Digital Archive....

The Last Hunger Season SSIR Opinion & Analysis It was in the middle of a Chicago snowstorm when Andrew Youn and I first met to talk about Africa. "The existence of a hungry farmer is completely crazy. It's mind-boggling. A hunger season shouldn't exist," Andrew told me on that frightful winter day, as the wind howled and the snow drifted beyond the windows of a bookstore where we nursed warm drinks. "Our mission as an organization is to make sure it never, ever happens."

Real World Impact Measurement SSIR Opinion & Analysis Measuring impact is kind of like raising kids: It's often hard, it costs more than you think it's going to—and you absolutely have to do the best job you can. The Mulago Foundation obsesses over impact because it's the only way to know whether the money we spend is doing any good. In fact, we don't invest in organizations that don't measure their impact—they're flying blind and we would be too. We funders are often eager to compare organizations, but evaluation is first and foremost about understanding whether a nonprofit or social business is succeeding on its own terms. Whether they set out to get farmers out of poverty or rehabilitate stray cats, we need a way to know if they succeeded or failed, and to what degree.

Learning From Failure: The Genius of Little Bets The CEP Blog Let's say your new job is to help give away money in order to solve complex problems such as climate change or poverty. To protect biodiversity in the Rockies. Or to reduce infant mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. How do you go about doing that? These days, you might search for some innovative program that you could bring to scale. A Big Idea that would create measureable impact. A typical search for a Big Idea might involve months of intense research, consultations with experts, and in-depth analysis by senior staff. The result might be a detailed strategic plan—pages of PowerPoint slides, Gantt charts, and logic models—all intended to show how your outputs and outcomes will invariably lead to your desired impact. Of course, this approach assumes your organization can muster the requisite insight and understanding to build the Big Idea—and that your grantees and beneficiaries will act the way you think the...

"…the next big boom is hardware" Timbuktu Chronicles We've been posting about this for a while. Jon Evans at TechCrunch : Replicator 2 from Makerbot ...because there's a new one coming. Software continues to eat the world–but I believe the name of the next big boom is hardware . Somebody a few years hence will write an article much like this one, looking back on the incredible hardware boom, and it will begin with a brief history of Arduino , MakerBot , and TechShop . We saw it simmering at Disrupt this year; Lit Motors won runner-up, and I found Hardware Alley more interesting than almost all the software startups . The hardware cycle is slower than that of software, so its boom may take ten years to peak, rather than three or four…but it's coming. My advice is to get in and stake your claim now...[ continue reading ] via Adafruit Sent with Reeder  (verzonden vanaf tablet)