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The Indaba Fieldwork Platform in 2011: What we learned on our way to 3,000 completed assignments

During the past year, Indaba has moved from a good idea to a field-tested tool with strong user validation.

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Introducing the Indaba Fieldwork Platform

Indaba is a online platform for public interest data gathering by distributed teams. It’s also a community of smart people all over the world sharing best practices for public interest fieldwork. (Image: Abdurrahman shows off Indaba in Mogadishu, Somalia.)

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Adventures in field testing, in which we almost melt a mobile phone.

It’s your July 2010 status report: I have good news on funding, and the Indaba fieldwork platform gets it’s first real-world testing.

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The Revolution Will Not Be Aggregated

The people that have been helping me develop the Indaba fieldwork platform are not a cross-section of the NGO sector or development community at large. Instead, I see them as the vanguard of a movement that is searching for ways to sustainably scale fieldwork. No field offices, no fancy mission statements, very little overhead, but lots of original data from diverse groups of people loosely connected by threads of copper and light.

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Indaba Camp!

Over the past two months, I’ve been working phones, airports and train stations trying to talk to as many people as possible about Indaba. Last week, we invited some of these folks over to the Global Integrity office for something that merged elements of group therapy and a hackathon.

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What is Indaba?

Indaba is a tool to manage people who are collecting and publishing information.


Indaba is an online platform combining elements of project, relationship and knowledge management. Indaba automates workflows, allowing geographically distributed teams to scale up rapidly, work efficiently, and publish the results in open, sharable formats.


Indaba is a software-as-service designed by and for the NGO community. Learn more...

Project Status

As of July 2011, we have 14 organizations with projects in the pipeline. Indaba is deployed in 34 countries, with additional projects in development with Public Radio International, the Carter Center, Global Integrity, the International Budget Partnership and others. Development continues on Indaba Publisher, while usability refinements continue with Indaba Designer and Indaba Builder.

Latest status reports.
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On Twitter as @getindaba
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Indaba2011big

The Indaba Fieldwork Platform in 2011: What we learned on our way to 3,000 completed assignments

During the past year, Indaba has moved from a good idea to a field-tested tool with strong user validation.

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How to secure your Web browser

This is a condensed version of the recommendations I send to Global Integrity staff regarding how to make a browser secure and reduce (but not eliminate!) the risk of spying by security services and other bad actors. As of yesterday, Google is once again raising hell over China targeting activists using less-secure browsers. The bottom [...]

OK GO!

Event Recap: “Wired for Change” at the Ford Foundation

Interview by Monika Kerdeman for Benevolent Media. On February 16, former President Clinton and 200 social innovators, technologists, entrepreneurs and philanthropists gathered at Ford Foundation for the Wired for Change event to discuss how to create an innovative and equitable digital future. A good overview, including archived “live blogging” posts, can be found on Jillian C. York’s website. The [...]

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Indaba Early Adopter Partnership — Overview

The Indaba fieldwork platform is a tool developed by Global Integrity for managing a distributed research project. See the Indaba whitepaper or feature list for an overview of the platform. The Early Adopters program allows a select group of organizations the opportunity to learn about, and if appropriate, run a project on the Indaba fieldwork [...]