mDATA: New Media Taskforce app competition submission

Posted by jfrant

I, along with two of my colleagues at SIPA (Ashish and Swami), submitted the following application to the New Media Taskforce’s first mobile app competition. Today, we had the chance to present our idea in front of an expert panel. There was some stiff competition and, unfortunately, we did not make the top three, but I’m encouraged by the positive feedback that we got…If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Feel free to take a look at our submission and let me know what you think in the comments section below. Also, check out the blog post I wrote (and didn’t immediately publish) that was the genesis of this idea.

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I won the lottery

Posted by jfrant

Last week I won the lottery. No, I’m not a multi-million dollar Powerball winner. I won the opportunity to see former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan speak at Columbia University.

Secretary General Kofi Annan Speaks at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs

The discussion ranged from the UN’s failure to prevent the Rwandan genocide – which Secretary Annan blamed on a lack of international political will following the “Blackhawk Down” incident in Somalia – to the current crisis in Syria.

Annan briefly touched on his resignation as UN special peace envoy to Syria, blaming UN’s failure to broker peace on the international community’s failure to close ranks against the Assad regime (specifically blaming China and Russia’s intransigence). Annan mentioned his successful mission to Kenya as an example of what the international community can accomplish when it speaks with one voice. As chief negotiator in 2008, he successfully brokered a deal between President Mwai Kibaki and Raila Odinga to form a coalition government. Still, I can’t help but wonder if Annan was the best choice in Syria given the context. Simply put, Annan is not a muslim and does not carry the same authority in the Middle East as he does in Africa.

What are your thoughts on this? Let me know in the comments section below.

Participating in this event was an amazing opportunity that I doubt I would have had at any other school. That said, I was so drained from my statistics midterm the day before that Annan’s quiet and monotonous voice nearly put me to sleep during his opening remarks. Note to self: drink more coffee.

The president deserves four more years

Posted by jfrant

I hope everyone’s registered. The deadline is almost here. Also, if you voted in 2008 and you plan to sit this one out, you need to start paying attention…the stakes are higher than ever. Let’s not turn our backs on the president that kept the U.S. from falling into another Great Depression right as the economy shows signs of recovery. He deserves four more years to make good on his promises. The opposition is just peddling snake oil (i.e. budget cuts w/out increased revenue to close the deficit and grow the economy).

Can’t kick the political bug

Posted by jfrant

Last night was the first presidential debate of the 2012 election. Being the resident politico in my program, I felt obligated to organize a group viewing of the debate. Half-way through the debate in a crowded bar surrounded by my peers, a pang of nostalgia flooded my consciousness. Olivia, a classmate and one of my closest new friends, commented on the fact that the debate was happening at the University of Denver. I responded that had I not decided to change career paths and pursue a master’s degree at Columbia I might have been in audience in Denver (alright, yes, probably just the over-flow room), not a bar in NYC. I still think I made the right decision by coming moving to NYC, but there are many things I miss about working for Senator Udall. This is just one small example.

Speeding through Yonkers with Columbia Cycling

Posted by jfrant

The Columbia Cycling Team has been holding no-drop group rides every weekend to encourage new-commers to join the team. Today, I took advantage of that opportunity and went out on my first long ride in NYC: across the Washington Bridge and all the way up to Nyack, an over 50 mile roundtrip. Check out my route. It was nice to learn a new ride…one can only go around Central Park so many times.

My legs felt good most of the way, but things got tougher on the way back when the the group split up and I joined the faster pack. We screamed down Hillside Drive in a drafting echelon. I pedaled furiously at the back of the draft-line, letting others take charge of pulling at the front. Then, toward the end of the ride, I decided to take my turn at the front…bad idea. After only 15 seconds of effort, I was spent and the team dropped me. Luckily they slowed down and I was able to catch up.

