1. More and more, I am thinking that the power of social media and new tech in foreign aid (as opposed to development in general) is in the ability to decentralize decision-making. That could mean giving more power to aid agency staff on the ground, to governments of the countries that receive aid, or (this is the exciting one) giving more decision-making authority to the people affected by aid. This blog post on consensus decision-making has me thinking about what that might look like in practice.
2. So, there’s this poor dumb kid who stole an iPhone in Ibiza. Or bought a stolen iPhone. And now the phone’s owner is posting all the kid’s pictures on tumblr and mocking them. (Do a search; I don’t want to add to the site’s google juice by linking it.) I understand the poetic justice logic. But. This is clearly a young guy and a guest worker living in Dubai. His life is pretty bleak based on those pictures we’re mocking, and the mockery strikes me as racist. I find myself unconvinced that petty theft makes it okay to humiliate someone to that degree. The fact that he is clearly poor and in a place where he has few legal protections makes it worse. Am I just a bleeding heart?
3. I leave Azerbaijan for good on Saturday. It’s been a short and fascinating experience; less than a year. I’ve never lived in a middle-income country before, let alone done aid work in one. Baku reminds me a lot of Boston, I think. Urban, by the sea, somehow both European and not. I have learned a lot from my time here, although I am still figuring out what those lessons are.
Well, my heart bleeds right along with you. I’m not sure how he got the Iphone but the blog is just mean and racist. I wish there was a way we could alert him.
I see the potential of social media in two, somewhat contradictory ways. FIrst, and I blogged about this last year (http://bit.ly/L87adn), is that it might actually empoiwer the recipients of aid. When beneficiaries don’t have to mutely accept the aid they receive, but start talking about it in ways that can influence the NGOs…
But I see the prolific expansion of our capacity to move info/data from the far reaches of the globe back to headquarters as driving the growth of HQs that now involve themselves in all manner of decision-making. Project managers can pick up a cell phone to talk over issues that a decade ago would not even have made a monthly sitrep. Potential for decentralization? Absolutely. But I put my money on power/authority following the data/info, and all that now flows to consolidated, central locations. Let’s see.