June 2013 - change - Mailing Lists

At Grameen Foundation, an International Nonprofit Becomes a Software Developer
by Gaetano Borriello 18 Jun '13

18 Jun '13

At Grameen Foundation, an International Nonprofit Becomes a Software Developer Capital Business (06/09/13) Steven Overly The Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit that provides healthcare to pregnant women in developing countries, has developed Mobile Technology for Community Health (Motech), an open source software platform that nonprofits, nongovernmental organizations, and humanitarian groups are using to address pandemics such as tuberculosis and HIV. "We’re a nonprofit developing software that we hope other nonprofits will build on top of," says Grameen Foundation's John Tippett. Grameen's Steve Wright notes, "at the highest level, what we’re doing is helping these organizations be more efficient and more effective in the same way any well-funded business would be more efficient or effective with technology.” The Grameen Foundation also has developed TaroWorks, a program that enables humanitarian organizations to create customized surveys. The organizations produce questionnaires designed to collect information about the people they aim to assist. Field workers then employ mobile phones or computers to perform the surveys and submit responses. Wright says TaroWorks helps organizations make decisions about the communities they serve and the development programs they offer based on tangible evidence. "We want them to build products and services that are useful to the poor, based on data," he says. http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-it/at-grameen-foundation-an-inter…

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Sugata Mitra: Slum chic? 7 reasons for doubt
by Yaw Anokwa 14 Jun '13

14 Jun '13

There is an interesting critique of Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall project at http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.de/2013/03/sugata-mitra-slum-chic-7-reason… Yaw

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Fwd: Acumen.org Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation summer course
by Nicola Dell 13 Jun '13

13 Jun '13

*From:* Sasha Dichter [mailto:sdichter@acumen.org] *Sent:* Thursday, June 13, 2013 6:00 AM *Subject:* Launch of +Acumen Online Leadership Academy ** ** ** *[image: Plus Acumen Online Leadership Academy]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=s6Qyl_os49w2mnvmBpWf8A> * *[image: Follow us on Twitter]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=r7ty9dvzPEkzpRuJbFlZNw>[image: Like us on Facebook]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=RdLDs1jTFL8Xi4s_jjUpzg>[image: www.acumen.org]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=ZhOCE9rniBScZDxy0w-7qQ> * Dear Jesse,**** For the last year we have quietly been experimenting with what it would take to bring the core of Acumen’s leadership programs to the world. We think we’ve hit on something exciting, and we want to share it with you.**** Acumen launched our first formal leadership program, the Acumen Global Fellows Program, in 2006, and since then we have been honing our curriculum and scaling our programs. Today, we have more than 120 Acumen Fellows, and are expanding our offerings through our East Africa Fellows Program, Pakistan Fellows Program, and, in 2013, our soon-to-be-launched India Fellows Program.**** We think this is just the beginning.**** The +Acumen online leadership academy<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=N7JuVkpXnTBjYe3D0jPaoQ> will bring this curriculum to anyone with access to the internet. The courses are free, they offer world-class content, and through our pilots we have already had ~5,000 people register for these courses from more than 100 countries. We hope that through these courses even more emerging leaders can gain the skills, perspective and insights to better help them improve lives of people around the world.**** Today we are proud to announce that, building on our longstanding partnership with IDEO, we are offering a new course titled* Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation. *Developed together with IDEO.org, Human-Centered Design for Social Innovation is a *five-week course beginning on July 10* that will introduce you to the concepts of human-centered design and help you use the process to create innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions for social change.**** [image: Register Now button] Register by July 3.<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=j4xqAQEJTEM_QrCRIRB5TQ> **** And thanks to the generous support of the Knight Foundation and the American Express Foundation, the +Acumen online leadership academy will offer a full suite of courses throughout 2013 at www.plusacumen.org/courses/<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=6FovX64FkP5StwDhdC3Z5w>. All courses are free and open to everyone.**** The world needs you to lead. This is your invitation.**** **** [image: [image: Sasha signature]] Sasha Dichter Chief Innovation Officer | Acumen www.acumen.org<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=YG7HgyUFKJzcFf6_US_MHA> **** *Sponsors of +Acumen Online Leadership Academy:***** [image: American Express Logo]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=c_wcEZ0wEzxPTmCN0U4e3w> **** **** [image: Knight Foundation Logo]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=04buj0klKW7djDJ54SRxGQ> **** **** **** [image: Tweet]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=btz5O-9rU0Tk9txzbkb15Q>[image: Share] <http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=4iS-9O3JBH2rb_Yk-AQ_eA>**** Share this message - Forward this to a friend <http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=w9BnmiCzhX8y3jWErT8reQ>To unsubscribe, click here<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/CO?i=3b4_LW-MdDIGgnfppFn0nEVAPxlQhh7k&ci…> .**** [image: powered by CONVIO]<http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=o3E4mLCvOlqKAvhhofSDxg> nonprofit software <http://support.acumenfund.org/site/R?i=pUPRmKMnJNrmK6NW0sj3xA>****

