Most of my readers know how enthusiastic I am about the potential that Internet has; being this either social web, social media, web2.0 or however you want to name it. But if I look back at what has happened in the development field during the last year, I have to say that frankly I am quite disappointed about how little has been happening. I expected the disruptive potential to be more exploited. Particularly in development organizations hardly anything has changed, and the wave of open networks, transparency or the two way conversation is rather a ripple.
Little innovation from development organizations
I remember the participants’ enthusiasm during last year’s web2fordev conference in Rome and I have also seen some interesting initiatives since, but the strong push towards taking advantage of the potential is not there. Critically, you can say that yes, the world bank has been playing a little bit around with blogs, UNHCR celebrates itself with Google map for fundraising, and Eldis has now a community, as well as Development Gateway has now ratings for articles, but here, in Germany, I cannot even find one convincing example from dozens of organizations working in the development field. But I know these are at least some first steps.
What are the reasons?
I think the challenges especially within the organizational context are multi fold. Just to name a few:
- Technical challenges: Almost all development organizations rely on software systems, which do not offer social media tools. Sharepoint is just one example of how it will never work to have an open knowledge sharing environment.
- Being it the communication department, the IT or any other departments – many share their refusal to a participative web. Staff should be offered to decision themselves what to published and which tools to use. No way! – for some people the social web scenario is still a nightmare.
- It is not on their screens! Most key players or management teams have not yet understood the potential of the web in total, although development organizations work internationally and engage in numerous networks. The Internet is still seen as a necessary evil. Generation gap?
- No real commitment for donor harmonization. One key pillar of aid effectiveness should be to exchange knowledge as open and transparent as possible. There are hardly any attempts to open data resources between organizations and for the public domain. Most content is still copyright, although it is for non-profit.
- Adaptation: It simply takes much more time. The learning curve of organization all together is simply really slow. The slower the bigger the organizations are.
- Open knowledge sharing is still not high on the agenda. Information silos are common and knowledge is kept closed north and south of the development field.
- The fear and distress to engage online, plus information overload and too little training for staff to show the potential to publish and exchange knowledge in networks.
- Too little interest to engage in dialogue and recognize the importance of local knowledge. User-generated content means that I also am able to listen as an organization.
What could be different?
A will to go public with the work, knowledge and problems of development organizations. Instead, they sat around in Ghana for aid effectiveness and have achieved so little. One step would be to acknowledge that problems are too complex, open channels of organization and use new ways to work together. Being it a Wikipedia for development or different sub themes such as Water wiki. But knowledge is preserved and kept in organizations. Information sources should be combined from different perspectives, instead, each organizations has its own websites. There is not even an attempt to combine data resources between bigger organizations. If you look for instance, the wisdom of crowd potential is not yet exploited. For project development or problem solution, hardly anything has been tested or experimented. In recent years amazing market and exchange places in all kinds of fields have been established, but the development sector still offers very little. I will elaborate that further in another post.
An explanation
In my opinion the easiest explanation is that the social innovation within or through the web flourishes best in open autonomous environments. This can be rarely offered in an organizational context. If you look at the most fascinating projects and initiatives of the last year, since the web2fordev conference, you will see that they are all grass root driven – mobile phones in Africa, human rights issues, citizen journalism, mashups or networks for development. So I wonder what could then be the role of development organizations to participate in the social innovation? How do you think web2.0 in development organizations will progress? Do you agree with the above statement or was I too critical?
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This blog explores worldwide social innovations and how people benefit from infor- mation and communication technologies. 
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Hi Christian,
any clue why it seems especially hard in Germany. If we look at the Netherlands (i.e. ICCO) or the UK (i.e. ODI) you find at least some more possitive examples.
Cheers
Martin
Hey Christian,
I agree that while there is lots of rhetoric, that action is limited. Coming from Toronto I am lucky in that many NGOs do embrace this new movement, partly because of a large number of colliding forces. There is a big open source community here, and social media is popular seeing as Toronto is one of Facebooks biggest user communities. People get social media here, and if they don’t get them they know that their teenagers get them. This atmosphere of Drupal Camps has lead to organizations actually embracing social media on a policy building level, and now I get people who don’t know what a wiki is telling me about Open Space facilitation strategies. The most exciting things happen when policy makers themselves actually listen, because this provides the funding necessary to invest in these types of endeavors. Not all NGOs are big cash cows that can afford to build websites, so having supportive funding agencies means that they can go forth into the world of Web 2.0 and create their own projects. The real problem is that not everyone wants to participate. I’ve seen my share of failed social networking websites, and I’d say the top reason is that people are sick of having to remember yet another password and check yet another account. Maybe what we need to focus on is creating easily customizable spaces that allow NGOs to interact and share their user databases. I think that TakingITGlobal does a great job at this, and I know that future startups are keeping this in mind when creating services.
