Road Trip: Talkin’ Fieldwork with Smart NGOs

Last week, I flew out to New York and Washington to sit down with a lot of smart people to talk about how transparency/accountability NGOs do fieldwork. I was joined by NGO tech doyen Allen Gunn of Aspiration.

It’s the start of a long listening process for the Indaba design team. I want to make Indaba a project that is rooted solidly in the day-to-day needs of real organizations, and to do that you have to talk to people.

I am deeply grateful to the people that have taken time to sit down with Gunner and me. Thank you! So far, we’ve talked with people at the following:

• Mzalendo
• International Budget Partnership‘s Open Budget Initiative
• Revenue Watch Institute
• Results for Development Institute‘s Transparency and Accountability Program
• World Bank (Public Sector Governance)
• World Bank (Health & Education)

And I hope to soon talk to:

• Bertelsmann Siftung‘s Bertelsmann Transformation Index
• The Carter Center
• World Resource Institute‘s The Access Initiative

In the coming days, I’ll be writing about what I learned along the way, and how this will inform the development of Indaba. But overall, I come away from these conversations with a great sense of common purpose.

Within the NGO sector, and within the transparency/accountability slice of it that the groups above represent, there’s so much overlap in the challenges we face. And yet there’s at times not a lot of technical and operational know-how trafficking between these groups. I see this when four groups with nearly identical fieldwork workflows develop four different technology solutions to solve the same problem.

My hope is that this road tour is a way to nudge these organizations into a community of practice that is a little more open and collaborative. I also hope that the Indaba platform will take this even further, by encouraging fieldwork tools (like workflows or survey methodologies) to be shared and replicated across organizations.

From what I’ve heard so far, I don’t think it’ll be a hard sell. People want to work smarter, and like to talk shop and learn and share. But with so much work to do, it’s not top of anyone’s agenda. If Indaba can create a forum that makes that a little easier, that sounds like a good start to me.

– Jonathan Eyler-Werve

– Image: Flickr/Wedzday01 (cc by/nd/nc)