Could you raise $10,000 in 48 hours, online? During the Thanksgiving holiday, for example, someone achieve this on Twitter to build a school in Africa. I witnessed the Tweetsgiving campaign unfold and received updates and encouragement from organizers who briefed followers of the campaign’s overall progress. Ultimately, this group exceeded their goal and raised enough to purchase books for the school. Some followers gave as little as $1, the recognition for even their contributions were instant and, notably widespread.

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The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) is a great resource for staying up on the latest trends in economic development research. One of their 2007 working papers, Using the Global Positioning System (GPS) in
Household Surveys for Better Economics
and Better Policy written by John Gibson and David McKenzie, talks about different [...]

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As a software developer at Idealistics I focus on the development of our software systems. Being on the tech side, I see a lot of the advantages technology and the world wide web offer to the social service industry. Technology has changed the provision of social services and organizations’ ability to connect with [...]

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In a presentation at the Social for Social Innovation at Stanford University (the audio file is available here), Dr. Alana Conner argued for fewer and better evaluations of social service agencies. Her argument hinges on the fact that good evaluations are hard to do. She points out the importance (and difficulty) of finding [...]

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A recently published Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) report provides some sobering statistics on information technology access of low-income and minority Californians. The PPIC reports:

Less than half of California Latinos (48%) have home computers compared to about eight in 10 or more for whites (86%), Asians (84%), and blacks (79%). Just four in [...]

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