Basics
Food, water, shelter. This is about the basic determinants of health and welfare.
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Gates Foundation opens the doors, a crack, with new visitor center
Keith Seinfeld / KPLU
Even in the restrooms at the new visitor center, the learning goes on. The images on the doors are of a "home latrine in village of Kushumhi, Uttar Pradesh, India," according to the inscription.
If you’ve ever been past the huge new Gates Foundation campus near Seattle Center and wondered what goes on inside – your time has come.
The foundation is opening up its doors, at least a little bit. This weekend, a new visitor center opens to the public.
Gates Fdn’s Tweets reveal passive, insular global health community
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is hosting a number of events today in anticipation of the opening of the philanthropy’s new public visitor center. Social media, and media in general, will play a big role in it.
If they use Twitter or Facebook to tell people about it, chances are the story will look like this:
Marc Smith, Connected Action
A snapshot of the Gates Foundation's Twitterverse
That’s a Twitter Map (here’s a more readable but huge link) made by Marc Smith, a sociologist who studies online communities, founder of the Social Media Research Foundation and former chief of Microsoft Research’s community technologies group.
The map, he says, indicates a fairly insular and uncommunicative bunch of folks.
“It’s mostly just an echoing of the Gates Foundation,” said Smith. “There’s not a lot of response, or engagement. Basically, it looks like people preaching to the choir.”
Update: Humanitarian rankers don’t like getting ranked on
In case you haven’t been following the comment thread on my earlier post regarding the Top 100 NGOs as identified by Global Journal, I wanted to post here a critical look at the rankings by development professional Dave Algoso.
Dave Algoso
Algoso is an expert on aid and development issues. Here is his post Lies, Damned Lies and Ranking Lists: The Top 100 Best NGOs written in response to my earlier post about Global Journal:
Ranking lists are great publicity for both the rankers and the ranked but they usually involve bad analysis and mislead the readers…. Most of these NGOs are, to the best of my knowledge, quite good. My big disagreement is with GJ‘s ranking methodology. And the fact that they created this list at all.
Meanwhile, the equally well-intentioned folks at Geneva-based Global Journal have expressed, to me by email and in various comment threads, their disappointment at being ‘ranked on’ for publishing their list of the top non-governmental organizations working at making the world a better place.
The editor, Jean-Christophe Nothias, takes special umbrage at being criticized by lowly bloggers and even contends this may involve ‘libel.’ Says Nothias of their rankings:
It is a journalistic approach, not an academic, not a mathematical, one approach that understands a simple fact. Profit has a metric, money. How do you measure solidarity? How do you measure healing, suffering? Do you believe such a ranking has anything to do with the S&P, the NYSE and other financials index?
Right, so how did they do it? How did Global Journal arrive at placing Seattle-based PATH as 6th best NGO in the world — along with ranking a few other local organizations like Mercy Corps and Landesa — and inexplicably exclude other top NGOs like World Vision and the Gates Foundation?
The folks at Global Journal don’t want to go into the details. They appear to be arguing that they didn’t depend solely upon a quantitative methodology that can be checked by others for reliability. They also relied on their journalistic methodology, their own expert judgment, as Nothias says:
Do bloggers have a methodology? Do they make a difference between being a reporter and a rapporteur? Or is journalism, in their eyes, at the cemetery? We have an ethic and a strong belief in the fact that journalism is already part of the methodology.
As a journalist who is also apparently a blogger, I can say with great confidence that the ‘methodology’ and reliability of journalism is highly variable. Ranking, by its very nature, implies some kind of quantitative assessment that should be independent of even the best journalistic judgments.
As far as Algoso is concerned, Global Journal’s list is so arbitrary and subjective it is meaningless:
Ultimately, it sounds like the methodology was: we browsed the web, talked to a couple people, then sat around the conference table arguing among ourselves. Here’s the result. Sorry, guys, but that just doesn’t cut it. That’s not a methodology.
Well, so what? The folks at Global Journal are basically arguing that an imperfect listing is better than no listing.
Algoso disagrees. He notes that many organizations are already using the magazine’s ranking for promotional reasons — for fund-raising, that is. So there’s one obvious downside to Global Journal’s rankings. Should donors not give to World Vision because they aren’t on the list? Says Algoso:
As a development professional, I want to see a more efficient market for funding social causes. That’s an economics-y way of saying that I want funds to flow to those NGOs that can best convert them into positive social impact.