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Fwd: [ITID] New ICTD2012 Special Issue Published
by Yaw Anokwa 12 Jun '13

12 Jun '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Arlene Luck <aluck(a)law.usc.edu> Date: Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 11:55 AM Subject: [ITID] New ICTD2012 Special Issue Published Dear ITID Readers, Information Technologies & International Development has just published its latest issue at http://itidjournal.org/index.php/itid. Reflections at the Nexus of Theory and Practice: Selected Papers from ICTD2012 Jonathan Donner, Rebecca E. Grinter, Gary Marsden Special Issue Editors This Special Issue of ITID contains six articles, each drawn from the plenary papers presented at the Fifth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development hosted at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, March 12–15, 2012. In total, 38 papers were presented at ICTD2012, 18 as plenary talks and 20 as poster presentations, all drawn from a field of 94 double-blind peer-reviewed submissions. The proceedings are available at the ACM Digital Library (http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2160673) As editors, we selected papers for this special issue which had been particularly well-reviewed during the conference process, and which engaged a diversity of current issues in the ICTD field. The invited authors extended and modified their papers based on feedback from ICTD2012, and then participated in an additional single-blind peer review cycle with experts in the field. The six revised individual ICTD2012 papers, as well as Bailur’s review of Dutta’s Communicating Social Change: Structure, Culture and Agency, each make new stand-alone contributions to the field. However, to introduce the issue, it is worth reflecting on the papers as a set, and on the 2012 conference from which they have been drawn. One notable attribute of this year’s selections may be that a preponderance of the articles engage with the structure and trajectory of the field. The two clearest examples of this style are Dearden’s “See No Evil? Ethics in an Interventionist ICTD” and Dodson, Sterling, and Bennett’s “Considering Failure: Eight Years of ITID Research.” Each uses a review of the existing ICTD literature to explore implications and difficulties of conducting research with and among actual people and complex communities. By placing the intervention and the project near the center of ICTD practice, the two pieces support a perspective that “success” in ICTD (or perhaps at least in ICT4D) cannot be framed in terms of advances in abstract theory, but rather, in terms of an interplay of theoretical progress and positive practical impact. Two of the other articles also engage directly with the trajectory of the field, albeit in manners which depart from interventionist frame shared by the two discussed above. In “Cell Phone Analytics: Scaling Human Behavior Studies into the Millions,” Frias-Martinez and Virseda suggest a promising new methodology, rooted in the systematic analysis of large data sets, that may improve researchers’ abilities to associate estimated socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of populations with different levels and patterns of mobile phone behaviors, without drawing on often-costly or scarce individual or household-level interview data. Meanwhile, in “Anthropology, Development and ICTs: Slums, Youth, and the Mobile Internet in Urban India,” Rangaswamy and Cutrell draw on the results of an ethnographic study to highlight the centrality of “mundane, non-instrumental, and entertainment-driven needs” among resource-constrained teenagers in Hyderabad. In so doing, the authors call specifically for an integration of ICTD and anthropological perspectives, and for the broadening of an analytical frame inside ICTD to accommodate such uses. Finally there are two articles which represent recent instances of the tradition of interventionist field research in ICTD. In “Emergent Practices Around CGNet Swara: A Voice Forum for Citizen Journalism in Rural India,” Mudliar, Donner, and Thies report on the development, deployment, and appropriation of a citizen journalism platform in India. Their work is multidisciplinary, combining details of an original technical component (an interactive voice response system), with an evaluation of a specific instance of its uptake and impact (as the citizen journalism portal CGNet Swara). Patel, Savani, Dave, Shah, Klemmer, and Parikh also take a close look at an original voice-based system in “Power to the Peers: Authority of Source Effects for a Voice-Based Agricultural Information Service in Rural India.” Where Mudliar et al.’s approach is wide-ranging, integrative, and exploratory, Patel et al.’s analysis of Avaaj Otalo is a focused experimental design engaging specifically with established information processing theory. Their findings—detailing an instance in which farmers found audio tips from peers to be more compelling than the same tips coming from experts—will further fuel the growing interest in peer-to-peer forms of information provision and sharing in development. It is our belief that both types of evidence and inquiry will continue to be important for the field as it moves forward; both inform better practice and design at scale for ICTD interventions, and both have implications beyond the specific instances of citizen journalism and agricultural extension explored in the articles. In a recent piece in this journal, Geoff Walsham (2013) offered some reflections on ICTD2012, noting (among other points) a relative lack of “Explicit Focus on the D for Development” concerning engagement with both policy and with the political economy of global ICTs. We would agree that these six papers do little to directly assuage Walsham’s important concerns. Matters of policy and political economy are only tangentially addressed by these selections. The engagement with specific definitions of development is also not universal, with perhaps only Dodson et al. and Rangaswamy and Cutrell explicitly drawing on existing conceptualizations of development, and the latter doing so largely in order to help push their inquiry beyond those conceptualizations. In contrast, the strength of these papers as a set may, instead, be that each one is involved some way with “the nexus of theory and practice” in the multidisciplinary community that is ICTD (Heffernan, Lin, & Thomson, 2012). Frias-Martinez and Virseda outline a new method; Rangaswamy and Cutrell encourage a broader scope; Dearden offers a framework for better engagement with research participants; Dodson et al. raise important questions about the relationship between framing and evaluation. Mudliar et al. describe one promising new platform with many possible new uses, while Patel et al. help build the evidence around specific best-practices for using peer-to-peer voice in development. As noted earlier, this iteration of the ICTD conference featured review and methods articles which are helpful in facilitating reflection on wider aspects of an increasingly multidisciplinary field. These are accompanied by the continued presence of papers that focus on addressing specific development practices and do so at a level of detail that enriches our knowledge of what, precisely, it is to “do development.” As a set, they reflect a field engaged in a robust dialogue around methods and practice. While Walsham’s critique should be taken as a further charge for the field of ICTD, the continued production of scholarship, like the pieces represented in this special issue, helps to raise the bar on our practice. It will guide the field toward generating results to inform policy, innovation, and intervention—based not just on isolated cases, but across the accumulated evidence of multiple initiatives. ===================== François Bar, Kentaro Toyama Editors-in-Chief Arlene Luck Managing Editor ______________________________________________ Information Technologies & International Development http://itidjournal.org