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Canvassing for development

Posted by jfrant

The New Media Taskforce here at SIPA is holding an “Innovating Mobile Tech for Development Competition,” where students are given the chance to pitch their idea for innovative mobile applications that seek to address specific political, economic, or social needs in international development to a panel of industry judges. Here is the idea that I may submit:

Village Well, Jombo village, Malawi by Flickr user Bread for the World

One of the major failures of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is a lack of timeliness and completeness of data measuring progress towards achieving the goals. Dr. Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Lancet:

One of the biggest drawbacks of the MDGs is that the data are often years out of date. Accurate published information from the past 12 months is still not available for most low-income countries. This timelag was inevitable when data were obtained by hand in household surveys, but in the age of the mobile phone, wireless broadband, and remote sensing, data collection should be vastly quicker.

Dr. Sachs is spot-on in suggesting that mobile technology will make data collection more rapid, but I would also contend that mobile-technology-enabled crowdsourcing will increasingly make traditional statistical surveys irrelevant. This is already happening in the arena of American politics. President Obama’s canvassing app enables citizens to volunteer their time to help register voters, build a massive database of registered voters, and ultimately organize voters out to the polls on election day. The app uses information about your location to suggest nearby households that you should visit and questions you should ask when you get there. I believe same model can be applied to the realm of international development.

Let’s say you have a database of 1,000 water projects spread across Malawi. You know the location of the water projects but do not have the resources to send an employee to monitor them on a regular basis. Water For People has built a platform called FLOW that enables field workers monitor water projects using a mobile app. While replacing pen and paper with a smartphone and Internet connection is a significant step forward, I believe that FLOW still doesn’t take the concept far enough because its capacity limited by its reliance on paid professionals to conduct the surveys.

The next-best thing to a trained monitoring professional would be a citizen armed with a smartphone. Bringing up the app, the citizen would be given a map of water projects in their immediate vicinity. They would then “check-in” at the water project and complete a simple survey about the state of the project. If the idea is expanded even further, this app could potentially supplement or replace the statistical surveys currently used to track progress toward achieving the MDG. And because the data would have no time lag it could be used to identify regions that require intervention in real-time, such as a village with an abnormally high maternal mortality rate.

Effectively, crowdsourced development data could turn the MDGs from an out-of-date snapshot of past development status into a tool for development practitioners and governments to detect issues with development while they are still relevant and actionable.

Skipping Consumer Theory and going straight to Complexity Theory (Am I getting ahead of myself?)

Posted by jfrant

After listening to this lecture by Owen Barder of the Center for Global Development, I think I’ve developed a better understanding of the rational behind many of the initiatives sponsored by Jeffrey Sachs (most notably the Millennium Villages Project).

According to Complexity Theory, Barder argues, traditional economic models fail to anticipate why some countries have been able to benefit from convergent economic growth, while others are stuck in a poverty trap. In other words, interventions in developing countries that focus on the one “missing ingredient which will enable poor countries to grow,” as Barder puts it, are doomed to failure. No one intervention (whether in access capital, modern technology, improved economic efficiency, better institutions or reformed politics) is able to influence the “complex adaptive systems” that make up a society.

The upshot of Complexity Theory for international development (as I understood it) is that development practitioners should not focus on individual interventions or impose their preconceived ideas on how societies develop. Instead, they should look for opportunities to sponsor innovation and encourage adaptation that will contribute to positive feedback loops.

Development can therefore be redefined as “the emergence of self-organizing complexity.”

Wow, that was a mouthful and I’m not sure I did it justice…I only just started studying Consumer Theory in my grad-level economics class. Anyway, you should watch the lecture, it will blow your mind: http://www.cgdev.org/doc/CGDPresentations/complexity/player.html.

Fretting about electives

Posted by jfrant

Orientation week #2 has been quite a different experience from last week. The 400+ other SIPA students have made the International Affairs Building a much busier place, and orientation sessions have been much more geared toward learning the ins and outs of academic life on campus.

