The 1%CLUB is the marketplace that connects smart development projects with people, money and knowledge around the world at onepercentclub.com.
Have a look and be part of it!
While entering the building at ‘s-Gravenhekje 1A in the city centre of Amsterdam you can feel a special vibe hanging in the air. In an old warehouse packed with history, Amlab is established.
Amlab is short for Amsterdam Lab, which consists of three different organisations respectively Akvo, Text to Change and 1%CLUB. Over one and a half year ago they decided to combine their energy and creativity and found an office where they could work together. In theory these three organisations just seem to share the same office but in reality they do a lot more.
What these three organisations have in common is that they all believe in the use of technology for social change. 1%CLUB is the online marketplace that connects people with smart ideas in developing countries with people, money and knowledge around the world. Text to Change uses mobile phone technology to inform people in developing countries about all kinds of social issues. Akvo develops and runs web and mobile services and builds networks of skilled partners that can change the way development aid is allocated and reported.
The collaboration between these three is not formed by policy, donors or other official cooperation agreements. What brings them together is their common search for innovation and the energy that comes with these young organisations.
The three organisations bundled their ideas about transparency within development aid and made up a plan. With this plan there will be no more discussions about the impact of development. The impact of a project will be exposed to everyone whether it’s bad or good.
How does this work? By using simple mobile reporting tools we will share first-person stories and data with a global audience and offer crowdsourcing tools to get people involved in supporting development projects with their knowledge, time and money. We set up a ground breaking way to explain how aid impacts the lives of people at the local level. A young Kenyan will be able to share his opinion about his local health clinic or the entire health system in Kenya just by using his mobile phone. We will share these stories with a global audience and offer crowdsourcing tools to get people worldwide involved in supporting development projects with their knowledge, time and money. The progress of technology allows us to take part in this global conversation.
Yesterday the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced that the AmLab idea is chosen as one of the top 10 best ideas they received. After beating over more than thousand other ideas in the competition AmLab is now ready to prove what it’s worth.
Not by endless conditions written on paper but with collaboration and shared passion brought together in an inspirational old warehouse, that’s where innovation starts!
This is a guestblog by Josje Spierings. She is project assistant at Akvo.
It’s been almost two weeks since the Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) 2012 took place in Nairobi and Amsterdam. With over 250 participants in Nairobi and 125 in Amsterdam, it exceeded our expectations.
The event kicked of on the 27th of June in Nairobi. The day started with keynote presentations about open data and open development. Bart Lacroix, founder of the 1%CLUB, made everybody shout out: “We want Open Data Now!” As a call to all organisations to open up their data and work on open development.
The first day ended with Ignite Talks. During this session seven Ignite Speakers provided five Ignite Talks. To clarify this, the speakers scattered around the room, and five minutes after they started their talk a buzzer went off, whereupon the audience continued to the next talk. The idea was for the speakers to keep their inspiring stories at a high energy level. In addition, it was a nice way to network and share experiences. If you want to view highlights of the ODDC 2012, watch the following video thich the 1%CLUB has made.
At the start of the two-day camp, we challenged the visitors to share their ideas on open data. Forms were handed out on which people could fill in their ideas. By the end of the first day, we had received over 60 forms, of which we selected nine ideas. Visitors were able to pitch their ideas at the end of the second day. Out of those pitches, one was selected as “the winner” and received a ticket to attend and speak at the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki. The winner of the ‘Pitch Your Idea’ was chosen by a jury consisting of: Pieter Dorst (Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs), Sam Gichuru (NaiLab), and Caroline Kitenge (Microsoft).
Dr. Edward Omete won this challenge. He pitched about eliminating wastage of public resources in hospitals and improving accuracy of medical data via smart phones, tablets and/or PCs, thereby reducing the work burden of health workers.
Another ticket was handed out to someone from a Co-Creation group. Co-Creation is an open innovation methodology that brings together professionals from different organisations/companies from various sectors in order to reach creative solutions that would never have been created without the Co-Creation. In a set time period they worked in multi-disciplinary groups to come up with a creative solution for a challenge. During this session there were four challenges, focussed on open data in different thematic areas: 1.Water 2.Health 3.Education 4.IFMIS (a county perspective).
After a difficult deliberation the jury decided that the Health Co-Creation group had the best idea and presentation. The group chose Janet Maranga to represent their group in Helsinki.
