Author: Alanna Shaikh

Tapping the Fanatical Surplus

By Alanna Shaikh | | 4 Comments |

I have a confession to make: I am a fan. I read fan fiction. I participate in Livejournal communities. I have actually written fan fiction on occasion. It’s been a great hobby in a life where I can’t have hobbies that involve material things, and fan fiction has saved me more than once from death by boredom on trips too long to carry as many books as I need.

It’s traditional to pretend to be ashamed of this hobby, but I’m not. It’s been crucial to my understanding of social media, community, and the way the world has shifted to a new participatory culture. I am proud to be a textual poacher. This level playing field has even changed the way I see international development. And sometimes fans do wonderful things.

Which is a long way of getting to this post by Laurenist. In it, she deconstructs a new charity started by Misha Collins, the actor who plays Castiel on Supernatural. Here’s how she begins:

Now, Misha is attempting to once again tap his social networking prowess (and large fanbase) to raise funds for a new charity, Random Acts. Not awesome. (Sadface.)

Don’t get me wrong. I like charities! I like Misha! I want Misha’s charity to be one that I like. Unfortunately, it seems the people behind it have good intentions, but as we in the international development blogger community know, “Good intentions are not enough.”

Let’s look at how Random Acts says it’s going to spend the money it raises:

  • 33% will be divided between the orphanages we support in Haiti
  • 15% will go to support victims of the horrific flooding in Pakistan
  • 51.99% will go to support random acts of kindness all around the world
  • .01% will be spent bribing public officials

She has two major criticisms: 1) Orphanages are a bad idea and 2) Supporting random acts of kindness is not an effective use of money. I agree with her on both points. Orphanages are a bad idea, almost always. Saundra can tell you why. And the whole random acts idea strikes me as kind of weak. A lot of feel-good; not much actual result.

But.

Misha Collins actually responded to Laurenist’s post with a well-thought-out comment, and here’s what he had to say about the “random acts” portion of his charity: “Part of what made me want to do this project was seeing so many of my followers on Twitter putting so much energy and so many resources into fandom. I think all of that energy is great, but my thinking was, perhaps, if we could harness a fraction of those resources (both creative and fiscal), we could put some of this c-list idolatry to good use.”

He’s got a point. Fans are completely off the hook crazy. I know this because I am one. I once sent a postcard to David Hewlett that said “how are you so awesome?” I have seen every movie Josh Charles ever appeared in, and that takes some serious endurance. Small wonder Misha Collins wants to tap this fanatical surplus.

The thing is, fans are crazy because being a fan is fun. It’s not meaningful, Henry Jenkins aside. It’s not purposeful. It’s just fun. People don’t do fannish things because they want to be useful. They do it to entertain themselves. While a Misha Collins doing-serious-things charity probably wouldn’t capture fannish attention, maybe his doing-silly-things charity will. And while those silly kind things may not be terribly effective, they are not, as the comments on Laurenist’s post pointed out, worthless.

Misha Collins, in his own way, knows the community he’s dealing with: nutso fans. He’s designed a charity that will appeal to nutso fans and use their energy for good. So, this time, I have to say – more power to him. (Except for the orphanages.)

———–

Photo credit: fanpop

Yep, that’s Misha Collins.

Beautiful Poverty

By Alanna Shaikh | | 14 Comments |

old bus

This is an unusual post for me. It’s old, first of all – I wrote it in my personal journal, on actual paper, about six years ago, while on a work trip to a country I’m not going to name here. It’s moodier than I tend to be now. And it kind of reminds me of something that would be on Tales from the Hood, not Blood and Milk. But I still agree with it, so I thought I’d post.

In Uzbekistan I never really felt like taking pictures when I drove through rural areas. Uzbek villages are made of corrugated pre-fab boxes, no matter how small they here. The houses and barns all look the same, too, with their pale cement walls. This isn’t like that. Houses and barns are different shapes and sizes and materials and colors. And, as I looked at them, I realized why.

Here, it’s poor. Considerably poorer than Uzbekistan. That’s why there are thatched roofs and unusual buildings, why you can see cows grazing next to lean-to’s and buildings painted thirteen different colors.

And the poverty makes for great photography. Poverty has texture. Clean modern buildings give you a feeling of smoothness – they’re bland and unremarkable and rarely worth the film. The homes of the poor have none of that. Each one is unique, based on what people could afford and what they could find. They’re full of color, they’re rough, and there is nothing bland about them.

In other words, a good synonym for picturesque is desperate.

Aesthetics are seductive. It is hard not to like something because it’s pretty. That can lead you all sorts of terrible places; it can lead you to mistake tragedy for authenticity. It can make you think there is some value to authenticity when people are starving. It can lead you to take gorgeous pictures of the countryside without ever realizing that you are documenting a quiet horror.

Finding a Job in International Development

By Alanna Shaikh | | 13 Comments |

Shop in Hanoi

I talked about this last month, but now that we’re really up and rolling, it’s time for my proper sales pitch. If you are looking for a job in international development, I can help. I’d been advising people on careers in this field for years. Now I am taking that to the next level.

