My life as a Development Gateway intern

Hi, readers!

My name is Regina, a first year graduate student pursuing a master's in international policy and development at Georgetown. Prior to graduate school, I graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in international relations. My academic interests led me to Development Gateway where I've been working as a communications intern.

What does the communications team do, you ask? Mostly we inform people, such as those in the international development community, about the organization through social media and other channels, such as press releases. As you may know, Development Gateway uses information technology for international development, so it makes sense that social media would be an extremely useful tool for us. I monitor Twitter so that our followers are up to date on our activities, but I also keep track of relevant blogs, Twitter users, news, and research so that followers can also see issues that we (and hopefully they) are interested in and involved with, such as aid effectiveness, donor-recipient partnerships, and aid transparency.

In addition to getting to know several active members and organizations in international development via Twitter, I've learned about the various programs going on at Development Gateway, such as AMP and AidData (check for updates on AidData on Twitter in the next few months!), to have a more complete idea of the inner workings and general mission of the organization. All in all, it's been a great learning experience so far with awesome people and interesting work!

More next week! In the meantime, check out our tweets @DGateway for recent developments, program news and general musings about international aid.

Tame the beast

A recent article in The Economist about data and transparency addresses the possible downsides of open government data. While the article sites some positive examples of efforts governments have made to make data more open, it acknowledges that, “whatever governments do, the presentation of endless facts can fall flat unless there are independent developers who know what to do with them.”

Even people used to dealing with data can be overwhelmed by all the raw stuff. In March Development Gateway is launching AidData, a repository that tracks more than 1 million projects spanning 81 donor agencies and totaling more than $4.1 trillion dollars over 40 years. Although clearly a rich source of information, one researcher who got a sneak preview of the database characterized it as an “unwieldy monster.”

Such a reaction didn’t surprise us. We know that it will take a variety of tools and a multi-disciplinary approach to make the data meaningful to a broad range of people. Toward that end, we are holding the Aid Information Challenge, an informal conference to bring together software developers and development practitioners to come up with applications that will make the data easier to access and more helpful to users. This event, held at the World Bank on March 12, is co-sponsored by AidInfo, ForumOne, and the World Bank. This video explains the purpose of the event. To register for the Aid Information Challenge, and help us tame the beast, click here.

The public launch of AidData will take place at the Aid Transparency and Development Finance conference in Oxford, U.K., March 22 – 25. Read more about AidData here.