Mind the gap* (in global development data!)

Paul Currion in his blog Humanitarian Info recommends a fascinating web site ‘Gap Minder‘. The site seeks to distribute information about global development indicators, and software to better visualise indicators. It’s quite amazing what can be done very easily these days. If you don’t have much time, go straight to the most interesting graph, which lets you plot millennium development goals on two axes of a graph, or on a map. Quite startling.

Staff turnover in humanitarian agencies

Those who have worked in humanitarian agencies over the past ten years may have noticed the emergence of “revolving door syndrome,” where colleagues leave or are reassigned at frequent intervals. Loss of staff continuity has become a major concern for most humanitarian organizations, and HR directors generally affirm that turnover rates are high in humanitarian organizations. A study published this month in the online journal Humanitarian Practice Network by David Loquercio, Mark Hammersley and Ben Emmens (download it here - you will need to register, but it is free) discusses these issues in detail. It points out that an accurate study of staff turnover really encompasses two issues: the proportion of staff leaving in a given time period, and the re-assignment or rotation of staff from one assignment to another. Read on for a summary of the article.

Google’s Larry Brilliant’s plans to tackle global climate crisis

The technology magazine Wired is running this interview with the head of the Google Foundation, Larry Brilliant.

He discusses the foundation’s mandate (climate crisis, global public heath, and global poverty), his approach “I’m going to approach this the way a venture capitalist would – map out the industry to see what the gaps are“), his methodology, (”you fund an initiative, learn what works, and ask, “Will it scale?”), and what makes Google’s foundation different from Gates!

For those who want more, Treehugger.com has a good set of related links, and the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley carries a longer interview from April 2006 here.