The 1%CLUB is the marketplace that connects smart development projects with people, money and knowledge around the world at onepercentclub.com.
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On March 22nd 2012, World Water Day, Butterfly Works launches a serious, but fun game about water scarcity in slums. The game and supporting Facebook campaign aims to create awareness amongst Dutch youth about the life of young people living in slums and especially in relation to water and the environment.
World wide, nearly 1 billion people live in slums and the number is growing, water is a basic necessity and providing access to clean water and sanitation for the world’s poor is one of the millennium development goals set for 2015.
Recently the popularity of ‘Games for Change‘ is growing, whereby the help of gamers is enlisted to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. GetH2O Challenge is a game about the challenges that slum dwellers face getting (clean) water. A fun game based on real life situation, with an educational purpose the game allows you to experience the race against the clock managing water, housing and pollution.
In the game you play the role of a ‘Change Maker’ who is working for the good of the community.
Your aim in the game is to build houses and manage the water supply while keeping the pollution in check, you can build water tanks and wells to improve the supply but time is always against you. In the end the best way to win the game is to build a community centre where the whole community come together to take action to solve the problem for once and for all.
On the accompanying Facebook campaign page Ben and Winnie, two students who live in Kibera, (an informal settlement of Nairobi) Kenya, share a video message giving you a glimpse into their life and the challenges they stumble upon getting water everyday.
By playing the flash game Dutch young people can experience slum life and what choices you can choose from and in that way learn to understand just how difficult things can be. Young people motivated to do something about the issue can share the game and the video messages with friends on Facebook, or donate money to one of a selection of water projects through the crowdfunding site 1%CLUB who is collaborating in the campaign.
Yesterday Akvo Foundation and Skoll Global Threats Fund co-convened a meeting in San Francisco on the subject of online services for the development sector. We had a great turnout and some very interesting discussions. The organisations represented at the meeting were:
Akvo Foundation, 1%CLUB, Blue Planet Network, Cisco Foundation, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Craigslist Foundation, Google, Inc., IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, Pacific Institute, Participant Media, Skoll Global Threats Fund, Skoll Foundation, Water for People and Water.org.
Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson, Akvo’s Technical Director presenting the concept of a shared online services platform for the development sector in San Francisco.
The funders were interested in seeing if we could create synergy and collaboration around the creation of these tools. They were also interested in the use of the tools themselves, such as FLOW, a field project monitoring application for mobile phones, created by Water For People, which have received quite a lot of attention in the last couple of months.
The organizations that were present discussed what a shared online services platform could look like, which tools were available today and what would be needed to make them easily available to everyone.
Akvo, 1%CLUB and Text to Change have been discussing this concept of a shared web application store for a while, as part of an overall transparency and collaboration effort which is part of our work at Open For Change, the Dutch Network for Transparency, Collaboration and Impact in Development.
Yesterday Thomas presented the current state of our joint thinking. In short the idea is to create web application store for our existing applications. The web app store would be a thin service layer which would enable data exchange between the applications, allow the existing applications to communicate with each other, and provide other shared facilities such as authentication and billing services. The web app store would enable others to create their own web applications that would use this services layer. On top of that we would collaborate around the development processes, testing infrastructure, sharing skills and helping each other.
There are several reasons why we would like to do this:
1. Critical mass: by having a number of core web applications available under the same umbrella we can more easily reach out to the users of the applications and get them to use them.
2. Efficiency: by collaborating around the infrastructure components we have more resources to spend on the core of the web applications. The stuff that matters.
3. Costs. It is expensive to build software, but it is even more expensive to maintain, update, support and improve what you have built. We need a sustainable software and online services strategy that will enable us to make the best use of the potential a global network society offers at low costs.
4. Innovation. The creation of this service layer will lead to the creation of new amazing applications we cannot even imagine at this point. We believe this to be the most exiting aspect of this project.
What’s next?
The creation of the web application store made a lot of sense to all that were present. During next week we are continuing the discussions to see exactly how this is going to happen.
Finally we would like to thank everybody at the Skoll Global Threats Fund who helped us organize this meeting at very short notice!
Anna and Bart – 1%CLUB Thomas and Peter – Akvo Foundation
Last Blogpost I mentioned the large group of people willing to spend lots of effort and time on projects in developing countries. These people mostly do this during weekends and after working hours. They spend a lot of time writing project proposals, looking for funds, emailing with their partners in the South and meeting with the board of their foundation to make future plans. They mostly do not have a lot of time but their ambitions are huge.
This post is a follow up on the post we did about his TED talk on Hippo’s and cheetahs. In this talk George Ayittey, one of the top 100 global thinkers, gives you a more profound insight into Africa as a continent, it’s people, culture and why, after 50 years of freedom and 600 bilion of Western aid, it’s still in tremendous crisis.
Questions like:
Why a continent that is so rich on minaral and natural resources is not able to lift it’s people out of poverty?
Why there is so many catastrophic leadership failure and government disfunction?
