.

Up until now, there was no convenient place to share all the interesting feedback, questions, and commentary from these events. This year, we decided to get a few of the Doing Business team members to let us know what's going on during their travels via Twitter. We're capturing all of their Tweets @WorldBankPSD, so follow us if you'd like to hear what the world is saying about the record results from DB2010.

Here's our line-up of Twitter correspondents:

• @nfgregory: Neil Gregory, Senior Adviser to the Vice President of Financial and Private Sector Development
• @SuzanneSmith7: Suzanne Smith, Lead Knowledge Management Officer
• @sbagaudinova: Svetlana Bagaudinova, Senior Private Sector Development Specialist
• @KarimBelayachi: Karim Belayachi, Operations Analyst working on the Starting a Business indicator

Social media Friday

Is social media going to change the world? The makers of this video seem pretty convinced: