September

On Wednesday September 19^th 2007 I attended the first Dutch Plone users day in Amsterdam. One of the presentations was about the new features of Plone 3.0, which is, amongst other things, OpenID compatible!

The first time I heard about OpenID was about 2,5 years ago. A colleague of mine, who helps keeping me up to date on all sorts of things including web developments, showed this movie during a break in the web2.0 writeshop held at IICD.

OpenID is a sort of online passport. If you’re registered there, any other website which is compatible with OpenID, allows you to sign in with the OpenID profile. You don’t have to create another username and password combination for that specific website! For all the people like me, making use of web services like blogger, flickr, facebook, linkedIn, gmail, surveymonkey, etc. on top of your official accounts like email, network, ftp, cms’es, etc. it is such a hassle to have to remember all of those unique combinations of different usernames and passwords. Thank goodness someone out there is trying to find a solution to this problem, and thank goodness it seems to be catching on!

It was truly a feeling of “the future is here”, sitting there listening to the presentation, and seeing that Plone has now become OpenID compatible, something I had heard about once within the context of “this is what the future will bring”.

Another fun thing of that day was learning that Plone is becoming more Web 2.0. For example, without being a programmer, you can ensure that the content in your website is automatically pushed towards web 2.0 tools like delicious and reddit. Also, users can design their own member profile pages with widget-like portlets filled with content or RSS feeds of their choice. Besides the increased web 2.0 characteristics, Plone 3.0 also has great improvements in user interface functionalities and easing the task of content management through inline editing, OpenID, and link integrity. And of course, all the strengths of 2.5 remain, such as the use of resolveUID, RSS feeds and smart folders remains.

I also learned about Bungeni: “ It is a Parliamentary and Legislative Information System that aims at making Parliaments more open and accessible to citizens ... virtually allowing them "inside Parliament" or "Bungeni"  the Kiswahili word for "inside Parliament". (Source: http://www.bungeni.org/)

It is based on open source standards and applications including Plone and is being developed in collaboration with eight national parliaments in Africa, including three countries IICD works in, namely Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. I hadn’t heard of Plone being applied in such a high profile project in Africa before.

It just goes to show, days like this Plone users day can lead to many unexpected new sources of inspiration and possibilities for finding synergies! Thank you to the “Stichting Zope & Plone” for organizing this day!

Once in a while suggestions come in to improve IICD's online Monitoring and Evaluation tool (http://demosurvey.iicd.org). Just last week, my direct colleagues Hanna, Anne-Marijke and myself have been working on a new feature: an easy-to-download analysis. This came as a request from the project partners in Uganda. Until now, the download contained only the raw data which was not directly accessible for our partners. Project partners were already able to collect data online, by asking their end-users to fill in a questionnaire in the online tool, and now they will also be able to download the results directly from the tool. This will truly make ‘local ownership’ work in practice!

Monitoring and evaluation is key to understanding how and why modern technology exactly works for development. IICD has designed a way to measure how ICT projects impact people's lives and that has enabled our partners and us to learn a lot! Partners have improved their services to better reach their target groups and training sessions have been tailored to better fit the local needs.

The wide use of the online M&E tool resulted in 15,000 questionnaires from end-users in IICD's nine focal countries. In Bolivia the project partners have been empowered to continue Monitoring and Evaluation themselves without much support. The same trend is now happening in Uganda where the project owners of 16 projects with 65 up-country centres will be empowered to use the online M&E tool for their own benefit.

As officer Monitoring and Evaluation I have been involved in the design and development of the online learning tool since the beginning. This tool is up and running since 2005 as the open source software application WebEnq (http://www.webenq.org/), which is developed and maintained by Nivocer (info@webenq.org). Even though the tool is functioning well … “the development of the tool is never finished!” This remark was made by my colleague Anne-Marijke, after she implemented some changes in the questionnaire at the beginning of the year. It turns out many new suggestions come continuously from our partners in the countries. Next on the agenda is the improvement of measuring the longer term impact of our partner's training efforts. And surely this is not the last improvement that will be made… I will keep you posted!