Today Eric and Robert are participating in a day long workshop with USAID’s Democracy and Governance unit that will give program officers concrete approaches to improve efficiency, transparency, and evaluation of their on the ground programs. They will be there to talk about new data visualization and collection technologies and how programs can implement them, with a push for opening up and sharing data, to bring about drastic efficiency improvements. They’ll walk through several examples, including:
- A collaboration platform that maps 950 programs’ recovery efforts in Haiti.
- OpenStreetMap, and how open mapping technologies can improve democracy and take root in places that commercial mapping platforms have not.
- OpenStreetMap as a collaboration platform, and how the OSM community responded to the earthquake in Haiti by creating the best country maps, and how four interns mapped 140,000 Miles of African roads in a summer.
- An election monitoring tool that plots the vote count from Afghanistan’s presidential election and overlays it with security and ethnic information.
- SMS for incident reporting around elections.
- The newly opened up data catalogue from the World Bank of more than 2,000 human development indicators from around the world.
After Eric and Robert’s session, the focus will switch from tracking program efforts on the ground to measuring democracy and governance overall in countries and regions. Folks from the International Center for Not-For-Profit Law, IREX, and Freedom House will be there to talk about the three analytical tools used to monitor this and how to improve evaluation efforts.
If you are attending the workshop, stop by to say hi to Eric and Robert after their session and ask them any questions you have.