There are ongoing efforts to fight this corruption by creating transparency in NREGA’s functioning, especially in the fund disbursement process. It is in this area that I recently came across a great example of appropriate technology seen in the photo below (image courtesy: The Hindu):

NREGA Report on Wall

This is the “Transparency Wall” in Ranga Reddy village in Andhra Pradesh, India. The Hindu reports that the writing on the wall contains names of workers, how many days they have worked, and how much they have earned. (see Tool of exclusion)

Various technologies such as SMS and websites are utilized to collect and share information about work completed and funds distributed. However, due to poor connectivity and high cost, they are not directly accessible to the rural poor that the NREGA is supposed to serve.

The wall on the other hand fully serves its purpose of transparency and accountability. It gets the information to a wide segment of the population, foiling abuses of the system. For instance, if someone who is not eligible for the scheme is receiving payments, it is now on a wall for everyone in the local community to see and take preventive steps. It also puts the officialdom on notice about paying out these funds in a timely manner. With an at-a-glance-report of how much was disbursed and when, the writing on the wall removes the power that a bureaucrat could wield over the rural poor with misinformation about when funding was received and who got paid.

Simple. Elegant. Beautiful. Those are the words that come to mind when you behold this writing on the wall. Three words that are also the hallmark of appropriate technology.

cross posted on Partnership for Transparency Fund

(yes, that is the whole Thiruvilayadal movie available on YouTube; you may thank me later)

That very same piece was one of our compulsory memorization poems in class VIII or IX (sorry, old age :-)). And guess what was used to teach that poem? No, not Thiruvilayadal. Konar Tamil Urai (Konar is THE classroom learning guide for Tamil literature, somewhat like Cliff Notes.)

To give you an idea of what it would contain, here is a blog post by Ponniyin Selvan, Song from Tamil sangam – Kongu ther vaazhkai, that explains the same poetry we are talking about here. If you re-read that post without that context setting first paragraph, that would be Konar Tamil Urai.

Imagine that! Here is a poetry piece with an interesting story behind it. A story that found place in a popular movie of the day. A movie in which one of the famous heroes of that time histrionically recites the said poem on big screen (ok, maybe a bit too much histrionics, but still). Any one of these would be enough to hook flighty teenagers sitting in that classroom. But did we hear or experience any of this? No, we were too busy memorizing the blasted poem. For if we even missed or misplaced so much as a single comma in that piece when we regurgitated it in our exams, we would be penalized. So, of course we are busy memorizing. And in that, the poetry? Lost!

Here was a chance to get teenagers to love our own language, feel its poetry, form an interest in its literature, and enjoy its learning. Instead, our education system beat it out of our heads. With Konar Tamil Urai.

1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings
5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Apollo Research is associating these skills to the six disruptive drivers that they predict will reshape organizations and workers (workers? yeah, even the terminology needs an update from the industrial age. :)). You can see the summary and full report at Future Work Skills 2020 »

This list raises a whole host of interesting questions for Appropriate IT Development Academy.

Let us take the subject of Social Intelligence. It closely tracks with empathy, which is one of the primary areas of focus for the Academy. However, the challenge is, how do we foster empathy and social intelligence in adults? It becomes even harder when we are dealing with college-age young adults to whom the society has been reinforcing the opposite message. What they are getting explicitly and implicitly from the society is that selfishness, self-centeredness, and self-interest are the only virtues they need for future growth.

Then there are those areas which by their very nature become a huge barrier for under-privileged youth. If New Media Literacy is a required skill for the workplace of 2020, then what about those who are left out of this literacy purely on the grounds of access to these tools? If writing content or creating a quick app for an Android phone or iPhone/iPad is a foundational skill for youth to get jobs in high-growth sectors such an IT, then what of those who have no access to a smartphone or the latest gadget?

These are but a sample of the complex challenges that we are grappling with at the Academy on a day to day basis. None of them have easy answers. However, they do beg a multifaceted approach to this thing called “training.” You will hear more as we experiment with various solutions in search for these answers. For now, I leave you with this list and questions of how to incorporate these soft skills into a training program. We would love your ideas and suggestions, so please do post them as comments below.

Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations has a related invention that is not as commonly known:

In 1501 Aldus Manutius, a Venetian printer, published a translation of Virgil’s works…What was new about Manutius’ Virgil was its dimensions. The so-called octavo size was designed to be small enough to fit in a gentlman’s saddlebags so as to make important parts of his library transportable.

Of course, Aldus Manutius‘ octavo was not an innovation of the same size or proportion as Gutenberg’s printing press.

This was a small revolution, literally and figuratively—small in the sense that the book had shrunk in size and cost, and small in that it was less significant than Gutenberg’s original innovation.

However, it was a small revolution that did have an impact, on both the society and on the original innovation.

