Comments on: Tanzania Votes – the Hard Way

By: steve

steve — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 13:35:55 +0000

great post and keep up the good work..

By: Jeane Goforth

Jeane Goforth — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:12:14 +0000

It’s not just Africa that’s not connected. We teach free music lessons to children (and adults) in Birmingham, Alabama. Staying connected with our students is a real challenge. More than half don’t have an email address. Many were through jobs that no longer exist. Of course, they don’t have ready access to the internet or computers. With landlines for phone service becoming the exception, parents provide us with cell numbers–but they change constantly as the parents lose or change service. The principal at the elementary school where we teach said he didn’t have valid contact info for half his students.
I keep reminding my board, staff and volunteers that we have to consider this in our planning. We cannot assume that our students will check online for schedule and location changes. When we make sweeping policy shifts, there is no way to communicate that to some of the people we most want to serve.
Some of the hyper-connected throw out that ‘these people’ could go to the library. Yes, but there’s also a lack of fluency that hampers success and is embarrassing and discouraging.

By: Christina

Christina — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:44:48 +0000

btw – congrats on the win!

By: Christina

Christina — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 21:43:36 +0000

Hi Stacey,

I can tell you with certainty that online change competitions are definitely skewed against the favor of African participation. There are several Ashoka Fellows in East Africa I know who refuse to participate in changemakers competitions, specifically for that reason. It’s a lot of work to participate, but Africa simply doesn’t have the bandwidth available to mobilize large numbers of votes. (And that’s true no matter how much money you have at hand to pay for the best available!) At the Webbed Empowerment Centers I started in both Gulu and Kampala, it was felt as a triumph if just one email could get sent without a glitch in the network messing things up. And then there is the language barrier, technology fear, and generally low levels of (online) literacy. It can help if the folks who want to vote pre-register with the site sometime before the voting period.

What would be great, I think, is if sites could think about a mobile phone interface for online voting )that includes the African cellphone networks – most mobile phone interfaces don’t.

By: Mike Dougherty

Mike Dougherty — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:47:14 +0000

I’m happy to support this initiative.

By: Nakeva

Nakeva — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:41:43 +0000

I’m so happy this initiative is working out and we get continued updates. Thank you Stacey and everyone involved to make change across the world a community action! I hope you win this Ideablob funding, my vote was in and I’m headed over to help out once again.

Cheers!

By: tms ruge

tms ruge — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:52:40 +0000

Perhaps I am viewing this from a different lens here, but despite it’s short comings and whoever wins the $10,000, this is a win for those in the running. This isn’t so much about the money as it is about raising awareness. The $10,000 is a nice carrot, but the sheer magnitude of the people engaging and participating is worth way more.

What better way to engage the greater populace, even those with lesser access to the playing field? It’s a win for the kids that got their first taste in global communication, participatory governance, and a comparative lesson in what it takes to be a winner despite being declared a loser by circumstances beyond your control.

This may seem like a popularity contest for $10,000 on the surface. After all, they could have just as easily asked for everyone to submit executive summaries and the winners decided based on that. But that process doesn’t engage, it doesn’t push, it doesn’t offend, it doesn’t get people to talk about it…. and it certainly doesn’t raise awareness. Can you imagine the only requirement to be President being the facts on your CV debated in a closed room? No, it’s out in the open and issues are raised and discussed, including those that would never see the light of day.

So I say this is good. It’s not perfect, but it’s good. I certainly wish that Epic Change wins the $10,000 cash, but in my book, Stacey, you’ve already won. The money is icing on the cake. The amount of awareness that you’ve raised can’t be measured in dollars. The seeds of inspiration, determination, wonder, and perseverance that were planted in those that voted in Arusha may never be measured for years to come.

But I can assert that the fruits of that exercise are worth more than $10,000 any day.