Great post!
Lisa
Great post, as always Christian.
I share some of your disappointment, although I didn’t expect NGOs to embrace these new tools – as you say too many organisational prejudices and phobias about transparency and bottom-up participation in development processes.
What I did expect, however, was a wave of new funding initiatives to support the birth and growth of social media aimed at developing nations. Unfortunately, I saw little here as well, at least in the UK. The Social Innovation Camp had some interesting proposals, but in the end only UK-centred projects were selected as finalists. Same thing for the UK Catalyst Awards. And no major donor has yet pledged – to my knowledge – significant sums towards this purpose.
Interestingly, however, I see more and more social innovators who are truly exploring how social media can make a difference in the developing world. As usual, they lack resources and support, but I think it’ll be just a matter of time before these independent thinkers transform development thinking with innovative and creative online tools.
Let’s just wait and see what happens!
I don’t know whether I agree or disagree with your saying that “social innovation within or through the web flourishes best in open autonomous environments”.
What I do fully believe it that it has to be bottom-up. I think that, as far as open autonomous environments are (per definition), bottom up, I would agree in part with your statement, but not it being exclusive.
But I think there’s room for such innovation within institutions too, though, in my opinion, no explicit allocation for these projects, no specific planning, no special strategies, etc. need being done that do focus in achieving NGO 2.0 as a goal.
I belive more in technology stewardship, in empowering the individual willing to do a project in a “different” way to be able to do it, to put “trojan (geek) horses (2.0)” as part of teams so the change comes from within, as the response of a real need, not as a lab strategy.
My 2 cents
Maybe you are in the wrong organisation?
If my one year in public administration/government told me one thing, it’s that they are resistant to change like nothing else.
I’m in transparency and accountability for NGOs and, believe me, even though one scandal is following the other, commitment to improve things remains low.
Thanks for all these interesting comments!
@Martin Behrens I know of some blogs and that for example Greenpeaces uses an internal social network system. On the social camp back in May some interesting have been presented. Most activities are internally.
@Lisa Campbell it is interesting to follow the different initiatives over there. Indeed takingITGlobal is impressive. In Germany one other problem is often a missing audience or a different culture. It often takes time to approach new ways and scepticism is first high.
@Alberto yes I think that there is a big limitation because of funding. That was a major problem most participants articulated at the social camp here in Germany. Particular in the development sector hardly any funding available. Many ICT4D colleagues I spoke to, do not take web2.0 serious or see it potential.
@Ismael yes I agree to some extend, because this happens actually in my organization, where innovation is driven by guerilla tactics.
But in an organizational context you need more support (e.g. management) to make it happen and that is difficult. Open and public initiatives develop their project in public and engage their to get it goingThat is a very different approach to the organizational one and has so far better results.
@Bijan Kafi You should get in contact with some interesting people in the UK, who try to reform the public sector in this regard. Albeit it seems quite tricky, they have interesting projects there in cooperation with the government. I am surprised that in the field of corruption the whistle-blower option has not been used with these tools. For example an anonymous social network for employees do not want to accept the corruption within their organization.
Hi Christian
I think you are too pessimistic, or maybe looking for the tsunami-like disruptive waves.!
I see increasing web 2 awareness and use all around.
rss feeds, almost common! Even the European Commission; bilateral donors; research groups, NGOs, … not very glamorous though.
social bookmarking, check out our delicious networks – more and more people begin to get it.
blogs and wikis, more and more …
youtube, blip.tv, slideshare – check out the development content. (see http://feeds.feedburner.com/euforicvideochannels for some video channels
facebook pages, …. oecd, odi, …
at euforic, in the last year or so, we’ve presented and trained and supported web 2.0 apps to hundreds of people in mainly european development agencies (admittedly only a few in germany!). – we made a few blog posts at http://euforic.blogspot.com/search/label/web2.0
It seems to me that the less flashy more ubiquitous tools are getting adopted, and yes, probably without, yet, major disruptive impacts. I suspect these will come when the famous ‘tipping’ points are reached …
cheers
Peter
Hi Christian
I share with you the disappointment that more has not happened. But I think you put your finger on the problem when you say “I expected the disruptive potential to be more exploited”. Perhaps that’s the problem, web2.0 is seen as disruptive (a pejorative term) rather than empowering. Just a thought.
