D2Development Fund

2009 Winner - Worldwise Development

Executive Summary

The purpose of Worldwise Development is to provide a formal facility which allows development practitioners toconnect and consult with anthropologists. The core feature of the website will be an interface featuring a mapof the world. By clicking a country on the map, development practitioners will access a database ofanthropologists who specialise in that region. The map will enable swift and targeted access toanthropologists according to region, thus facilitating access to context-specific knowledge.

Team

 Aoife McCullough '08; Hamid Foroughi '08; Magdalena Kloss '08; and Michael Schaefer '08

November 2010 -- Update from Worldwise Development, in their own words...

 The idea

It’s hard to believe it’s more than a year since we submitted a hopeful project proposal to the D2Development Fund. In that year, we’ve experienced the highs and lows of making an idea a reality.

We are Anthropology and Development graduates who, during our Masters at the LSE, wrestled with the contradictions between development ideology and anthropological theories. One contradiction that we faced was that in DESTIN seminars, the failure of development projects was often attributed to the limited knowledge of local contexts among development practitioners. Meanwhile in anthropology classes, we were being introduced to reams of ethnographies which contained a wealth of insight into local contexts.

We felt that part of the reason that this knowledge was not percolating through to development practitioners was because it was hard to access. We came up with the idea of developing a database of the world's anthropologists which could be accessed via an interactive map. By clicking on a country, a development practitioner could access profiles of anthropologists who specialised in that region. We named our project worldwise.

Making the idea happen

The first challenge was to agree on what our website would look like: fun and exciting or professional and efficient. We tried to go for something in between and developed a temporary website which looked like this.

The temporary website introduced our idea and allowed us to work on the backend of our product while still having something to direct people to. The next step was to develop a content management software system (CMS) that would be able to receive information from the map and call up the right profiles. We decided to use the free software provided by Joomla to do this. The advantage of using Joomla was that we didn’t have to write a programme from scratch but the disadvantage was that we were limited to the standard frameworks that Joomla supports. One of the main challenges that our design team had to overcome was to change php code to customize the website.

Meanwhile, our website designer got to work on figuring out how to use Java to design the map. We decided to use Java as it was compatible with Joomla and would be easy to upload on slower connections.

Needless to say it was a learning process for all of us. We are just in the final stages of linking up the map with the CMS on Joomla and plan to be able to launch the working map by the end of November 2010.

Apart from the technical problems of developing a website, we had to cope with the challenge of coordinating and communicating with each other, especially since each of us lives in a different country and works full time. We managed this by holding bi-weekly Skype conferences and using online tools such as Google docs. We also had a gathering in April 2010 to discuss our plans and decide on some key issues.

What people are saying

Via the Change.org website http://humanrights.change.org/blog/view/dial-an-anthropologist_the_next_big_thing_in_aid_work

Dial-an-Anthropologist: The Next Big Thing in Aid Work?

by Jina MooreMay 22, 2010 09:42 AM (PT)Topics: Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights, Global Poverty

The Internet is full of critiques of aid projects around the world — some of them more useful than others. As critics often say, projects misdiagnose the problem; they don't fully fund the proposed solution; they have an infinite set of possible unintended consequences. The most common refrain? They get the cultural approach all wrong.

Until now.

Well, maybe. A group of graduate students at the London School of Economics wants to put the power of anthropology into aid work. (For you find this is promising requires, of course, that you believe in the power of anthropology, but let's take that as a given for the moment.) Frustrated by their campus conversations about the unused knowledge of anthropologists, they started Worldwise Development, a website that seeks to link aid workers with anthropologists who possess regional and topical expertise.

The website is in its infancy, but the plan is to create a sort of professional homework hotline. Click on a country on the interactive map and bring up a list of anthropologists working in that country. Want real-time feedback on a proposed intervention? Post a question on the message board; Worldwise Development gets it, via SMS, into the hands of an anthropologist who can answer it.

It's an interesting idea, and one that might help prevent aid projects from repeating the same mistakes.

But a girl who lives in Rwanda has to wonder: What about the insidious legacy of anthropology in the very parts of the world that aid now intervenes to try and help? It was anthropologists, after all, who created the racial classification system that colonial powers used to privilege some and subjugate others in their vassal lands. In Rwanda, it's not too much to say that the practice of anthropology laid the social stratifications that were exploited during the genocide.

Sure, anthropology has changed over time, but I for one would want a professional mea culpa before deciding bringing more anthropology into aid is the right idea. And then there's this: The Internet lets us communicate with people we never could before. Why dial an anthropologist when I can email a Rwandan?

Via the Savage Minds Blog http://savageminds.org/2010/05/27/dial-an-anthropologist/

by Kerim on May 27th, 2010

Via the Global Poverty blog (where you’ll see our own Dustin Wax has left the first comment), comes news of Worldwise development, a website which “aims to facilitate collaboration between development practitioners and anthropologists.” As they explain:

We believe that anthropologists have a lot to contribute to development work, but that their knowledge and skills are still underrepresented within the industry. The demand for anthropological expertise is growing, but links between the two fields are still weak. While informal network facilitates collaboration between a small number of anthropologists and development practitioners, most anthropologists are still out of the reach of development agencies, especially academics and those currently conducting field research.

We aim to address these issues with two tools; an interactive map and a discussion forum. We envisage that the interactive map will formalise collaboration between anthropologists and development practitioners. Meanwhile the discussion forum will provide space for both anthropologists and development practitioners to debate the role of anthropology in development. By joining worldwise development you can be involved in shaping how anthropologists collaborate with development practitioners.

Seems like a great idea! I hope it succeeds in its goal. (NOTE: The website is not yet fully active. Right now it is just an announcement of what they plan to do after launch.) But even more than that, this is exactly the kind of thing I have long been arguing the AAA should be doing on-and-off the web…

Future plans

Once the map is launched, we will focus our energies on promoting our website among anthropologists. We plan on using our contacts with anthropology PhD students to build a base of members. We will then branch out to targeting more high profile anthropologists.

When we have built a base of members that are of interest to the development community, we will target specific NGOs and development agencies to promote our product.

We are currently in the process of developing an advisory board; a combination of anthropologists, development practitioners and business people who have knowledge of online businesses.

Further down the road, we plan to develop a discussion forum that will be accessible via sms which will allow anthropologists to particpate in discussions while based in the field.

D2Development Funding

All work on the worldwise website has been funded by the D2Development seed funding that we received last December. The grant was used to pay a web designer and a CMS programmer. We are really grateful to our fellow DESTINers who voted for us and contributed to the D2Development fund. Without this seed funding, the idea of worldwise would have stayed an idea.