By: Tyler Ahn

Tyler Ahn — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:30:30 +0000

The difficulties of online voting and this very critique is something we deal with on a regular basis. Indeed the lack of connectivity is a hurdle for many and operating an online platform poses certain amount of challenges in these parts of the world.
We have put other measures in place to benefit our community members regardless of their connectivity. First, it is not simply a popularity contest. Each competition entry is vetted by our distinguished panel of judges to ensure that they meet our criteria of Innovation, Social Impact, and Sustainability.
Once the finalists are chosen through the vetting process, we arm our finalists with tools to leverage their existing networks, we also notify the Changemakers community as well as publicize the voting phase of the competition to the general public. A click can give these great projects much needed funds, all projects are open for public review so anyone can make the decision for themselves.
Despite all that we do, we cannot ignore this issue of connectivity. So we work hard here at Changemakers to make sure that there are other benefits to being a part of this online community. But voting aside, what we value the most here at Changemakers is our community members and their role in our marketplace of solutions. Since we started running online competitions a few years ago (Changemakers was once simply a journal), we have leveraged our networks to funnel more than 30 million dollars to our competition participants. We have made countless connections and helped to create partnerships between our entrants. Some of the recipients of these funds were winners, many were finalists but some were neither winners nor finalists too.
Connectivity varies widely from continent to continent, country to country, even city to city. But it is only a matter of time for internet penetration. And we are not ones to underestimate our participants and community members in the developing world. Hundreds of Indian farmers queued up at the local computer kiosk to vote. They usually checked grain prices there, but once word got out that one of “them” became a Changemakers finalist, they knew that they could make him a winner, and they did.
Actually, the majority of our winners don’t come from the “developed north”, the plurality come from Asia. Out of a total of 62 winners, 26 come from Asia, India wins the tally of most winners at 19. Yes, the US is a close second with 14 winners but we have a collection of winners from Africa and Latin America as well. (10 from Latin America, 5 from Africa round out the 41 majority) It’s certainly not evenly distributed but your fate is not sealed because of your location.
We believe in the power of the internet to help social innovators go to scale, to share their ideas and to find one another. It never ceases to amaze me when someone tucked away in the far corners just “gets” us so well and what our vision is. We believe that we will one day have an Everyone a Changemaker world, and the online competition is just one of the ways that

By: Shannon Aronin

Shannon Aronin — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:22:16 +0000

Coming from the grant writing world, where the competition for funding is based primarily on who has the best grant writer and who has the most well connected board, I find these online competitions to be refreshingly democratic in comparison to how the nonprofit community HAS been doing things for a very long time. Particularly as other major sources of fundraising have dried up considerably in the current economic climate, these competitions have so many healthy social benefits.

Is it perfect? No. Is it biased towards the West? Undoubtably. But I don’t think it’s fair anymore for anyone to suggest that the people being helped are being exploited. They ARE driving their own future.

I agree that what you have accomplished here Stacey is amazing, and I applaud your efforts. I also want to congratulate Mama Lucy on her outstanding on the ground community organizing that has created such a groundswell of support and community initiative. You would be hard pressed to mobilize a community being served through charitable foundations so well anywhere here in the States. This is truly an awesome effort. Congrats to you both.

By: Kari Saratovsky

Kari Saratovsky — Wed, 27 May 2009 21:17:30 +0000

First of all, I echo the above praise for your thoughtful post, Stacey. It’s amazing to think back to December of 2007 when we launched the Case Foundation’s Giving Challenge (using the platforms Causes on Facebook and Global Giving). We did so to help introduce new online fundraising tools to a broader audience and to help individuals understand the power they could have to be a champions for a cause they care about. As you well know, we weren’t interested in how much money you could raise – but more on how many individual donors one could attract to his/her cause.

Fast forward a year and a half and look at what’s happening – you are taking these tools and introducing them around the globe to a whole new demographic of people who want to be champions and support causes that are directly impacting them. I loved the stories you shared of the frustration but determination of the people of Tanzania who so badly wanted to participate.

As we look forward to announcing our next Giving Challenge later this year – your questions of access and infrastructure are important to keep at the fore front of our minds.

We’ll be sharing some important findings from the Giving Challenge in a few weeks. But, one of the surprise findings was that participating charities with similar missions often worked on behalf of each other so that each one would have a chance to win a daily prize of $1,000 for having the most unique donors in a 24-hour period. This goes against the notion that it’s simply a “popularity contest” – and I thought worth mentioning.

In any case, we’ll be releasing the data in mid June on http://www.casefoundaiton.org and will make sure to share it with your readers.

Thanks again for all you do, Stacey! – KDS