Every day we are reminded that the challenges faced in eradicating poverty are multifaceted and include complex economic, social, political, and cultural dimensions. For this reason, we work with a number of partners and experiment with many technologies to try and leverage the right community with the right skills and tools to address a given challenge.

Over the past two years, the World Bank has been experimenting with a number of platforms and partnerships to ‘open’ the development paradigm recognizing that we cannot solve the deep and systemic challenges posed by poverty and underdevelopment by ourselves. Our early work on Open Data and inter-active Mapping has been transformative in shining a bright light on what we know and don’t, where we need help, and what can others can do with our data. We will continue to push for greater access to information for all because we believe it's the best possible way to democratize development. As we continue to learn from one another, let me share how we're thinking about these issues at the moment.

From Open Data to Open Government

Governments are starting to recognize the value of open data and geo-spatial data for improving the planning, provision and monitoring of public services. As we know, real value also lies in raw data behind tables, graphs, and maps. The numbers, shapes, lines and descriptions that capture our environments are used and re-used in ways we can’t always predict. When Governments have and in turn provide access to statistics and geo-spatial data, policymakers can make better informed decisions enhancing the quality of public services provided to citizens.

The World Bank’s Open Data Initiative represents a major step towards Open Development. Our Mapping for Results initiative developed with GeoIQ makes all underlying geo-spatial data and development indicators fully open and accessible where users can easily download entire datasets or access them through APIs. Similarly, the World Bank’s Climate Change Portal harnesses Development Seed’s Mapbox, which makes underlying climate data fully open. Furthermore, we have supported Open Government Initiatives in countries as diverse as Kenya and Moldova allowing citizens and software developers to re-use public data and create useful applications for private and public good.

Engaging Mapping Communities

In Haiti, we partnered with citizen mappers and the wider technology community to improve our response times for post earthquake relief. Our partnership with Open Street Map in Indonesia and recently Tanzania has allowed us to work with citizen mappers to geo-reference and map basic social infrastructure like water points, clinics, and schools. Building on this foundation, we’ve collaborated with partners from local government, civic hackers, and civil society using platforms like Ushahidi to listen better to citizen feedback and engage public service providers.

Expanding Access to Geo-spatial Data

Our agreement with Google enables governments, UN, and non-profits agencies to leverage our partnership to expedite access to raw geo data like the location of schools, water points, and health facilities. In the case of natural disasters and humanitarian crises for example, we know that timing is critical for effective response. Our non-exclusive agreement seeks to improve access to useful geo data for humanitarian response and development planning.

The agreement is focused on non-commercial use of geo-data but we believe it represents a very important step in expanding access to information. Governments, UN agencies, and non-profits will now have better access to a richer set of geospatial data to address development challenges including humanitarian response. We will continue to strive for all data being open and freely accessible and look forward to engaging with others and advancing the broader conversation to make development more effective and inclusive.

Remember that video of a band in a Brooklyn metro ride using iPhones as their instruments? Some people said Apple staged it. The company never denied it. Regardless of whether it was genuine or a publicity stunt, the video is so great that it quickly went viral and people ate it up like candy.

"Branding doesn’t matter. If the content is good, people will share it,” said AOL’s David Shing, or @Shingy, in his keynote speech during DCWeek’s tech conference on Thursday. The conference took place in the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia, and packed a full house of web developers, online marketing professionals and web entrepreneurs.

Shingy was speaking of the future of media trends in an odd but cozy black-box theatre. He managed to say a lot of perfectly tweetable phrases of < 140 characters such as:

"Campaigns are out, conversations are in”

"Curating is the future: Good content will come back to trump massive noise.”

"'Like’ and ‘follow’ are being completely diluted. We're not listening anymore,” and therefore prophesized: “Unfriending will become a trend.”

And my favorite:

"Stop focusing on how many followers your page has. We are not 11 years old; this is not a popularity contest.”

It all came back to the same thing: It’s about quality, not quantity. Whether it’s targeting the influencers and not the masses, or producing great content instead of noise. A big one that resonated with me was the need to make apps only if they have an immediate practical purpose; a piece of advice that our institution does not seem to be following.

There were four streams that the conference focused on. An entire room was geared toward the use of the Internet for social good. A panel on Internet tools for this purpose discussed the usefulness of riding on a profit-making brand to create social projects, since they have the funds for it.

Dan Morrison, from Citizen Effect, emphasized the importance of the human element, since it’s people who make the real connections after all. Some of the projects and free tools mentioned includedNetwork for good, Cause capitalism, highrise, civicrm etc.

The World Bank was highlighted in the Data panel, where Development Seed, the firm which built data.worldbank.org, used it as an example of the great significance and the reasoning behind the institution’s decision to open our data.

As for the technical topics, HTML5 was probably the most attended lecture, in which browser developers spoke of the adoption of new web standards.

Jen Simmons, a web designer with a podcast on future web trends, The Web Ahead, said: “When to do the switch? You should not be thinking this way… more like what elements of HTML5 should I be incorporating into my site?”

For those of us not so familiar with HTML5, it’s normal, since developers have not finished defining it nor do they think they will. The current 10-year lull with the current standards will not occur again; therefore it’s more a matter of starting to integrate HTML5 components into our web sites rather than thinking of a rash conversion. It will be changing continually anyways.

Simmons finished by saying that: “Part of what it means to be a web developer is to continue learning. If you think that you already know everything you need to know, I don’t know where you work!”