Ecosystem Op-Ed blog posts present creative new ideas and visions for the feedback field. They weave together evidence, theory, and lessons learned by the feedback community to discuss current issues in a thoughtful and accessible way. If you would like to suggest a topic for an op-ed or write a guest piece, please reach out to us at [email protected]
What if citizens could get more information and provide feedback to those responsible for emergency service delivery? Members of Feedback Labs have set up mobile helpdesks to allow people in Nepal do exactly this.
Feedback Labs’ Dennis Whittle spoke at the CECP’s annual meeting in New York
City. Together with Douglas Sabo (VISA), Kim Symon (New Profit) and James Powell (UNICEF), he asked what is the role of technology, data, and citizen feedback for
informing social innovation?
Stories about women raped by soldiers, or old into sexual slavery and trafficked have been documented and used to develop a global conscience about this issue. Global campaigns have produced innovative solutions that include everything from crowdsourcing to programs that help communities understand the dangers and signs of gender based violence.
While we can applaud this progress, we must also recognize that there is still a long way to go if we are going to prevent and eliminate all violence against all women. Despite hundreds of studies that have been collected over the years, there is a huge gap in data about older women’s experiences. In fact, the voices of women over 49 are absent from the conversation about violence against women.
Intermediation is not going away but it is changing and we should all agree that’s for the better. It’s changing in two fundamental ways:
1. Who is intermediating?
2. How are they intermediating?
In the old paradigm, large organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, CARE, Save the Children, and the Red Cross hired the experts to i) analyze problems and ii) design solutions. They then iii) mobilized the money to fund those solutions, iv) hired the staff or consultants to deliver the solutions; and then finally v) organized any monitoring and evaluation.
By utilizing data, communities are creating systems that are built for learning in order to change and improve as they go, helping them prioritize resources, identify gaps and match people to the best housing opportunities to fit their needs. This post is the final in a series about the elements of a coordinated assessment and housing placement system (CAHP). This post offers an overview of data collection and communication, which plays a vital role in the housing referral process. We’ll also take another look at Take Down Targets, which are helping to drive results as we push on toward an end to veteran and chronic homelessness.
The Accountability Lab and Feedback Labs recently co-hosted an event at the OpenGov Hub in Washington, DC entitled “Impact: So What?” The idea was to generate an honest conversation around how we are measuring impact in the accountability and transparency space and what we can collectively learn from this process to help us improve. Preceded by a Twitter chat (#impactchat) and a twin event at the OpenGov Hub Kathmandu, the discussion brought together a diverse crowd of activists, non-profits, policymakers and donors.
In healthcare, numbers matter. They are the measures of physical condition – blood pressure, temperature, height and weight – in a patient profile. They govern the amount of time a provider spends with each patient daily in order to elicit the information needed for assessments and diagnoses.
Increasingly, research shows that a vital aspect of that information is the patient context: the environments, values, relationships and experiences that shape who patients are and how they live. This context directly impacts health, and shapes the challenges patients face in striving to be well; communicating about life outside the four walls of healthcare is thus integral to healthcare that addresses patients’ individual needs.
The Toolkit helps organizations improve the way they listen to their constituents to be more responsive to the people they are trying to serve – and ultimately to improve outcomes. Development of the Toolkit was led by founding Labs member Ashoka Changemakers in collaboration with other founding members including Keystone Accountability, Development Gateway, and GlobalGiving. Platform was developed by District Design Group, and strategic advice and funding were provided by the Rita Allen Foundation.
Increasing visibility and awareness of international principles of human rights is creating new opportunities and challenges for channels of citizen feedback. The roles and responsibilities that governments and businesses have with respect to human rights are becoming increasingly recognized internationally. The UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (so-called “Ruggie Principles”) include operational principles around three pillars –the State duty to protect, the corporate responsibility to respect, and access to remedy. Businesses are increasingly recognizing that there are financial risks associated with conflicts around human rights issues.
Charities produce masses of evidence about their effectiveness but we suspect that much of that research is missing, ropey, unclear or you can’t find it. It’s thought that fully 85% of all medical research is wasted in ways like this. This damages beneficiaries in two ways. First, donors and other operational charities can’t reliably get feedback on whether a particular type of work is effective, so may avoidably implement or fund something suboptimal. And second, the research consumes resources which could perhaps be better spent delivering something which does work.