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Please, unsuscribe
by Moises P. Ramirez 12 Jun '13

12 Jun '13

Thank you! Moises P. Ramirez Movilistica C.A. +58 212 2427622 - 412 2324636 moises(a)movilistica.com www.movilistica.com

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Crowd Funding Campaign for Nairobi Dev School
by Nathan Breit 11 Jun '13

11 Jun '13

After being denied a visa to attend a coding school in the United States 19 year old Martha Chumo decided to start a school in Nairobi using crowd funding to pay for space and utilities. The school she's planning to create is modeled after the Hacker School program she was going to attend in New York (https://www.hackerschool.com) Martha goes into more detail on her fundraiser page, "I need the funds to start it because the school will be free. Anyone who applies will attend the school for 3 months for free. This is the same experience I was going to get at Hacker school, and I want others to enjoy the same!" If you're interested in finding out more about her project, here's a link to the indiegogo page: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/nairobi-dev-school

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CTO position at Grameen Foundation (formerly Grameen Technology Center)
by Kentaro Toyama 11 Jun '13

11 Jun '13

Grameen Foundation in Seattle is looking for a CTO to oversee the technical direction of their work in mobiles for global health, agriculture, microfinance, and microenterprise. Job description and application link here: http://www.grameenfoundation.org/chief-technology-officer. Kentaro

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Fwd: [TIER] JOB: Social Impact Principal @ ThoughtWorks
by Yaw Anokwa 11 Jun '13

