The Future of Resources, Narratives and Collective Intelligence for Development.

Build Up Co-Directors Helena Puig Larrauri and Rodrigo Davies outlined their vision on the future of development assistance in this essay that was one of the winners of the Next Horizons Essay Contest 2014, which was held by the Global Development Network in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
“The past decade has seen the emergence of two parallel data revolutions that affect development programming. First, the Open Data movement has pushed organizations – governments, non-profits and companies – to publicly share information and allow public scrutiny. Second, the increasing availability of free, open source and user-friendly information technologies is enabling a growing number of civic actors to collect, process and analyse their own data. The confluence of Open Data and communitydriven data are changing the way development is done. This paper explores the processes that are being set in motion in the development project “marketplace” by these twin data revolutions. It describes three examples of the ways communities and organizations are building on these developments: by organizing and leveraging new resources, creating new narratives, and building collective intelligence. These changes present networked, decentralized alternatives to established ideas, and are beginning to exert some pressure on incumbent processes and stakeholders. We argue that the development sector has the opportunity to engage with and support the growth of these so-called alternative infrastructures into ones that complement incumbent infrastructures. To do so, development organizations must learn to allow communities to shape their priorities about where and how aid is deployed and focus programming on creating an enabling environment for this organic process to happen in a constructive, democratic manner. While this may seem like an uncertain, radical future, it is the natural corollary of giving millions of people open access to data, and the ability to generate and share it.”