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

http://www.dgroups.org/groups/web2fordev/index.cfm?op=dsp_showmsg&listname=web2fordev&msgid=873453&cat_id=18952

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.

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!!

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!!

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

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

@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.

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.

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

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 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

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