mmenwyelet's blog

Last month, our team, along with our friends at Futures Group, hosted the sixth Principles for Digital Development meeting on open standards, open data, open source, and open innovation. For those that haven’t attended a working group meeting in the past, these sessions provide an opportunity for members of the development community to share lessons learned and best practices in the implementation of ICT4D projects.

In advance of the Principle 7 meeting in San Francisco next week (it’ll be streamed for those that are interested in attending remotely), I thought a short recap of where we left off would be a good primer for this month’s discussion on reusing and improving existing tools, platforms, and frameworks.

Here were some key takeaways from the Principle 6 discussion: READ MORE »

Our team is pleased to be co-hosting the sixth Principles for Digital Development Working Group meeting with Futures Group on open standards, open data, open source, and open innovation. For those that are not familiar, the Principles Working Group is translating the Greentree Consensus for Digital Development into practical action to amplify the good work of USAID and other donors in advancing the reach of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in international development. USAID Administrator, Dr. Rajiv Shah, emphasized the importance of this work in the USAID Impact blog on Oct 20, 2014: 

“We call these principles the Greentree Consensus, and they are built on earlier sets of principles that draw on the insight of more than 300 NGOs with expertise in the field. …We must do more to take these insights into action. Over the next year, we want to hear from the development community about your experiences in bringing technology to tackle development challenges — from promoting media freedom to solving water shortages.” READ MORE »

Since the launch of DemTools: the Democracy Toolkit in August, the NDItech team has been hard at work. We've developed several new features and integrated our suite of tools into a range of programs that support groups working for democracy, open government, and citizen rights around the globe. To better and share these new developments with interested parties, we'll be sending out a quarterly DemTools Newsletter.

The NDItech team welcomes your feedback and encourages you to stay involved in the toolkit's development process. We want to know how you're using DemTools, what challenges you're experiencing, and what improvements you'd like to see in the future. Share your comments, suggestions, and ideas with us at [email protected].

DEMTOOLS IN ACTION

Tunisia Elections Observation

Tunisian election monitoring observation group and NDI partner Mourakiboun pursued three parallel vote tabulations, or PVTs, this year to assess the quality of Tunisia's Parliamentary and Presidential elections and verify the national results. Mourakiboun faced a tight timeline for the execution of a software system to manage their data collection efforts. Creating a new database from scratch is a painstaking and long process. READ MORE »

Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post by Katherine Bradbury, Project Assistant on NDI's Asia team.

In March 2002, NDI established an office in Afghanistan and has since worked to promote the participation of civic groups, political parties, women, and government bodies in the country’s political and electoral processes. This process has taken place in the context of a difficult transition from Taliban rule to new democratic institutions. While political organizations and civil society groups have made progress in advancing democratic political processes, much more needs to be done to protect gains Afghanistan has made in democratic governance, political pluralism, and the protection of human rights, especially the rights of women. Security, political stability, and democratic governance are closely linked, and the legitimacy of Afghanistan’s government hinges on credible elections. The recent 2014 presidential and provincial elections presented an opportunity to promote fair and peaceful competition for political power, and sustain the progress that has been made to-date in Afghanistan. READ MORE »

In case you missed it, our team recently presented at the CiviCRM User Summit, a one-day conference that brings together users, consultants, and developers to share ideas and skills, and discuss features of the popular, open source CiviCRM constituent relationship management (CRM) tool. I had the opportunity to moderate the NDI session at the summit, which our friends at AGH Strategies recorded and will be making available in a few days. Until then, I thought I would recap our presentation and share some highlights from the event. READ MORE »

Editor’s Note: Cross-posted from NDI's guest blog on CiviCRM.org 

For over 15 years, NDItech has been in the business of developing technologies for development. One of our newest pet projects is called DemTools, or the Democracy Toolkit. DemTools is a set of four webapps to solve some of the most common problems our global partners experience: civic organizing, managing constituent relationships, tracking election data and fostering civic debates. Two of them are custom-configured versions of CiviCRM, so we’ve been working closely with the core team throughout our design and development process.