There is a great need to improving the evaluation of impact and effectiveness within the humanitarian, or NGO, community. It’s actually quite difficult to find consensus on the best metrics in this field. Many experts are struggling to come up with the most reliable measures of effectiveness.
In the meantime, people like Algoso think subjective short-cuts to rigorous evaluations may do more harm than good — if only by shifting funding away from those who actually are doing a better job toward organizations that happen to have won a media-sponsored lottery.
Guardian info-graphic: How Africa Tweets
Here is a visual display of How Africa Uses Twitter, courtesy of The Guardian.
Though perhaps it should have been entitled Where Africa Tweets, since it’s not so much a description of how people tweet as where most tweets come from, it’s an interesting look at social media in Africa. South Africa outscores everyone, even Egypt.
I took special note of the fact that 68 percent of those polled said they used Twitter to monitor the news.
The Guardian
Does Davos matter? In a good way, I mean.
World Economic Forum
News analysis
The World Economic Forum opened today in Davos, Switzerland.
I wasn’t invited. Neither were you, in all likelihood. Bill Gates always is and will make his standard pitch for assisting the world’s poorest.
For decades, the global political and business elite have gathered at the WEF meeting to discuss, deliberate and declaim on all manner of issues.
Economics can pretty much incorporate any issue it wants, given either the scope of this ‘dismal science‘ or perhaps its increasingly unwieldy definition as to what it is economists actually do. So people here talk about almost anything.
Unless they don’t want to.
Last year, I noted that a significant number of participants and pundits asked if Davos was even relevant anymore.
Al Jazeera
Today marks the one-year anniversary of the spread of the Arab Spring from Tunisia to Egypt. Yet at last year’s hobnob gathering of the upper one percentile, nary a peep was heard about this world-changing popular revolution. Even weirder, WEF was celebrating Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif as one of the world’s top model young leaders.
Some said then that WEF at Davos had become worse than irrelevant given that many of these who come here to talk about finding economic solutions to the global meltdown actually built the fire — and are those who continue to profit from the global inequity they say they want to fix.
One of the most newsworthy (and kind of funny) moments last year was when mega-banker CEO Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase complained about people picking on bankers. The reaction Dimon provoked only provided more evidence, many said, of how clueless are the elite at this meeting.
Since then, the Occupy Movement has emerged like an angry swamp blob, with about as much clarity of purpose say its critics.
But Occupy is now in Davos to greet the elite, a sign of the times. Meanwhile, Desmond Tutu is there also, trying to get people to stop pointing fingers and instead work together to actually solve problems. Continue reading
Bill Gates warns against cutting foreign aid
UN
Bill Gates at World Health Assembly
Bill Gates, on his way to Davos, issued his annual letter yesterday outlining his philanthropic goals and offering perspective on how best to make the world a better, healthier and more equitable place.
Most of the news media focused on Gates’ fairly provocative challenge to those who criticize and oppose the Gates Foundation’s strategy for improving agricultural productivity primarily in Africa — generally dubbed the “Green Revolution for Africa.” Basically, he said the choice is Innovate or People Will Die.
Lesser noticed but perhaps of more immediate and overall importance, Gates also called upon rich nations to recognize the value of foreign aid — and not to cut aid budgets due to the current economic downturn. Here’s a few stories on that, from the Wall Street Journal and the AFP. Here’s Bill on a brief video clip the Telegraph put out:
Seattle World Premiere of the First Humanospheric Change-Up
Calling all local Humanospherians! Do you like beer? Want to make the world a better place?
If so, please come join the gang at Humanosphere for our ‘inaugural’ (that means first) Change-Up gathering at Seattle’s Re:public public house and cafe on Westlake in the beautiful and fascinating (okay, that’s going too far) South Lake Union neighborhood.
Short notice. It’s this Thursday, Jan. 26.
What’s a Change-Up? It’s what change-makers do at a meet-up.
Here at Humanosphere, we cover the news on global health, the fight against poverty, inequity and change-makers. Seattle’s got a lot of them. We are constantly trying to change ourselves, to better report on these issues and cover our community’s role as a leader in many areas of global change.
Please come along and toast change. Re:public is located at 429 Westlake, or here’s a map.