[polldaddy poll=6500288 align=right]When not drinking calculus through a water hose at the daily “math camp,” I spent my time fretting about the elective classes I want to take my first semester. Luckily, I was (mistakenly?) given a registration date that was earlier than many of the other first-year SIPA students. Not-so-luckily, my registration dates (Tuesday and Wednesday) were before the advising session that was supposed to equip me with an understanding of how to register. With the help of Corey (a student advisor for my program) and after staying up until 1am on Monday night to parse out my preferred electives, I managed to register without much trouble.

I’m only planning to take only one elective course this semester (and the “Earth Institute Practicum” – pass/fail), but I’ve registered for three: New Media for Development Communication, Non-Profit Financial Management (may require accounting as a pre-req), and Microfinance and the Developing World. I’m already leaning heavily in favor of one of these courses, but please help me select the elective I should take by voting in this poll.

Also, check out my draft schedule below. I will have Mondays off!

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My fellow development practitioners

Posted by jfrant

I am truly honored to be among the 50 amazing people – each more impressive than the next – that I had the pleasure of meeting this past week during the MPA-DP orientation.

The MPA-DP Class of 2014 is composed of talented, diverse and compassionate future development practitioners. I am looking forward to getting to know and work with them all over the next two years.

We all had to submit bios and photos so I expect they will be posted to our program’s website in the near future. Until then, suffice it to say that they are all extremely impressive.

Next week (orientation week #2), I will get to meet the rest of the SIPA Class of 2014. There will be about 450 students total in my class, including MPA and MIA students.

On another note, here is a conversation I had on Twitter with some amazing people at the cutting-edge of fighting water poverty. We discussed how to use mobile technology to improve reporting on water projects in developing countries, which could be a game-changer for the sector’s monitoring and evaluation capability.

Two observations: (1) this was the first time I have ever had a legitimate conversation on Twitter, (2) it’s cool to be treated like an equal by real development practitioners. I’m looking forward to many more conversations like this one when classes start. I hope that my program will equip me with the skills I will need to turn Twitter discussions into reality.

P.S. I’ve been bad about taking photos. I will post some good ones next week.

Gross National Happiness or Have You Seen a Cow?

Posted by jfrant

Today was the first day of the first week of orientation for my master’s program (MPA-DP) at Columbia. The day concluded with an interesting lecture (the first Development Practitioner Seminar) from Dr. Saamdu Chetri, the director of Bhutan’s Happiness Center. His lecture was on Gross National Happiness (GNH). Every two years the country of Bhutan conducts a survey to determine the level of “happiness” in the country. The idea is based on the fact that GDP is an inadequate indicator to judge the wellbeing of a society. In fact, the traditional concept of “growth,” Dr. Chetri explained, may be incompatible with long-term economic sustainability.

[polldaddy poll=6477912 align=right]At the end of the lecture, we were given the opportunity to ask questions. My question: Since the index is based mostly on answers to subjective questions in an interview setting, how do you ensure that social pressure to be happy (or at least say you’re happy) doesn’t artificially inflate the level of “measured” happiness. That’s not how I phrased it (I wish I’d phrased it better), but that was the basic idea.

Dr. Chetri’s response was that the questions are designed in a way to make it very difficult to intentionally sabotage the results. Instead of just asking if you’re happy, the interviewer would ask a variety of questions on numerous subjects from which they could infer the person’s level of happiness. For instance, the interviewer would ask something like: “Do you know what a cow looks like?” The assumption being that if you don’t know what a cow looks like you are less connected to nature and therefore less happy.

The GNH is based on four pillars of happiness, which are good governance, sustainable socio-economic development, cultural preservation and environmental conservation. Economic development is important to achieving happiness and equity in society, but it should not come at the cost of the other three pillars. For example, while cleaning up an oil spill may create jobs and contribute to GDP, it has a negative impact on overall happiness because oil spills are devastating to the environment.

Central to GNH is the idea of sustainability, which will also be a key component of the Sustainable Development Goals (the successor to the Millennium Development Goals, which will sunset in 2015).

P.S. I went on an evening ride in Central Park today. Going fast is scary with so many people around.