Sunday, November 25, 2007

Although not related to ICT for D...

An interesting development in ICT and its potential impact in other arenas of our lives: Facebook and ABC have joined forces, essentially to increase the political literacy and civic engagement of young adults (the article can be found here).

Such partnerships between ICT and politics (including the success of the YouTube-sponsored debate) make me wonder how ICT could potentially revitalize democracy in our nation--especially in light of the apathy of many young adults--as the 2008 Election looms near. For a generation where many of us likely spend more time online and participating in social networking sites than we do watching the news on TV or reading the papers, increasing access to relevant information in a palatable way seems to be a promising way to enhance civic engagement and potentially increase voter turn-out for the next election.

Friday, November 23, 2007

The Importance of Design

VP of Design at SAP Matthew Holloway's in-class lecture about a month or so ago was one that really forced me to reconceptualize the function and appearance of everything around me. When he initially asked how many of us in the class thought we were designers, I definitely didn't raise my hand because I've never been the really artsy, creative type. However, once he started prodding us about various 'everyday' things that every has had to do or continually does in their everyday life, it was interesting how my mind raced to check-off a series of things I routinely do that is in fact considered 'design'. With his lecture and the subsequent readings highlighting the need to find out how your customers, or potential customers, use a certain product have been really helpful for me as Mohammed and I continue to refine the design of our project for Seva. I think the only thing I wished we had access to was the opportunity to witness the Seva Field Offices "in action." I can't quite remember which article it was we read, but there was one that underscored the need not only to survey the people that are using (or will use) your product, but to actually witness them using it. I think that being able to visit each of the Field Officers for even one day would really inform our design of the intranet/social networking platform. However, since geographic, time, and financial constraints prevent us from doing these observations, Mohammed and I are using the results of the Needs/Interests Survey Assessments distributed to the Seva Field Officers almost a month ago. While I think that we can finalize a basic design of the intranet/social networking platform concept, Seva will have to continue to test our design versus how the Field Offices are actually utilizing it in their day-to-day life, and be flexible enough to modify our design as necessary.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

The Marriage of the Market and Social Entrepreneurship

Director of Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) Jim Koch's presentation was very interesting and I thought represented the business perspective of social entrepreneurship well. The two questions/comments I came away with (reflecting on our readings and his lecture) were

(1) How, if at all, does the two-week bootcamp take into account the socio-cultural-political context of where the entrepreneurs come from?

(2) Jim's statement regarding how entrepreneurs can solve the problem of a 'lack of a market' or 'non-consumerism' that is typical of the populations that comprise the bottome of the pyramid through education struck me as an interesting point that conflicted the take-away message from one of our readings that argued supplier-induced demand was a mistake that many entrepreneurs made. In many ways it reminded me of the LINCOS experience in Costa Rica when foreigners decided what the Costa Ricans needed without evaluating their needs and the appropriateness of their intervention into this rural society. At the same time, I can appreciate the value of the example given by Jim regarding the necessary education of a certain village to replace the current more expensive method of producing potable water when an entrepreneur has found a way to produce potable water at a much cheaper price. Nevertheless, I question in what instances education is appropriate to eliminate non-consumerism.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

NetSquared's 2nd Tuesdays of the Month Gatherings

Tonight's topic of "Finding Software for your Non-Profit with Allen Gunn of Aspiration" with a cameo by David Sasaki, Director of Outreach for Global Voices speaking about his project Rising Voices proved to be a very informative workshop. Overall, it was a very engaging evening with an opportunity to network with those working in the non-profit sector.

Perhaps the best part of the whole evening was the walk-through of Allen Gunn's Social Source Commons website, which provides a comprehensive resource for software options for non-profits. This website will assist Mohammed and I in streamlining our research of existing models available to assess the appropriateness of relevant ones for our project. Additionally, Allen Gunn offered his ad hoc consultation services for all of us in the audience--something that Mohammed and I will definitely take advantage of!

Monday, November 12, 2007

Revolutionizing Healthcare through ICT

Revolution Healthcare is trying to do exactly that.

Browsing through the site and watching the clips of Steve Case, the founder of the site and co-founder and former CEO of AOL, illustrate the potential of ICT to create more informed healthcare consumers. However, I can't help but think that most people aren't ready for such an innovative site. Although people (especially those of my generation and younger) are used to consulting the internet for consumer-related needs and inquiries , healthcare has been shown to differ greatly from other industries. Take the case of public reporting of healthcare quality indicators, for example, how many people have actually consulted a website publishing hospital and physician score cards? Probably very few of us even realize that such sites exist. On the other hand, how many of us have used sites like CitySearch and Yelp to discover new restaurants, bars, etc.?

For now, I believe people are more likely to use sites that assist them in 'self-diagnosing' injuries/illness (for better or for worse) such as WebMD than they would be to use a site such as Revolution Healthcare. Nontheless, the prospects for such services I believe are great, especially in an age of the demonstrated benefits and proliferation of electronic medical records (EMR) and technology's influential role in improved efficiency and quality of healthcare.

Although this post does not directly relate to ICT for development, this class has been really useful for me to learn more about ICT in various disciplines. I'm definitely not the most technologically saavy person, and I think this class has really forced me to catch up on the latest trends and innovations in ICT and 'ICT for D.'

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Kabissa 2.0

So I've fallen off the blogging bandwagon and this is the beginning of getting myself back on track...it's a bit difficult to keep up with my blog as I've never had one before, not to mention I'm partial to hard-copy journals. Nonetheless, I have this running list of "Things to Post" on my blog. So without further adieu, to item #1:

About a month ago, I encountered a pretty amazing organization called Kabissa that was launching a brand new project called Kabissa 2.0 that

"Marries power of Web 2.0 with passion of 950+ African orgs in our network. Savvy Web 2.0 Ambassadors will collaborate through the Kabissa site and face to face to develop and promote homegrown strategies for employing Web 2.0 for social change."

