Björn Johansson's blog
Since our start in December 2009 numerous visitors have registered with OpenAid. For a long time now, we have regretted not being able to offer you any means of contributing your knowledge and ideas to OpenAid and the aid transparency movement in general. We have therefore decided to make OpenAid into a more 'communal' experience by adding collaborative features.
First out is our translation service. Read more »
How do you get civil society engaged in public online monitoring of your project? Even if you design a killer website for interaction among stakeholders, it will be of absolutely no value without visitors. And chances are that unless you're a seasoned search engine optimizer or have a very large budget at your disposal, nobody will ever find your website. This is where social networks enter the picture.
Development aid is all about politics and politics is all about convincing an audience to support our cause. With the advent of the Internet information is at everybody's fingertips. In fact, information has become so easily obtained that we often forget that in order to convince our audience we first have to make them understand the information and its implications. Steve Krug teaches us in Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability that internet users don't read our web pages, they merely scan them for interesting information. In the fraction of a second we have to both catch their attention and get our message across.