The Responsible Data in Humanitarian Response meeting held last week in The Hague gave me a lot of food for thought; below, I’ve tried to summarise what my main learnings from the two days were.
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Last week, I joined the Responsible Data for Humanitarian Response meeting in The Hague, where I had the pleasure of moderating a session on civic data streams, as well as talking about the International Aid Transparency Initiative process, together with Roderick Besseling of Cordaid. Roderick talked more about the specifics of using IATI within Cordaid, and it was really impressive to see how they are actually using internally the data they publish to IATI - while I talked about IATI data from a more general perspective.
I’m planning to write up the notes from the discussion very soon, but in the meantime, here are the slides I used for the discussion.
Yesterday, I gave a talk at the Stiftung Neue Verantwortung here in Berlin, about the work I’ve been doing looking into how data is being used in international development. I adapted a presentation I did together with Becky Kazansky at last year’s re:publica, which you can see online here, where we talked about the unintended consequences of increased uses of technology in development.
This post is being updated with more links/corrections on an ongoing basis! To see older versions, check the Github repo
A few weeks ago, I asked online via Twitter, and offline to friends of mine - what’s your favourite podcast?
I got these responses:
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about how civic tech tools need to be “less shiny, and more useful”. I got some good feedback about this - most people agreeing with the general premise behind it, but some people spoke out in defence of ‘shiny’:
I’ve been trying recently to think about the things I’m most interested in, and I realised that with regards to technology, there are a few terms that come to mind: civic technology, data journalism, and Information Communication Technologies for Development, or ICT4D. The more I think about the three seemingly disparate labels, the more similarities I see between them.
Put simply, I’m most interested in the use of technology to improve people’s lives.
This week, I had the pleasure of joining a group of about 100 people working on topics around ‘following the money’ at a two day workshop in Berlin. There was a mixture of people at this workshop; technologists, activists, journalists, and funders. One of the first ‘spectogram’ questions that was asked was regarding ‘shiny tech tools, and whether they are useful or not.
I found this statement, and the reactions that followed, particularly interesting - for the last year, I’ve been looking closely at how data is put online by international development organisations - normally, through “shiny” data portals, which seem to be used very rarely. The statement, and the rest of the workshop, got me thinking about what we makes an effective and useful technology tool.
The last few weeks have seen growing protests “against Islam” across Germany, which made me feel surprisingly uncomfortable here in Berlin - until I saw how willing and supportive Berliners were against such discriminatory, fascist behaviour.
There are so many talks up online from the Chaos Communication Congress that it can be a little hard to know where to start watching. Here are some of the favourite talks that I had the pleasure of watching, and some others recommended by kind people on Twitter - in the spirit of bringing attention to the great talks held by women, I have prioritised those talks in this list. Included below the embedded videos is a list of all of the other talks that were also recommended.
My head is still spinning a little after returning from my first visit to the Chaos Communication Congress, aka 31C3, with the assigned motto ‘A New Dawn.’ It was four days long, with upwards of 12,000 people, organised by Europe’s largest association of hackers, the Chaos Computer Club who, for more than 30 years, have been - in their words - providing information on:
technical and societal issues, such as surveillance, privacy, freedom of information, hacktivism, data security and many other interesting things around technology and hacking issues.
It wasn’t anything like an event I’d ever been to before, for many reasons. I felt a little like Alice in Wonderland having fallen way, way down the rabbit hole; there were things I didn’t realise were possible, and things that I didn’t understand all around me. The Congress Centre in Hamburg was transformed from a standard conference centre into a thing of beauty; volunteers running the Congress had spent days (weeks?) there building, decorating, and illuminating the entirety of the place.