11 Jun '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeff Wishnie <jeff(a)wishnie.org> Date: Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 5:44 PM Subject: [TIER] JOB: Social Impact Principal @ ThoughtWorks To: tier(a)tier.cs.berkeley.edu Location: Chicago, San Francisco, or New York Full listing: http://bit.ly/11UPjfi Apply here: http://bit.ly/1a2fYyJ Description: ThoughtWorks is a global software consulting and products firm dedicated to improving the art of software delivery and to bettering humanity via technology. Our clients are people and organizations with ambitious missions - whether they're in the commercial, social, or government sectors. They trust us to deliver the disruptive thinking and technology that empowers them to succeed. By joining ThoughtWorks, you'll discover a diverse community of bright individuals whose purpose is to revolutionize software design, creation and delivery, while advocating for positive social change. In our 20th year, over 2300 ThoughtWorkers are currently serving clients from offices across 11 countries. The Social Impact Program (SIP) Principal is a new role being created in North America. The primary objective is to improve the positive social impact of our North American portfolio by increasing our engagement with mission-led organizations. Although we are open to doing work pro bono for the right opportunities and organizations, this is primarily a role focused on selling ThoughtWorks services to new clients in the social sector. While we welcome all applicants, we are particularly excited to meet outstanding women or minority candidates, in line with our commitment to increasing the diversity of the IT industry throughout. As SIP Principal, here's some things you might do at ThoughtWorks: Learn something new every day Think through hard problems, and work with a team to make them reality. Work in a dynamic, collaborative, transparent, non-hierarchal, and ego-free culture where your talent is valued over a role title. Identify and bid for well-funded initiatives that align with ThoughtWorks technology services value proposition Find and shape short, high-impact engagements that can be executed with minimal commercial consequences for either ThoughtWorks or the customer Explore creative commercial models (e.g., joint grant application) with customers/partners Develop and nurture a network or ecosystem of actors in the social sector in which ThoughtWorks plays a key role Support and enable more North America-based ThoughtWorkers to work effectively with mission-led organizations Here's what the ideal candidate would bring: An understanding of "how things get done" in the social sector - who are the major actors (funders, service providers, organizers, etc.) A broad network of NGOs, foundations, charities, activists and other organizations that might have needs that can be served by technology A passion for technology and understanding of how technology solutions are designed and implemented (you do not have to be a technologist or software delivery expert - we have plenty of those who will support you!) Great interpersonal, networking and sales skills How to apply If you are interested in taking on an opportunity that offers variety, innovation, and unique challenges every day, then apply here. _______________________________________________ TIER mailing list Website: http://tier.cs.berkeley.edu TIER(a)tier.cs.berkeley.edu https://www.millennium.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tier

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Fwd: [TIER] CTO position at Grameen Foundation (formerly Grameen Technology Center)
by Yaw Anokwa 11 Jun '13

11 Jun '13

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Kentaro Toyama <kentaro_toyama(a)hotmail.com> Date: Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 4:35 PM Subject: [TIER] CTO position at Grameen Foundation (formerly Grameen Technology Center) To: tier(a)tier.cs.berkeley.edu Grameen Foundation in Seattle is looking for a CTO to oversee the technical direction of their work in mobiles for global health, agriculture, microfinance, and microenterprise. Job description and application link here: http://www.grameenfoundation.org/chief-technology-officer. Kentaro

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FW: Please join us for an Open House at IHME!
by Richard Anderson 11 Jun '13

11 Jun '13

From: Events at IHME [mailto:events@healthmetricsandevaluation.org] Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 12:40 PM To: Events at IHME Subject: Please join us for an Open House at IHME! We invite you to experience how IHME's world class scientists and bright young minds are applying cutting edge technology to the world's biggest health challenges. [cid:image002.jpg@01CE5D3F.C1D5F330] Come explore the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at an Open House Tuesday, June 18th between 5:30-8:30pm Hosted at our Belltown Offices 2301 5th Avenue, Suite 600<https://maps.google.com/maps?f=d&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=%3BCRHSpk-0xxCqFf…> Please join us for an evening filled with conversation, discovery, food and drink Getting there: The Open House will be held at IHME. For directions to our offices, click here<http://www.healthmetricsandevaluation.org/about-ihme/contact-us>. Parking information: The Fifth & Bell Building Parking Garage (located in the building where IHME is located) will be open until 9pm the night of the Open House. Two-hour street parking (free after 8 pm) is available. There are also two large parking lots on the corner of Fifth and Bell. For more information, please contact: events(a)healthmetricsandevaluation.org http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org<http://healthmetricsandevaluation.org/> Follow IHME on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ihme_uw<http://www.twitter.com/ihme_uw>

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