Tuesday 9 July 2013

Activate: Open Development

Today I'm at the Guardian Activate conference, been before and found it very stimulating. Mainly attended by media people, it's good to mix with a different crowd. There are many speakers, and the sessions are short, the longest 20 minutes, the shortest 2 minutes. Blogging could be interesting!

First up is Chris Vein, Chief Innovation Officer for The World Bank on innovation and openness.

Talking about Open Development. Transparency enables greater participation in development process, collaboration vital to innovation. Open Bank focusing on extreme poverty.

"In an analogue world, policy dictates delivery, in a digital world, delivery informs policy" Mike Bracken. Start with the user, not the policy

8 principles of open development:

User centred. Understand needs of the user. Bottom up approach, not top down.

Data driven. Most disruptive of principles. Use real time data to make real time decisions. Shorten processes eg for open bank, making loans. Example, project in Uganda, banana crop extremely important. Disease attacking banana plants, could wipe them out, used SMS messaging to report outbreak of disease, map responses using geocoding, created map of disease for first time.

Reusable. Reuse bits of development to speed it up

Scalable. Everyone loves a pilot, let a thousand flowers bloom etc, but world is littered with dead flowers. Think about long term scalability, not short term solution.

Sustainable. Modular development based on open source, open data platforms, doesn't have to be recreated as things change. Let the world in to maintain it.

Ecosystem. Think of all of the players in a solution. Understand everyone and keep everyone involved.

Open. Goes without saying. Example, Map of a slum area in Tanzania. Government had no idea of how big slum was, where roads were etc. used people in the slums to map it.

Security and privacy. Has to be a priority in all projects.

In summary, technology is powerful, but to truly provide solutions, eg to eradicate poverty:
Development as the platform
Community is the capacity
Customer is the approach
Empowerment is the key


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

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