Technology Salon

You might think that the topic of collecting data via mobile devices would be a rather dry discussion of data management and statistical methodology. You would be very, very wrong. The Technology Salon all but came to blows as we wrestled with privacy issues, total costs of ownership, and other elephants in the room. When…

Fail Faire DC 2011 is a celebration of failure. We will have great speakers with fun, fast, Ignite-style presentations of their professional failures. Audience participation is not only encouraged, it is mandatory! We are all peers and none of us is perfect. Expect much laughter as we navel-gaze at where we have all gone wrong…

One of the sad truths that emerged at the Technology Salon on ICTs and M&E was that failure in development is rarely about the project performance, but about winning the next contract. This means that monitoring and evaluation is less about tracking and improving progress towards social change and more about weaving an advertising pitch.…

In this month’s Technology Salon, National Health Information Systems: Who Uses What, Where?, we discussed a recently-completed study by Vital Wave Consulting that surveyed the global landscape of national HIS ecosystems in the developing world. The overall outcome may surprise development practitioners, but its well known to IT experts: basic change management matters more than fancy technology.