GDN is now accepting applications for the Japanese Award for Most Innovative Development Project (MIDP).

Are you looking for an opportunity to scale up your innovative project? Here is your chance to receive US$ 30,000.

The Global Development Network (GDN) is offering development organizations headquartered and working in developing countries and transition economies such as yours, a chance to receive grants through the Japanese Award for Most Innovative Development Project (MIDP), as part of its annual Global Development Awards and Medals Competition. A second prize of US$ 5,000 will be awarded to the runner-up.

In addition, the lucky first prize winner will be eligible to compete for a grant of up to US$ 200,000 for their project through the Japan Social Development Fund.

And there’s more! The finalists will also get a chance to present their project to an international high profile audience at GDN’s 13th Annual Global Development Conference in June 2012. Their travel and stay will be funded by GDN.

If you think your project is creative, innovative and has had a significant social impact, hurry and log on to http://www.gdnet.org/~2011_awards.

All applications and documents must be submitted electronically at the Online Proposal Appraisal system - OPA (http://opa.gdnet.org).

Application Deadline: January 31, 2012 (Indian Standard Time 6:00 PM)

For any further queries related to the competition write to  awards@gdnet.org.

Presentations from recent event "Online Competitions: Defining Success and Demonstrating Impact"

About a month ago, the KM Impact Challenge and the Society for International Development sponsored the  "Online Competitions: Defining Success and Demonstrating Impact" event. We heard three great presentations from The World Bank Institute, Ashoka's Changemakers,  and the U.S. General Services Administration,  who shared their insights and experiences with online competitions and challenges.

In her presentation, Gail Davenport from World Bank Institute gave an overview on how competitions and prizes have been present throughout history.  She explained the dynamics of some of their competition mechanisms such as the Development Marketplace that in addition to identifying winners has been building a community, and focused on sharing her experience and some of the challenges with the recent Apps for Development Competition.

On April of 2010, the World Bank open its data sets for free (previously available just for subscriptions, usually for academics).  Building on the experience from the DC government on DC Apps, they launch Apps for Development encouraging software developers to engage with the WB data to develop and App that relates with the MDGs.  "The Apps for Development Competition aims to bring together the best ideas from both the software developer and the development practitioner communities to create innovative apps using World Bank data."

View the screencast of Gail Davenport's presentation here.

Kris Herbst, Creative Manager and and Alexa Clay, Knowledge and Learning Manager of Ahoka's Changemakers focused their presentation more on the impact Changemakers has had throughout the years.  Changemakers was launched 12 years ago, and after 5 years they moved to a more engaging phase, applying more of an 'American Idol' metaphor for online competitions.  On their first online competition they received 100 entries, on their second competition entires where received from more than 30 countries and realized the great potential of opensourcing solutions.  One of the impacts for organizations resulted in reducing their 3-4 year call for proposals to 3 to 4 months.

Marketing and outreach has been very important for their online competitions success.  They currently have about 10,000 innovations with the participation of 90,000 members from 125 countries. More than 40 million has gone directly to fund social innovators. They have also been successful in generating a diverse and important group of partners that include: The Packard Foundation, The Gates Foundation, Nike, G20, IDB, National Geographic, among others.

For many social innovators, winning a Changemakers competition or being associated with the Changemakers label has helped bring more attention and support to their work, that otherwise they would have not been recognized for.

View the screencast of Kris Herbst and Alexa Clay's presentation here..


The event concluded with Daniel Munz presentation about Challege.gov website.  Challenge.gov was created to serve as a central online platform for prizes and challenges for different US government agencies. Their approach was to come up with and easy, clean, inviting design where user driven content is a must and makes the website. In Challenge.gov you can sort challenges by many ways, making it easy to discover challenges so that you can box yourself easily based on what you like.

They have provided powerful financial and social incentives so that they can build in from the network that has been generated around the challenges. An example is the ability to support a challenge even if you may not want to solve it. Since its recent launch, challenge.gov has 44 unique challenges offered by 22 agencies on different issues.  A total of 80,000 visitors, 3,200 + supporters, visits from 4,800 + cities in all 50 states and visits from 160 different countries.

The US government considers this platform as an efficient mechanism that enhances our democracy.  Some examples of their successful online challenges are: the USDA Apps for Healthy Kids,    How do I become President? Challenge with Kids.gov - to graphically explain the process of how to become a president. Among many others.

View the screencast of Daniel Munz's presentation here.

Online Competitions: Defining Success and Demonstrating Impact- upcoming event

A KM Impact Challenge Event hosted by the Society for International Development (SID) Washington DC Knowledge Management Workgroup

Date: Tuesday October 26, 2010
Time:  12:30pm - 2pm

Venue: International Resources Group (IRG) and Webinar (see details below)
Address: 1211 Connecticut Avenue NW; 4^th Floor; Washington, DC 

Online Competitions-also referred to as Challenges, Knowledge Fairs, and Innovation Markets-are gaining popularity and becoming a go-to knowledge management tool.  But how do we define (and achieve) success-and perhaps more importantly for continued investment, how do we measure and demonstrate their impact?  What can online competitions contribute to improve development effectiveness?