I started the International Development Careers List. For $2 a month, I’ll give your personalized advice in response to your questions. So you get access to my answers to you, and everyone else’s questions and answers. Recent topics have included “Where do I work to get the best salary?”, “Can I start an international development career at age 40?”, and “Is it really all about who you know?”

In addition to the Q&A, I also post new job vacancies, often before they’re out on the general websites. And I tap my network of international development colleagues and friends to offer advice on any topic I can’t cover on my own. I’ve hired a lot of people for a lot of international development jobs, and I’ve applied for and gotten a lot of international development jobs, so I know what it’s like on both sides of that fence. I can help you get what you’re looking for.

And – added bonus – I maintain a dynamic ebook with every single newsletter in it, updated as I publish. I send it to every new subscriber, so you get access to everything we have talked about to date as well as all the new content as it publishes.

The details

The newsletter is an informal email that comes via letter.ly. Your name and address won’t be visible to anyone but me. I guarantee to publish at least once a week, but in practice I tend to send out 2-4 newsletters a week. So far, I have been able to answer every question I have received within a week, but that could slow down as the number of subscribers increases. I take the identifying information out of all questions, so you stay anonymous even after I publish your Q&A.

The subscription cost is $2/month, and I won’t be offended if you sign up to get your own question answered and then drop off the list. You pay via Amazon payments, but if you want to use PayPal instead, email me (alanna.shaikhATgmail.com) and we’ll work something out.

Some Happy Quotes from Early Adopters

“The best $2 you can spend on your international development career!” – Wayan Vota

“I’m loving your newsletter thus far. I’ve been reading your blog (and a whole lot of others on your blogroll) for awhile but haven’t wanted to bug you with my own questions just yet. Your writing is fantastic and I love the insight you bring to working in this field.”

“Thanks so much! This is very helpful.”

“I’ve already read through the collection of past newsletters. GREAT STUFF.”

“As someone who is beginning a career in development/aid, Alanna’s newsletter has provided for me a resource that answers the many questions I have.  From practical advice on how to blog, how to choose a grad school, and a listing of job opportunities, the newsletter is an absolute for anyone who is new to aid/development.” – Tom Murphy

*******

photo credit: shapeshift

Chosen because it’s of a shop in Vietnam, where I have always wanted to work.

Change Hurts

By Alanna Shaikh | | 21 Comments |

There has been an interesting blogosphere discussion of crowdsourcing in the last few days. The usual crew of people who think about aid – this time humanitarian response in specific – seem to be polarizing slowly into pro and anti-crowdsourcing camps. I linked you to the calmest posts there. There are positions staked out all the way along the spectrum from “crowdsourcing is evil and will hurt innocent people” to “crowdsourcing is going to change the world all by itself.”

As always, I’m somewhere in the middle on this. Crowdsourcing is just a tool. It’s not a miracle cure for anything. It’s a good tool, and sooner or later most competent emergency response groups will find a way to use it. Some will be early adopters, some will trail in at the end. Eventually it’ll get trendy with donors and everyone will start mentioning crowdsourcing in proposals, whether they have a decent plan for it or not.  (I’d also like to point out the remarkable similarity between the rhetoric on crowdsourcing and the discussion of the last big miracle, microfinance.)

But this post isn’t actually about crowdsourcing. It’s about change.

Look, we all know international aid is a mess. The system is not selecting for efforts that work. Bad programs get rewarded. Useless programs get extended. Good programs vanish for no apparent reason.

There are a whole lot of reasons that aid doesn’t really work. Personally, I like to blame democratically elected governments and their need to control where taxpayer money goes.* You can also look at international politics, the challenges of data collection in poor countries, and the sheer complexity of the system. Just for a start.

Anyway, everyone who works in this field knows it’s deeply flawed. The chance to work for an effort that really works is like gold. It’s what we all dream of. We cling like barnacles when we find it. Because it’s too rare. (Too rare, but does happen. Let me make that clear. A broken system means inefficiency, not utter failure. There are development efforts that succeed, and we don’t want to lose them. That’s one reason that feelings run so high.)

Something has to give. We can’t make this broken system keep flailing along forever. Heck, even Rajiv Shah knows it. And when the system changes, it’s going to hurt everyone invested in the status quo. I don’t know if it’s going to be a formal system shift like Cash on Delivery aid, or a disruptive innovation born of some technical advance. But it’s going to hurt, and everyone that’s part of the current system is going to struggle to adjust.

So when tempers flare over whether SMS messaging has actually been proven to save lives, I think what we’re really looking at is fear and hope. Is this the disruptive innovation that’s going to change everything? And if it is, is that good or bad? What if the change makes a flawed system worse?

* No, I am not arguing for dictatorship. But I am saying that most democratically elected representatives aren’t going to be aid experts, and they do control the purse strings. This leads to inevitable mess.

———-

photo credit: fd

Chosen because barnacles were the only decent visual in the whole blog post.