Yet the octavo size mattered, because it helped spread the written word. By making books cheaper and more portable, Manutius made them more desirable, which in turn meant more copies were produced and more experiments with printing were undertaken.

This made me wonder – is it that huge innovations need smaller, related revolutions for it to advance, expand, and succeed? In this case, the answer is yes. But if we dig deeper into any world changing innovation, I am sure the answer would be the same.

Shirky compares this revolution made possible by someone who accepted the larger social change (printing press) against those who fought against the tide and draws a valuable lesson (more like a warning really).

The lesson from Manutius’s life is that the future belongs to those who take the present for granted.

Now, can someone please pass this message on to MPAA and RIAA as they continue to push for SOPA and their own irrelevance? (See Infographic: Effects of the Internet Blacklist Bill (SOPA) and SOPA: Hollywood Finally Gets A Chance to Break the Internet)

Samburu & Masai Mara, Kenya (cc) CanWeBowlPlease

First, in April 2011, Kenya Gazette Notices dating back to 1906 were digitized and made available online through a partnership between Kenya Law Review and Google Kenya.

Then, in July, Kenya partnered with Google Books to release 60 years of Kenya’s Hansard (the official report of parliamentary proceedings) in an easily accessible and searchable online format.

July also saw the launch of the Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI) with the goal of making “core government development, demographic, statistical and expenditure data available in a useful digital format for researchers, policymakers, ICT developers and the general public.”

KODI makes available large data sets from the Kenyan government (e.g., census, public expenditure, data from health and education ministries) and the World Bank (e.g., development indicators) in a user-friendly website for the public and data access via APIs for software developers, all developed on the Socrata platform.

These initiatives allow Kenya to take large strides in fulfilling its constitutional promise of access to information as a citizen’s fundamental right. It is now in the hands of community groups and software developers to analyze, visualize, make meaning, create knowledge, trigger civic actions, and enable social change with the available data. If not, open data and access to information will remain empty promises without any social impact.

Kenya has a vibrant technology for social development community (case in point: ushahidi and M-PESA) that is already stepping up to the challenge. It has only been a few months since KODI launched, but there already are a few projects that are using this data in innovative ways for the benefit of the community. A sample:

• Kenya Public Expenditure Portal: Review spending of Constituency Development Funds (CDF) at county level
• Virtual Kenya: Visualization of MPs (Member of Parliament) who are willing/unwilling to pay their taxes
• Msema Kweli: Mobile application to track Community Development Funds (CDF).
• Google Public Data Explorer: Trends in government expenditure for social spending, physical infrastructure, and other spending based on data from Kenya National Bureau of Statistics
• Huduma: Fix my constituency platform for citizens to demand social services from the government.

We will keep an eye (a very-excited-eye to be precise) on developments in this front and bring more news to this blog. Stay tuned!

For More Information:

Kenya Gazette Notices

Kenya Parliament Hansards

Kenya Open Data Initiative (KODI)

Article 35 of Kenya's Constitution

originally published on Partnership for Transparency Fund blog

Human-centric design begins with attempt to understand the wants and needs of customers—and well beyond what a typical market researcher might find useful. The point is to better understand the way people think, feel, and live at the BoP before, during, and
after designing products or services.

An example of human-centric design is WaterHealth International’s (WHI) experience with home water delivery. WHI is discussed in more detail in a later section, but one insight is worth noting here. WHI builds and operates village-based water purification systems. The standard model is to operate a WaterHealth Centre in a central location, where villagers can come to purchase water and transport it home. In an early effort to generate incremental revenues, WHI experimented with a home delivery service. The thinking was that WHI could charge rich households a premium for delivery (approximately two times the price of the water) and use these fees to subsidize water for the poor.

The service was an immediate success, but somewhat surprisingly, day laborers were the customer group most likely to use the service. It turns out that rich households had servants and perceived no incremental cost to sending them to transport water. But the day laborers put a high value on their time. They needed water in their homes and couldn’t spare the time to pick it up—but they were willing to pay for a service that was vital to them. Immersing itself deeply into the local community and listening carefully to its customers allowed WHI to develop an important but counterintuitive understanding of its target customers.

From Innovation for the BoP: The Patient-Capital Perspective in the book Next Generation Business Strategies for the Base of the Pyramid: New Approaches for Building Mutual Value.

So, task for today – figure out Google Fusion Tables and find a solution for PTF.

Step 1 — Learn. Why would one use Google Fusion Tables? And, what exactly is the difference between Spreadsheet Mapper and Fusion Tables anyways? Google has handy chart that compares the features of Spreadsheet Mapper and Fusion Tables. The primary differentiators that can help us make a decision one way or another:

• Number of Markers: Spreadsheet Mapper can accommodate a maximum of 400 points or markers on the map, while Fusion Tables has no such limits.
• Pretty Factor: The pop-up balloons (the box thingy that pops up when you click on a marker) can be customized a lot more in Spreadsheet Mapper than in Fusion Tables. 6 templates in Spreadsheet Mapper vs. 1 in Fusion Tables. Someone without HTML knowledge can go a long way with Spreadsheet Mapper templates. Of course, HTML knowledge will get you even farther (side note: with the proliferation of online tools, I am beginning to think HTML should be taught in primary schools :)).