The thinking behind DemTools was simple: to design context appropriate solutions for advocates of political change that were informed by user needs and could enhance existing workflows. However, what we learned from conducting a host of usability tests on our Civi-enabled tools was that making them work was anything but simple. READ MORE »

There’s something about being presented with a challenge that inspires people to be innovative. Perhaps that’s why an organization like USAID launched its Grand Challenges for Development initiative, which is rooted in the fundamental belief that engaging the world in the quest for solutions is critical to instigating breakthrough progress using science and technology. The World Bank’s Apps for Development initiative is another instance where an organization leveraged a competition to bring together the best ideas from software developers and development practitioners to create innovative applications; in fact, we've been writing about these app challenges for years. 

Of course, when a cash prize is attached to propositions like these, imaginations are bound to go wild, as evidenced by the winners of the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge competition, which were announced last month. Working in partnership with the Ford Foundation and the Mozilla Foundation, the Knight Foundation launched their challenge initiative in February of this year, where the posed the question: How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation? to which they received 704 responses. While the 19 winners (to whom a total of $3.4 million dollars was awarded) all focused on themes related to Internet access, transparency and safety, the solutions they offered were varied. READ MORE »

Internet and mobile technology have become a part of everyday life for most around the world. As smartphone access to the internet expands it’s no surprise then that the number of mobile apps on the market has also grown rapidly in recent years, reaching close to 1 million that can be downloaded on both iPhone and Android devices. One of the most interesting new ones is Open Garden’s FireChat app, which aims to make the Internet more reliable by bypassing existing networks and internet service providers. Since its launch in March, the app has gained two new users per second and several thousands of installs a day. Here’s why.

Micha Benoliel, the CEO and cofounder of the startup Open Garden, developed the FireChat app to allow all devices, including smart phones, tablets and laptops to work together to create a mesh network through which to access the Internet at any time. Now for many, the term mesh network may be new, but the general concept is one that most of us are familiar with. This is how it works.

In the absence of an outside Internet connection, the Open Garden takes advantage of two features commonly found in cell phones today: Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. Much like a bicycle wheel, where multiple spokes connect to a central hub, a mesh network allows multiple devices to connect to a single Internet connection. Each device on the network functions like a hotspot, allowing other devices within a range of 100 feet to connect to it and gain Internet access. What this means is that messages can be passed between devices connected to the mesh network without each device having to establish its own Internet connection. The advantage of this decentralized network is that users can keep their conversations concealed from prying eyes and surf the Internet under the raider. The disadvantage however is that users are not able to send messages to specific people because communications sent on the mesh network are visible to everyone connected to it. READ MORE »

Since Nigeria's transition from military to civilian rule, NDI has worked closely with civic and political organizations to support the development of the country's newly formed democratic institutions. Although the quality of elections in Nigeria progressively declined post-1999, the 2011 elections marked a turning point, as they were seen to be the most credible elections the country had ever held. Now, with the 2015 elections fast approaching, identifying how to build on this momentum is on the minds of many.

Given the rapid rise in the use of digital technology and the way that it’s changing the relationship between governments and those being governed, part of the answer may lie in expanding political participation using social media. Our team here at NDI just published an important new study this May on Citizen Participation and Technology, which showed that while more people are using technology around the world, the quality of their political participation and the overall impact on democratization varies from country to country.

An interesting publication released this April by AfricaPractice takes a look at the case of Nigeria and how the country’s evolving digital media landscape is having an impact on citizen participation in politics. READ MORE »

Allow me to introduce myself – my name is Meron! As a recent graduate from Georgetown’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program, my passion for exploring the nexus between politics and technology led me to NDItech. As the new project assistant with the information and communication technology (ICT) team, I’ll be working on the strategy, design and implementation of technology to support NDI’s democracy programming around the world. Given the rapidly changing landscape of global politics and technology, I’m eager to apply my academic and professional experience in the areas of good governance and innovation processes while serving in this new role.

I join the ICT team having previously worked as a research assistant at Global Integrity, where I assessed the transparency and accountability mechanisms of African governments. I later served as a peace fellow with the Advocacy Project in Uganda, where I investigated the technology challenges facing an innovative women-led organization that makes handcrafts from recycled materials. During my time at NDI, I’m eager to build on my past experiences related to transparency and accountability, women’s empowerment, and civil society capacity-building. I'm especially looking forward to exploring ways to better harness technology to democratize information, promote social activism and enable public accountability around the world at a time of great need.

Let the fun begin!