Ushahidi, Twitter, and the future of foreign aid

By Alanna Shaikh | | 15 Comments |

Text of a short talk I’ll be giving next week:

I want to tell you a story about crowdsourcing, social media, and how the world is changing.

A little while ago, we saw an outbreak of brutal ethnic violence in Southern Kyrgyzstan. Southern Kyrgyzstan is largely populated by ethnic Uzbeks, and they were being attacked – in really horrible ways – by ethnic Kyrgyz. They had been living together calmly for 20 years. It was an ugly shock.

I have spent a lot of time in both Southern Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, and I was pretty upset about what was going on. I was reading about the situation obsessively, and talking to all my Uzbek and Kyrgyz friends about it. I learned that the violence was being driven by rumors. The first Kyrgyz attacks came in response to rumors of Uzbek atrocities, and rumors and distorted stories were still triggering violence.

So I thought, Kyrgyzstan needs Ushahidi, to cut through the rumors.

Ushahidi is an open source software platform that aggregates and maps crowd-sourced information. It receives information via SMS or the web, and then presents it in a user-friendly way that people can view on a computer or a cellphone. It was first used to map post-election violence in Kenya.

Five years ago if I’d thought that, there would have been nothing I could do. I could have told my friends, written a blog post, and worried. This year, I posted about it on Twitter. A couple people on Twitter gave me the contact information for the Ushahidi team. I wrote to them, and they told me that there was an Ushahidi Kyrgyzstan effort going on.

A guy called Altyn Ismailov was working on an Ushahidi platform for Kyrgyzstan. I got in touch with him by email. He told me that by now the violence had mostly stopped, but there was a constitutional referendum coming up in three days that threatened to trigger it all over again. Alytn wanted to have a referendum-specific Ushahidi platform running, to both monitor the voting and track any violence that occurred, but he had hit a wall.

Altyn was out of money, and he was exhausted. He asked if I would help him write a grant application to get funds to finish the Ushahidi platform and educate people about how to use it. I said yes, but I was worried about trying to get DfiD or USAID to mobilize funds in four days. Then Altyn told me he needed 564 dollars.

Now I don’t have a life where I can just write a check for $564, but I do have a bunch of Twitter followers. I told Altyn I thought I could fundraise the money for him, and leave major donors out of it. I put up a ChipIn widget with a project description, and described the effort to my Twitter followers. My goal was to raise $564 in 48 hours.

We raised $610 in 8 hours. It was amazing. Altyn got his money, and the platform was up in time for the referendum. The voting went smoothly, and there was no further violence. Odds are it would have gone smoothly anyway, but we were proud to be part of the insurance.

This isn’t a story about me or Altyn, though. This is a story about change. Ushahidi is an open source platform, developed in the global south. Ten years ago, Africa didn’t have the connectivity to develop and distribute a platform like Ushahidi. And ten years ago, cell phones didn’t have the power or the ubiquity to make Ushahidi a useful tool.

I learned about Ushahidi from the web. I got the contact information for its team via social media. I was in touch with Altyn by email. I raised the money using the ChipIn widget to let people track and donate, and all my fundraising requests were on Twitter. Nothing about the fundraising effort would have been possible without social media and new technology.

This was a small scale effort, and there were a lot of reasons that it got lucky.* But I have a feeling it’s going to be the model for a whole lot of bigger efforts in the future.

*Specifically, Ushahidi is a social media darling, the amount of money needed was small and specific, and Kyrgyzstan was in the news.

———–

(Photo credit: Robert Thomson)

Chosen because this is a gorgeous picture of Kyrgyzstan and looks just like I think of it.

Boring Administrative Notice

By Alanna Shaikh | | 23 Comments |

Hi,

I feel kind of awkward about this. But I’ve been getting a several emails a day asking for career advice. I really like helping, but I do have a day job and it pays by the hour so spending time on this costs me money. And I can’t make them all into blog posts or Blood and Milk would be nothing but jobs jobs jobs.

So, from now on, if you want career advice, you’re going to have to sign up for the newsletter. It’s not free. It costs $2 a month. But I’ll strip your question of personal information and answer it in as much detail as I can. You can sign up for just one month to see my answer to you, or you can stay on the list to see all the career advice.

I think this is going to be fun. It will give me a chance to vent in more detail and be less formal than I am on the blog. (I know, you’re thinking I’m not all that formal now, but you’ve never seen me in full late-night rant mode.)  I am hoping over time we can grow this into a community of people who help each other find their dream jobs in international development.

This is how it works: If you want to write me for career advice, sign up for the newsletter. Then, email me from the same account you signed up with, tell me you signed up, and ask me your question. I’ll make your question anonymous and send the answer out to the list. I’ll answer your follow-up questions on the list as well.

Like I said, I feel a little weird about this, but I just can’t keep up the way things are. I think this will be better for everyone.

– Alanna

Edited to add: I am putting each newsletter that goes out into an ebook, and when you subscribe, I send the ebook with every newsletter to date. So when you subscribe, you also get the whole archive.