Development Seed

The annual Web4Dev conference is happening this week in New York City at the United Nations. This is a great event that always features some really incredible and important conversations about technology and development. Events like this are impressive for how much potential they have to actually do good for the world. People from across the UN system, including ones from other big multilateral organizations, NGO’s, and the private sector, all sit down together for a few days to learn from each other and talk about the latest tools that can help them get their work done. It’s a great opportunity for development professionals to learn about what’s happening with technology, and for technology people to learn about what needs to happen on the ground to help development work happen in better ways. We’ve been going to these events since they started and are always really impressed by the creativity and interesting conversations.

Conversations this year will get into things like using new technology for better disaster response, improving knowledge management for humanitarian organizations to make their work more efficient, and using mobile devices to improve accountability and transparency for field operations. The outcomes from these kinds of conversations stand to have a direct impact on poverty, the environment, public health, and more.

Eric’s heading back again this year, and he’ll be leading two of the main sessions: one on open source tools for real time decentralized data collection, and another on cross-organizational data sharing incentives and the potential of RDF. If you’re not going and are want to get a better sense of what he’s talking about, some of his presentations will be related to blog posts we’ve done on data collection and the benefits of open data.