In addition to a ticket to Helsinki, the winners received a towel to attend the “Open Sauna” Session at OKFestival. After the award ceremony there were drinks and cake to celebrate the first year anniversary of the Kenya Open Data Initiative.
The event was a big success, with over 250 participants connecting and exchanging ideas and knowledge.
In a few weeks the Open Data for Development Camp (ODDC) 2012 events will take place in Nairobi and Amsterdam. They are bound to be great events, which will take the usage of Open Data to the next level.
In 2011 we organised the first Open Data for Development Camp in Amsterdam, bringing together a diverse crowd of policy-makers, development aid workers, researchers, journalists, ICT-staff and software developers in order to learn about the possibilities of Open Data for Development, share experiences and networks. Here you can read more about the 2011 event.
Following that event, the NaiLab ICT Incubation Centre in Nairobi called out to the organisations present in Amsterdam: You have the data, we need that data. Give us the data!
They suggested having the next event in Nairobi and offered to help with the organization. So this year we will take them up on that offer, in addition to holding a 2012 event in Amsterdam.
On Wednesday 27th and Thursday 28th June, we’ll be at the iLab at Strathmore University in Nairobi, to connect on-the-ground initiatives on open data and citizen engagement in development initiatives.
On Friday the 29th June, we’ll come together in Amsterdam with lots of Dutch organisations, to take stock of what is happening, and to engage in making the data available that African organisations and companies are asking for in Nairobi.
OpenData for Development Camp in Nairobi
The ODDC in Nairobi is part of The Kenya Open Data Pre-Incubator Program, a six-month experiment to help accelerate the availability for the public to make sense of data and to galvanize engagement around critical public issues.
The event in Nairobi will be a 2-day conference about open data and open international development. These terms might sound vague, so here’s a brief explanation:
Open data is a term that is used to describe data that is freely available to everyone to use and republish as they wish, without restrictions from copyright, patents or other mechanisms of control. Open international development takes into account open data, but also open cooperation. It’s the idea that organisations that work in the field of international development should work together to make tools and create efficiency.
In March 2011 the Obama Administration launched the Open Government Data initiative, which fits into our Open Data Development philosophy. One of the countries acting upon it was Kenya and in July 2011, with a lot of support from the World Bank, it launched The Kenya Open Data Portal. There was a clear message: for the people to hold us accountable.
Nearly a year after its launch, it seems like a good time to look at next steps. How does it influence people? So with this event we’ll take it a step further and explore how indeed the Open Government Data of Kenya, the Open Data of the World Bank and the IATI (International Aid Transparency Initiative) files impact the tech community in Kenya and, behind them, the active citizens.
The ODDC in Nairobi is organised by ICT Board Kenya, Kenya Open Data Initiative, Open for Change, World Bank, NaiLab, iLAB, Akvo, 1%CLUB, Hivos, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands, and Development Gateway.
The event will offer a combination of keynote speakers, workshops, best practices, speed geeking, hack space, networking, exchange of knowledge and needs, sharing data sets, co-creation, open data visualisations, and inspiration.
Open Data for Development Camp in Amsterdam
The ODDC in Amsterdam will focus on explaining open data and open development to interested organisations and NGOs. It will elaborate on what IATI is, what is happening all over the world in the field of open data and ways in which opening up data can impact an organisation. There will be a connection to the Nairobi event via Skype interviews and presentations.
The ODDC in Amsterdam is organised by Open for Change, Partos, Akvo, 1%CLUB, IICD, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands.
It will take place in the AmLab in Amsterdam and will be a combination of keynote speakers, workshops, best practices, networking, exchange of knowledge and needs, open data visualisations, and inspiration.
We’re now just a few days away from going live with Openaid.nl, the new web interface that will allow people to explore the Dutch government’s international aid portfolio in a much more dynamic way.
It’s the latest step in our work to support the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs implementation of the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard.
Akvo has steered the project, following a successful pilot early this year to bring some of the Ministry’s aid data-sets online. The openaid.nl platform has been designed and engineered by Siem and Tristan Vaessen from Zimmerman & Zimmerman in close cooperation with Akvo’s Mark Westra and Peter van der Linde. On Wednesday I interviewed Siem and Tristan about the project.
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