Andrew Keen in a blog post yesterday has a nice classification of Internet optimists vs. pessimists, more insights into perhaps why not everyone outside the web2.0 church thinks it’s all a good thing.
http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/the_great_seduction/2008/09/the-wisdom-of-h.html
Tscheuss!
Kevin
Hi Christian,
Your analysis is right on! I believe that the only way to win over development agencies to buy into web2.0 paradigm is to take each and every opportunity to push the agenda forward.
Most of the time, these guys do not even know that these tools exist. At best, they may have heard of them. Our job is to show them how they can benefit by using specific tools for a specific situation and context. It is a long process. It will not happen overnight. Some will grasp the concepts faster than others.
What will really help is when one of the big guys in the development arena starts implementing and using the tools… Then the others do not want to fall behind and will follow suit.
Maybe this is a very simplistic way of looking at it, but I am an eternal optimist, and believe if we keep the pressure and continuously sing the glories of these tools and really show how they can be used to achieve bigger impac, WE CAN DO IT!!
One reason why Web2forDev may not be quite working, yet, is because for it to work the whole sector of international development would have to change its (work) culture. On the other hand, not many seem to approach the challenge in this way.
Instead of thinking:
1. What changes in leadership, training, capacity building, incentives, and the like, should we make, as organisation?, …
Many are still thinking:
2. What tools and social media should we put into place? What would be the technologies to really empower us for Web2forDev? …
The problem with this is that you should do 1. and then think about 2. (we all who have been in knowledge management, in one way or another, know this) Or, just do 1. and 2. in parallel. Just never do 2. without doing 1. … which, in particular, STILL happens a lot in the international development sector. And which is why change for Web2forDev is and will be resisted.
In other words, instead of focusing almost exclusively on the Web2forDev tools, I think those who want Web2forDev changes and positive effects to come about in actual fact should turn their attention away from the tools, at least for some time, and be more strategic as they try to play change-agents in their organisations. Turn their attention away from the tools and focus this on the ‘touchy-feely’ part of the picture as I heard somebody referring to it, recently. Focus on the social fabric, often being described as ’soft’, and use one’s emotional intelligence to identify and articulate issues of significance, then influence for those to be addressed.
In any case, for Web2forDev to work well in the future, any and all of us who are and would be Web2forDev users would need a lot of emotional intelligence in order to enable a social fabric like distributed cognition, which would be the right context for Web2forDev.
Have I seen this work in other (public sector!)organisations? Actually, no, I haven’t.
Do I know it would work? Yes, I do …
Thanks, great post, Christian!!
Another reason is that this developement or awareness for Web 2.0 only happened within those departements that had a connection to IT. But those who actually have to do the knowledge management for a specific subject (far away from any IT relations) are those that still need to learn more about it.
In other words: there are lots of scientists out there, active in devaid orgs who do km work but have no clue of the potential of facebook or even just RSS feeds to name just two simple & open tools.
It’s very sad indeed.
comments to this blog entry also on the web2fordev dgroups
http://www.dgroups.org/groups/web2fordev/index.cfm?op=dsp_showmsg&listname=web2fordev&msgid=873453&cat_id=18952
Most bigger organisations are still trying to attract people to their website. The idea of trying to think about web 2.0 – social networks etc is not to be expected to be developed by these organisations. The new kids on the block like;
Ammado,
Nabuur,
MYC4,
Kiva,
Play It Forward (in development),
Social Actions
will probably be the ones that prove that it works (sooner or later) and then they ‘classic’ development organisations will follow.
In this respect I have also wondered why there is no Wikirectory on development Aid.
http://vanstokkom.blogspot.com/2008/08/wondering-about-wikirectory.html
Hi Christian,
project. But it needed incentive from donors.
When you write “No real commitment for donor harmonization”, I would like to add a small point. Communication is still not a “real” budget line in project management. Even for organisations looking for core funding, the line is often called something like “communication and fundraising”. Communication is still seen as a structure cost, just like salaries, office renting, electricity… Almost never as a tool for impact.
Evaluation, being at first perceived as a control, needed time to shift toward a positive and constructive tool from projects. It’s now a normal budget line of any (or almost
Donors still don’t seem to understand the importance of communication (seen as knowledge sharing) prior, during and eventually after the project.
This comment is a little bit simplistic of course (the incentive may come also from the NGO themselves, the beneficiaries, the governments…), but it’s just a comment, not a post
Anyway, thank you for your writings Christian !