Blogs by aid and development workers -- real, raw, riveting
11:03, 17 September 2009
.. Posted in Development, Relief and Advocacy Efforts.. Link
While I was the volunteer coordinator and primary content contributor/wrangler for the Aid Workers Network, I had the pleasure of working with several aid and development workers doing amazing things in the world, who were willing to volunteer their very precious spare time to helping others on AWN. One of them was Peter Casier of the World Food Programme, who took on the task of managing the blogs section of AWN. He's still at it, and here's a recent post he made to the AWN forum that he graciously agreed to let me repost here. GIven how often I get messages from people who want to work abroad in aid or development, as well as how often I read criticisms of aid workers, I thought this would be helpful to share (and note the tips for aid workers who want to blog at the end):
Peter:
There is a lot of information around that interests us, aidworkers and humanitarians. It fascinates me, both in the quantity of information and in the way it is dispersed. Few social aggregators and social media sites have categories which are of interest to us, or offer selected news of our sector. Stuff is dispersed everywhere. Selections via Google News on search criteria like "Aid" or "development" return too much noise ("aid to the banking sector" is much more popular nowadays than "aid to Africa"... e.g.)
For a year, I have been experimenting with different means to get the relevant information automatically collected in simple,low bandwidth and searchable sites.
Not only would it give those working in the nonprofit sector an easier overview, but it would also help in broadcasting news of our sector to the "general public". Call it "advocacy through information"...
Gradually this has grown to different sites.
- Aid News aggregates the latest news bulletins related to aid news (and areas in which we work). (updates broadcasted via Twitter @AidNews)
- Change Thru Info does the same but for news bulletins from humanitarian agencies, and blogs about development, aid,... (updates via Twitter @ChangeThruInfo)
- The Other World News only shows the latest posts, refreshed each time the site is loaded.
- Non Profit Blogs stores a random selection from about 300 nonprofit blogs. (updates via Twitter @NonProfitBlogs)
- You and Us and Me does the same for "Green News" (updates via Twitter @NewsOnGreen)
- Humanitarian News is my latest project (@HumanityNews on Twitter), and a bit grander in scope. It takes in about 600 different sources (news sites, blogs, generic websites), and puts them into 5 sections: aid news, blogs by aidworkers, news updates from the nonprofit sector, blogs from the nonprofit sector, and green news. This aggregator is much faster and powerful than the other ones, features selective RSS feeds, and daily Email updates with the latest news. On average, Humanitarian News stores about 300 updates per day (I am still tuning the site to ensure it misses not a single article).
The site has been up since 3 weeks, and collected up 6000 articles so far. The power with a repository like this, is the search. E.g. searching for DRC, or Darfur or "health+climate change", gives you an overview of what has been published in all these sources.
I do quite a bit of an effort to keep the sources focused and updated, to filter junk out of the posts (and sites), and to update the list of sources continuously...
Have a look and tell me what you think.
PS: While building these sites, I (with sweat blood and tears) collected a bit of experience on blogging, blogging tools etc.. So for those of you blogging as a hobby or blogging for your nonprofit organisation, I compiled some of my experiences in a site with blogging tips, specifically for the nonprofit sector: BlogTips.
Enjoy.
Peter
