week 2 

8/29/16 - 9/4/16

Sanjay Pradhan: How open data is changing international aid

There were so many things that I found interesting in this talk. While there's no denying the state of imbalance and disproportion throughout the world, and we always know it's had to get people to donate their money to someone else, possibly halfway across the world, that they have never met. However, I didn't anticipate having challenges with appropriating the donated wealth to those in need. As Sanjay Pradhan pointed out, in order to have effective development, we need to establish a collaboration between the governing agencies and the constinuents affected. The ideal dynamic would have an honest, transparent, accessible, and effective government that is in conjuction with and accountable to an actively participating citizenry. What I really liked about his approach is that he decided to start bridging the gap by giving the poor and disenfanchized populations ways to express themselves and their concerns.
I also appreciate that this video portrayed the globalization of data in a favorable light. It's a great idea to use the already available resources in such a proactive way. and How inspiring that there are governments that are actually beginning to pay more attention to their people and implement measures to improve current conditions!! Here we're sitting "on top of the world" as far as living conditions in the first world goes, and no other time than now has it been so blatantly obvious that our government does not want to take our voices seriously- and then to find out that in developing countries, the governments are being more accountable to their public; like Ghana for example, How awesome that they revealed oil sector contracts to the public! What do you the the odds would be of something like that happening here??
And then the effectiveness of this project- fantastic. Especially evident in the example of Tanzania - the fact that the mapping was done over wireless data and a college project makes it a feasibly reproducible task - We could have the entire world mapped out by communities and resources to the smallest details in such a short amount of time- and having accessible connection points at the remote places, so that the people can honestly evaluate the extend of the aid they received, would present a "visual graphic of the collective voices of the poor."
Lastly, but certainly not least: a few words on the speaker. His voice in particular was one of most prominent of his features- he has such as soft tone- yet the message is delivered with captivating power. Furthermore, he has such a genuinely warm, engaging, and deeply human disposition - his passion and his purpose almost radiate through him and it's pretty spectacular- not something that comes around often.