When I first found this organization, they had a pretty snazzy YouTube clip explaining how this would work, but unfortunately, that clip is currently no where to be found. Basically, this initiative reminded me of what Kiva does, but instead of recruiting lenders to donate small amounts of money for borrowers from developing countries, this site seeks volunteers to donate their time and expertise to various African groups and villages. My first reaction to Kabissa 2.0 was to envision the possibilities...and there are many! However, after viewing clips with a few individuals huddled around a laptop in a hut with dirt floors, it made me wonder what percentage of African communities could benefit from Kabissa 2.0. Obviously, in order to benefit from the valuable knowledge that volunteers could offer, the village would need to have pretty good internet connectivity in order to have video conferences, etc. Thus it's primary beneficiaries would not be the poorest of the poor. This point presents an internal conflict for me: on the one hand, I feel that helping any population is 'good enough' ; however, on the other hand, I wonder where we would be as a global population if everyone had this mentality. What would happen to the poorest of the poor? At some point, if more targeted efforts to assist those living in abject poverty ceased to exist at all, the divide between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' would be even more exagerrated and the segmentation of those considered 'have-nots' would exacerbate existing disparities.

Clearly, broad programs aimed at poverty alleviation (etc.) generally benefit the less poor more than it does the poorest of the poor. Is it acceptable, for us as a society, to create these initiatives that may improve the well being of all segments of society, but generate more pronounced disparities across socioeconomic classes? It's a tough dilemma because how could you reject a program that would produce postive change for your targeted population(s)? While a one-size-fits-all solution does not exist, generally, an approach to poverty alleviation (etc.) that benefits all segments of the target population without exacerbating existing disparities requires a shift in how these problems are conceptualized and how success is measured. I believe such a shift was highlighted in Anke's article we read a few weeks ago. I won't recount point-by-point each and every aspect that must be considered to ensure that initiatives are meaningful and beneficial for the target population as Anke outlined them clearly.

Instead, I'll end this post with the acknowledgment that this problem is not limited to poverty alleviation efforts in the developing world, but is actually quite prevalent in any quality of life improvement initiative. For example, quality improvement in healthcare is definitely not immune to such a dilemma as it relates to the differential care minorities and non-minorities receive and their resultant health outcomes. I don't think this dilemma has a concrete solution, but rather requires conscientious questioning and consideration of how programs/initiatives are designed and implemented and the identification of possible unintended consequences they can yield.

Sunday, September 23, 2007

Living in a Box and Trying to Think Outside of It

After reading Victor Papanek's chapters, I felt a little bit conflicted: conformity versus creativity (evidence-based decision making versus 'thinking outside of the box'). He explains that finding oneself at one extreme or the other is not what he's advocating, rather he asserts that:

"In fact, conformity is a valuable human trait in that it helps to keep the entire social fabric together. But we have made our severest mistake in confusing conformity in action with conformity in thought (135)."

After Matt Holloway's lecture last week, "everyone is a designer"--regardless of one's profession, at one point or another, we have designed something. So Papanek's argument applies to all fields and professions; however, recently there has been increasing emphasis placed on evidence-based management and decision-making in health care. What I am having trouble compromising is that I see value in both approaches to problem-solving--I wonder how it is possible for aspects from each approach to inform the decision-making process in dealing with a health care problem or issue, for example. While one never wants to continue to 're-invent the wheel' in making decisions and solving problems, at one point does one stop trying to develop innovative solutions in trying to resolve a particular conflict? When does one decide to ignore the practice of 'thinking outside of the box' simply to focus on surveying what has been done in this field (and other fields) when faced with the same problem? Taking into account the time constraints that people face day-to-day also skews this decision-making process towards choosing a 'solution' that's has been proven to be efficacious because it is much tougher to 'think' than just 'do' when 'time is money'.

Moreover, in this respect, I totally sympathize with Papanek's assertion that our society and educational system encourages and rewards conformist thinking. Today, we live in such a fast-paced, results-oriented world where the incentive structure is set up such that tangible productivity is rewarded while intangible productivity (or simply thinking) is penalized. I've seen this occur in practice numerous times when people rush into creating and implementing an intervention to meet a social need without the proper assessment and analysis carried out to ensure that the intervention is (a) effective and (b) sustainable after the intervening team leaves just so that something is being done. However, as I (and I'm sure many others) have witnessed, sometimes less is more, especially when the intervention could do more harm to the target population than the current status quo.

What I thought was especially interesting was that his observations are as relevant today as they were in 1970. After reading Papanek's chapter 7 regarding this tension between creativity and conformity and the numerous blocks that inhibit us from even developing solutions that are innovative (let alone being able to implement them on a larger-scale), I began to think on how this could be undone for me personally (since I have been conditioned to stay within the box as a consequence of spending a majority of my life in academia). Personally, doing more exercises as outlined in Robert Harris' "Creative Thinking Techniques" I think would be very beneficial--however, what I've discovered is that I still succumb to attitude that in order to be productive, I must be able to furnish palpable evidence of my efforts. In other words, while trying to sit down and flesh out an example Harris proposes to help people start thinking of unorthodox uses for simple objects, I find my mind wandering to the mental checklist of things I must do that inevitably results in me deciding to focus my energies on another task that allows me to show what I have accomplished (such as writing in this blog, for example!). In other words, trying to find a balance between conformity in action and conformity in thought is difficult if I have been trained to operate as if they were one-and-the-same.

With that, I realize that years of conditioning to producing tangible results will not disappear in a day, a month, or even a year. Nonetheless, I am hopeful that recognizing this tendency is one step in thinking beyond this box in which I reside.