Step 2 — Create an Excel spreadsheet for Google Fusion Tables. There are many tutorials and sample tables that were helpful in creating a dummy table with test data to figure out how Fusion Tables works and renders data. The ones that I found most useful for this exercise:

• A list of publicly available Fusion Tables. The one that was used to model PTF’s map
  • Guardian’s Incidents between South Korea and North Korea data and map
• Google Fusion Tables Example Gallery with links to case studies on how Fusion Tables are being used around the world

The draft Excel spreadsheet with a column each for year, country, grantee, project name, topic, grant amount, and adviser is ready for action. A lot of data was made up, particularly the grant amount column, since the test was also to see how cumulative graphs would work.

Step 3 — Import Excel spreadsheet into Google Fusion Tables. That was easy enough to do following instructions found in the various Google Fusion Tables tutorials. The two that were really helpful:

• Map sample data with Fusion Mapper
• Map your own data with Fusion Mapper

Then ta-da, an embeddable map was ready. It even had a few other visualizations that would be useful – heat map (showing density of projects), bar (which topics had what amount of projects), and timeline (chronology view of project funding by year).

Step 4 — Enhance the Google Fusion Table further. As soon as the map was ready, the next question became how to add a couple more features to it and make it look prettier (but of course! :-)). The questions and the discovered solutions:

• Wouldn’t it be nice if we could change the style of marker by project topic? Each project topic would be indicated by a different color and size pointer.
  • Styling the marker icon with “Column”
• In India, there are six different projects indicated in one marker in one location, thanks to the fact that the spreadsheet only had country name for location. How can we distribute the markers around so that they are not displaying on the same spot on the map?
  • One of the markers on the map is in a wrong location. How do I fix it?
• To test the location marking feature, I randomly distributed various cities in India on the spreadsheet. Not just the metropolitan cities like Chennai, even smaller cities like Erode and towns like Tiruppur. Google picked up every single one of those locations. Quite Impressive!

Step 5 — Sit back and enjoy the view! Google Map of the work embedded here:

Unidentified. Sometimes you want to use the web without having your online activity tied to your identity, or even a pseudonym—for example, when you’re researching a medical condition or searching for that perfect gift for a special someone. When you’re not logged into your Google Account (or if you never signed up for one), that’s how you’ll be using our services. While we need to keep information like IP addresses and cookies to provide the service, we don’t link that information to an individual account when you are logged out.

Pseudonymous. Using a pseudonym has been one of the great benefits of the Internet, because it has enabled people to express themselves freely—they may be in physical danger, looking for help, or have a condition they don’t want people to know about. People in these circumstances may need a consistent identity, but one that is not linked to their offline self. You can use pseudonyms to upload videos in YouTube or post to Blogger.

Identified. There are many times you want to share information with people and have them know who you really are. Some products such as Google Checkout rely on this type of identity assurance and require that you identify yourself to use the service. There may be other times when it’s more desirable to be identified than not, for example if you want to be part of a community action project you may ask, “How do I know these other people I see online really are community members?”

Now, Google sees itself as enabling all three types of uses and users. You have to be an identified user for certain services or you can opt to be a pseudonymous user under certain conditions (someone may want to mask their identity if they want to upload a protest video from Libya for example) or you may want to search as a completely anonymous user.

There of course are risks even within this model. For instance, would it be possible to track down someone who posted a pseudonymous video by the IP address, especially if the IP is the same that is connected to their identified self? However, the fact of the matter is that Google sees itself as serving all three modes of use. Sure, they may not make certain tools available for some types of use, e.g., when you buy something using Google Checkout. However, they are not denying any of the critical services such as Search, YouTube, and Blogger to users in pseudonymous or unidentified mode.

This is distinctly different from how certain other online services treat different types of use. Ahem, Facebook…I am looking at you. 

Facebook requires that you are an identified user to use any of its services. No, you cannot even be pseudonymous. You have to be a registered and identified user before you can do anything. See Jillian York’s meticulous researching and reporting on the impact of Facebook’s terms of service on advocacy work and activists, particularly “The Risk of Facebook Activism in the New Arab Public Sphere.”

So, kudos to Google on doing the right thing. Thumbs down to Facebook on this one.

That night was the first of 10 — and counting — that hundreds have occupied the Wisconsin state Capitol. The TAA hadn’t planned to stay there overnight. “It emerged rather organically,” explains Alex Hanna, the other co-president of the TAA.