The event will feature presentations from a few practitioners including: Kris Herbst, Creative Manager and Alexa Clay, Knowledge and Learning Manager, Ashoka's Changemakers; Gail Davenport, the World Bank Institute; Daniel Munz, U.S. General Services Administration who will share insights and recommendations from their experience.  There will also be the opportunity for audience members to share and discuss their perspectives.

Join us to advance our collective understanding of this topic!

Moderators:

Stacey Young  Senior Knowledge Management Advisor at USAID and Co-chair of the SID KM Workgroup

Tony Pryor       Senior Manager at International Resources Group and Co-chair of the SID KM Workgroup

REGISTRATION:

Click here to RSVP for this event or visit www.sidw.org and navigate to the October 26 KM workgroup event page listed in the event calendar.

To register for the webinar, visit https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/917629656.

For more information regarding the event, or if you have a specific experience you'd like to share, please contact Marie-Ange Binagwaho, mbinagwaho@irgltd.com.  

About the Sponsors

The KM Impact Challenge is an initiative of the Knowledge-Driven Microenterprise Development (KDMD) project under the USAID Microenterprise Development (MD) office.

The Society for International Development-Washington Chapter is a diverse global forum of international development practitioners and serves as a knowledge broker for ideas and best practices.  SID-Washington is a leading global development membership organization that provides a space for dialogue and bridges a dynamic community of individuals and institutions working in international development.

Louise Clark organizes a successful KM Impact Assessment session at the AgKnowledge Africa

Louise Clark organized and co-facilitated the Knowledge Management Impact Assessment session at the AgKnowledge Africa event this week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.   In this session, practitioners shared their experiences and discussed the challenges they face when trying to measure or assess the impact of their KM investments or initiatives.

There was great attendance and people were very energized during the session that used the open popcorn (brainstorm) and world cafe techniques, to facilitate the sharing and exchange of practitioner's experiences and knowledge in the topic. The discussion will also provide input to the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge initiative, that we are supporting, to ensure that it responds to the real issues that practitioners face.   

Watch the ShareFair's interview of Louise on the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge:

Joining the discussion about KM Impact Assessment

The Impact Alliance will be participating next week in the SID Knowledge Management (KM) Workgroup Event on Impact Assessment Methodologies for KM.

Participants will be sharing methodologies and approaches for measuring KM investments that will contribute to the discussion and also feed into the collaborative discovery and mapping process of the KM Impact Challenge initiative that the Impact Alliance is facilitating.

If you cannot make the event on October 12 in Washington, DC you can still actively participate via the webinar. To sign up for the Webinar click here click here.

Click here to read the event details and to RSVP

To submit your favorite methodologies contact click here.

The Impact Alliance partners with USAID in the Knowledge Management Impact Challenge Initiative

The Knowledge Management (KM) Impact Challenge will bring people together to develop better methods to meet the challenges of figuring out how to effectively measure the results and impact of investing in KM and learning, focus our efforts and resources, and make the case for KM to senior managers.

The Impact Alliance partnered with USAID to facilitate the KM Impact Challenge initiative that has three main components-- the Collaborative discovery, the Online Challenge, and the KM Share Fair-- where practitioners and organizations will come together to discover, document and share effective KM impact assessment practices.  This will be a collaborative learning process around what works and what doesn’t; identifying effective practical measurement tools for assessing the impact of KM investments and advance standards of good practice.

We invite you to share with us your favorite articles or web links to valuable resources on the topic.

For details about the KM Impact Challenge initiative and to learn more on how you can participate please read the Overview document.  Please consider that the KM Impact Challenge web site is still under construction and will be launching in the next weeks, so check back soon for updates on the date for its official launch. 

Make sure you are following us on twitter and on facebook where we will be sharing more information about the KM Impact Challenge initiative.

Interesting Capacity Development experiences collected in the "CisD" Knowledge Fair worth exploring

Earlier this year, the Impact Alliance partnered with The United Nations Development Programme in the ‘Capacity is Development’ Knowledge Fair, which collected experiences on successful policies, programs, and investments around human and institutional capacity development from around the world.  

If you haven't had the opportunity to read some of these experiences I would recommend to start exploring them by viewing some of the Top 10 Finalist Videos that were shared in the 'CisD' Knowledge Fair. Organizations did an excellent job in capturing their great stories in these videos:

Top 10 Video Finalists

This effort proved to be successful in gathering more than 150 experiences and contributing to the ongoing collection of evidence around CD policies and investments that have demonstrated impact progress toward achieving the MDGs.  We invite you to read some of these case stories in the 'CisD' Knowledge Fair website.