DemTech: Our Blog
The 50% Solution; Or, The Glass Is Entirely Full
Wired has a nice piece on the successes of for-profit development. You can argue back and forth on the place of international NGOs for…
Read MoreAfghanistan Election Results Site Raising Questions - As Designed
One of the key goals of our AfghanistanElectionData site is to make the election process more transparent. The site combines raw election results with data from several sources, then provides…
Read MoreNo More Smoke-Filled Backrooms: Leveraging Tech for Transparency & Accountability
In many parts of the world, countries are taking first-time steps to make their governments more open and accountable. Yesterday, NDI had the opportunity to host participants under the auspices of the Department of State's International Visitor…
Read MoreIt’s 10:00. Do you know where your data is?
So you wanna secure your organization. You’ve thought about the appropriate balance of security and complexity for your team. You’ve taken steps to clean up your computer and lock down your network. Whew! Mission Accomplished, right?
Sadly…
Read MoreAre "Sustainable" TechDev Approaches Actually Hindering Development Partners? A Mini NDI Case Study
My visit to Macedonia last week for the eDemocracy conference presented an opportunity to check in on a long term project that our NDItech team has been involved with since 2005 - a little Access database…
Read MoreInternet at Liberty 2010: NDItech goes to Budapest
For the past 3 days I’ve been in Budapest at the Google/CEU ‘Internet at Liberty 2010’ conference, learning from and talking to some very clever people working…
Read MoreIs Tech a Postive for Democracy?
There is a lot to say about the role technology plays in democracy and democratic development. The US State Department's focus on internet freedom and the wider 21st Century Statecraft initiative that Secretary Clinton announced in January 2010,…
Read MoreHTML: The Universal Language
Just back from a trip to Erbil, Iraq. NDI is working with the Iraqi parliament on a new project, and one of my main roles was finding local coding wizards to build the software.
I was impressed…
Read MoreLeadership on the Lake – Macedonians Win with Tech Cooperation
When introducing IT initiatives into legislatures or about any other organization, the importance of good leadership and "buy-in" from the top is widely recognized as a key to successful adoption. It certainly was a recurring theme by several of…
Read MoreThe Challenges of High Tech, e.g. Bikes
Nicholas Kristoff wrote a good story in the Grey Lady on the power of bikes to transform lives in Africa.
It's a nice Kristoff-style human interest piece. What really intrigued me was his comment on…
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