Many roads lead to Rome/different styles of development cooperation

During the Dutch Innovation Seminar, organised by de Baak last week, we had a chance to present NABUUR.com. The audience: 150 innovation managers from companies and NGO's from the Netherlands, eager to learn about open innovation.
I would like to share what happened during the presentation of Siegfried Woldhek. (founder and CEO of NABUUR.com).

Paul Bulenzi (Local Representative for Jinja-Central in Uganda)and Siegfried Woldhek brought NABUUR ''live''.

Through Skype, Paul Bulenzi raised a question about the shipment of 2 big boxes with mosquito nets, donated by Musquito Curtains from the US to Uganda. The audience came up with a number of possible solutions by sharing their ideas live and real time.

The solutions they came up with were so much representing the expression: many roads lead to Rome that I would like to share them with you... this is not about what's best, but what's possible!

1. My wife is a flight attendant for an airline, I can ask her to bring them
2. I know an airline who has a program for transporting goods for non-profits
3. You should tell and teach Paul to help himself
4. Use social networks to raise this question
5. I can post a message in a community for people travelling a lot
6. I have a friend and his girlfriend works for a US company in Uganda, maybe they can arrange shipment
7. Why don't we all raise a little bit of money and just pay for shipment by T&T?

For me the solutions mentionded represent different ways of thinking about development collaboration. Funny to see!

As a tip I would like to share with you another .com organisation who was on stage at the Dutch Innovation Seminar: www.sellaband.com: SellaBand has been regarded as a driving force behind the Music Revolution. It challenges the traditional music industry and encourages aspiring artists and music lovers to go into business together. SellaBand aims to level the playing field of the global music industry.

2 Comments

Comment by Christine Egger on October 14, 2008 at 7:01pm: Hi Gerdie,

Awesome to see this exchange! It's so heartwarming to see the ingenuity and variety in these suggestions.

There are lots of criteria for determining what a group will do with these suggestions -- whether certain resources are available, for example. Another kind of criteria would be whether or not they individually reflect an ideology -- a philosophy or theory about what SHOULD be done -- that NABUUR and/or the local representative would support.

Last year, Tom Munnecke (Social Actions member) introduced me to David Ellerman's work. David is an economics professor and former World Bank guy. He writes about different kinds of helping, specifically those that are likely to create dependency and those that are likely to create autonomy. (#3 in your list shows that others are thinking about this difference, too!)

I wrote about some of his ideas on my blog, because I like how Ellerman frames the role of helping not as delivering assistance, or even teaching another how to assist themselves, but rather as encouraging and amplifying the good that’s already going on within the other’s world. The role of the “helping agency,” he says, is to catalyze, foster, and otherwise amplify 1) positive things that are already happening and 2) any experimentation that’s already happening for the purpose of improving upon what’s already going on.

I was thinking about that as I read the list of suggestions, and realized that it was difficult to figure out which of them reflects an amplification of either of those things. Which makes sense, because I don't know anything about the community where the project is taking place. But it got me thinking... For those who do know the community and project well, is it possible to assess not only the overall project goals but small pieces of the project against an ideology like David's? Or another theory of change that determines what suggestions would make sense to those involved?

This is a question I've started to ask about all of the campaigns that are listed on the social action platforms that the Social Actions API aggregates from. I wonder whether the theory or ideology or what-we-believe-about-what-can-and-should-be-done-to-help-someone can be made explicit, and how that could be relayed to people who are invited to get involved with any kind of micro-philanthropic project.

Thanks for prompting me to think about this again -- and out loud. :)

Comment by Siegfried Woldhek on October 16, 2008 at 7:26am: Hi Christine,

What struck me at the meeting was that with 180 people in the room, the question at hand could be solved in 4 -5 different ways. it seems to be a general rule of thumb that a group ca 40 people is needed to solve most any question. With a larger group there usually are more solutions 'in the room' and I thought that there wasn't much point in wasting time to find the best solution. But you're right; it is probably useful to define some assessment points. Thanks for drawing attention to David Ellerman's work. He, Tom Munnecke and I met a few times some years ago when social networking was beginning to take shape and I recommend David's book 'Helping People Help Themselves'.
Warm regards,