Podio – finally!

When I started as a development worker in Peru in 1985, PCs had just started to emerge. Everywhere around me I saw Peruvians and aid workers alike programming PCs using floppy disks and software with funny names like dBase and Lotus 123. At technical college I had been taught a little about programming in Basic on mainframe computers. Now, high up in the Andean mountains people were developing their own applications and I was quick to hitch the ride. No Windows yet and MS-DOS was just one of the obscure names floating around. 

After these initial exciting times of developing your own applications, and actually using them yourself (!), companies started to take over. MS became Microsoft. Databases and software became the stuff of professionals and the rest of us became users. Some got very rich, some very big, some both, but most became disenchanted with software and systems. Users were charmed with user requirements, user acceptance testing, training, and, more recently, user stories or even journeys.

How come that we can create our own websites, blogs, Facebook pages, YouTube channels and much more, but that the organisation of our work still depends on other people?

No more! Podio has put us in charge again 🙂  

Commodities

A raw material or agricultural product that can be bought or sold, such as copper or coffee.

• a useful thing such as water or time.

That’s the dictionary’s take on what a commodity is. As good a description as any, but outdated. Raw is no longer raw and products have expanded from the agricultural realm into virtually all areas of economic activity.

It started out simple. People found things and bartered. One had salt, the other flint. They got together and determined among themselves how much salt was worth how much flint. Then specialisation set in: some people could do things others couldn’t and vice versa. Trade emerged. In fact, trade still means both the act of producing products and of exchanging them. Then exchange itself became a trade too. In other words, the tradesman no longer traded what he (or she, but mostly he) had produced but sold it to what came to be known as middleman. This type of trade took place in markets or shops. Shop, by the way, just like trade, refers both to the place where the product is produced and where it is sold.

The tradesman could only barter what he had crafted. The middleman had more options. Why stop there? One middleman could trade the output of many tradesmen. The output produced by one tradesman became the raw materials for the next. Only problem was how to determine the value of what was traded among middlemen rather than tradesmen. Money and markets entered the stage. From there it was a short leap to commodities—products valued and exchanged by markets.

Fast forward a few centuries and we have lost sight of the tradesmen all together. Engineers, distributors and marketers are among the many that stand in our our line of sight. Them moving out of sight would no longer suffice, however, as each product is made of many other products (erroneously referred to as raw materials), all of which are produced by many—well—producers. Simply put, we now have producers that produce commodities that are sold on markets to consumers. This may work for steel, but does not work for the primary raw material of today: knowledge.

Skin is 1st organ ever

I was not surprised when scientists recently confirmed that skin was the first organ of a multi-cellular organism (sponge) to evolve. I would argue that without a skin a multi-cellular organism is just a bunch of cells, not a multi-cellular organism. The skin determines what’s in and what’s out and in doing so needs some type of identity. Then the cells need to communicate with each other, specialise and so forth. The rest is evolution.

The same goes for multi-cellular organisms forming organisations, organisations forming societies and societies forming not-sure-yet-what.

not a business model, a development model

The basic model underpinning businesses is well known and all around us. Markets determine value and value = profit = money. Driven by this same profit motive, whole suites of information and communications technologies have been developed and deployed, usually known by their 3-letter acronyms (CRM, ERP, and so on). Meanwhile, the not-for-profit world, and the international development community in particular, has been struggling to adopt and apply this business model and related technologies to support their efforts to make this world a better place; to have an impact. Frustrated by the lack of success, the high costs, and the endless discussions, we revert back to email, spreadsheets and Skype calls and put our findings in intimidatingly long and complex documents.

Now a new breed of social technologies such as social media, social networks, blogs, wikis and pedias, maps, mobile phones, games, online collaboration, and so on (also known as the Web2.0) is emerging which has both the for-profit and not-for-profit worlds struggling and thriving. In this emerging social world where people volunteer rather than charge for their contributions, where (almost) everyone is a click or call away, and where everyone is a potential publisher, artist or pundit, the profit motive no longer explains nor drives every transaction.

This blog explores the context and contours of a model for development that, where relevant, draws from the lessons being learnt in the for-profit world and builds on the new opportunities created by social technologies.

from alchemy to knowledge

That’s awfully familiar, I thought when reading about the early days of natural philosophy in Clay Shirky‘s second masterpiece Cognitive Surplus. I have tried to illustrate why open communications are essential for development aid by retyping this piece from Shirky’s book in the left column and rewriting the same piece but from a different perspective in the right column. Clay had the benefit of hindsight, I the benefit of the future’s unpredictability.

“I was raped” ¦..(

Last week a 16 year-old girl from Almere (Netherlands) was raped by a boy her age. My daughter Carmen (22), who runs a kind of model agency called Beautiful for a Girl (10% of proceeds go to Plan’s Because I am a Girl campaign), called me to tell me that one of the girls she works with was raped when she bicycled home after an evening out in Almere. The evening was unrelated to her agency’s events but Carmen was one of the first people the girl called to tell her horrific story. They have talked a lot since.