Dear Colleagues There are many people and organizations doing good work in all areas of socio-economic development ... Simon Stumpf talks of some 2,500 social entrepreneurs in total and hundreds in rural development ... but I would argue that the numbers we do not know about are a lot bigger than those we know about. But it is worse ... there are a huge number of people that with a modest level of technical, monetary and practical assistance that would become entrepreneurs and make a huge socio-economic difference for themselves and for their communities. What we are trying to do with Community Analytics (CA) is to start looking at the community and what is going on in the community ... what could go on in the community ... and what organizations are in place to help with the needed interventions. CA has a community focus with the priorities defined by the community ... and the interventions driven by the community. CA does little more than (1) serve as a scorekeeping and (2) serve to collect and compile performance stats ... rather like any sports game of any importance! Peter [quote="simon.stumpf"] Hello! My name is Simon Stumpf and I work for Ashoka: Innovators for the Public. We boast the world's largest network of leading social entrepreneurs - 2,500 total and hundreds doing innovative work in rural development. I am currently working with my colleagues in Sub Saharan Africa and India to find 100 new "Ashoka Fellows" with cutting edge and systems-changing new ideas in rural innovation and farming. If you are a social entrepreneur with a big, bold new idea or know someone who is, I'd love to hear from you! Please email me at [email protected]. Thanks! Simon [/quote]

Dear Sameera My interest is the development and deployment of Community Analytics (CA). The CA framework for metrics of socio-economic performance embraces all sectors including the very important agriculture sector. A large amount of data are needed ... the data need to be low cost and valuable. The problem of data overload must be avoided! We are moving towards a mobile phone solution ... SMS text messages and relational database connected using FrontlineSMS or something similar. The CA approach is more like accounting than surveys and statistics ... the data points are in themselves correct ... and they yield valuable information when they are organized in a rigorous manner. You can probably add significantly to what we are doing with CA ... I hope so! Peter [quote="sameera"] Hi All I am Sameera Wijerathna, Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) Activist in Sri Lanka. Currently I am attached to Dialog Telekom (www.dialog.lk), a telecommunication company in Sri Lanka. Under the main theme of ICT4D, I am involved in different programmes and ICT for Agriculture is one of my key areas of interest. Currently I am working on my Masters Degree research - "Mobile Phone for Agricultural Development of Sri Lanka". Sameera. [url=]http://ict4d-in-srilanka.blogspot.com/[/url] [/quote]

Dear Colleagues May I reformulate the question! I find the project (pakissan.com) interesting, and I will argue that its primary success will be in making profit for the program and those that participate in the various aspects of the exchange. Is there any evidence that agricultural communities in Pakistan are making socio-economic progress ... how is this measured, community by community ... could they be using the concepts of Community Analytics (CA) to do the measurement? Are there village level data that show changes in socio-economic status of the community and the activities that have been instrumental in facilitating change. How much did the interventions cost? How much value adding for the community was achieved? It is only at this point that I would look to see whether or not the Pakissan project had a role in helping to facilitate change. In CA we look for very strong cause and effect links ... we are not directly interested in rather weak correlation. Having said that, we appreciate that the performance of an exchange may have very powerful correlation with the mobilization of fund flows for agriculture ... and we also want decisions about allocation of resources for agriculture to be based on good knowledge about the cost and impact of interventions and associated investments. [quote="tjkf"] Dear Mr Kasana, Your project (pakissan.com) sounds very interesting. Is there any concrete evidence to date that it has helped to improve the productivity of farmers in Pakistan? If yes, in what ways? Kind regards Torbjörn Fredriksson [quote="irfan.kasana"] Hi, I am Muhammad Irfan Kasana from Pakistan, working with Pakistan's first Commodity Exchange "National Commodity Exchange Limited" as Manager Research & Product Development & Operations. Core objectives to provide an Online Future Trading Platform wher farmers can directly trade what ever they produce right from there farm gate a true implementation of ICT. I have also developed the largest Agriculture web portal in Pakistan http://www.pakissan.com with more than 7000 subscribers and 2300 active forum members aiming "Connecting Agric-Community for better farming" We are at the moment working on E-Village concept and had already organized successfull conferences with in 3 provinces out of 4 in Pakistan. Follow us on facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=185839181212 . Here we are striving for ICT & Associated Technologies to the door step of our rural community not only for Agriculture development but for Education, Health, and Social Activities. [/quote] [/quote]

My name is Peter Burgess. My specialty is data and analysis more than it is technology ... and management information more than sophisticated statistical analysis. My interest is in easy data that can transform the performance of socio-economic activity to generate a lot more value adding than has been experienced over the past few decades in developing countries. Some parts of technology have followed Moore's Law ... with power doubling every 18 months and costs halving in the same time. Imagine this is agriculture ... but it is not happening. One way performance can be improved is by a whole framework of better metrics, data and analysis that allows better decisions. We have developed Community Analytics (CA) to do this ... very simple data about important things for each and every community ... trends over time ... comparisons with other placed ... all on top of 21st century technology. Looking forward to hearing what others are doing Peter Burgess Tr-Ac-Net.org Community Analytics.

Dear Colleagues The challenge of our global society is to have a sustainable productive world in which ALL may be participants on a reasonable footing. ICT is one of the great success stories about productivity ... with an improvement over the past 50 years of perhaps multi-million fold. But even though there is this huge technical productivity improvement, its use as a tool to do things of value is rather modest ... one might even say pathetic. My hope is that we can start using the power of ICT to make information accessible ... and get useful information where it is needed. A priority, it seems to me, is to help agriculture be more productive ... and education to be more productive ... and health to be more productive. More people need to know things that are useful and help to improve productivity. More people also need to be engaged in removing constraints on progress ... on improving productivity. Using ICT to distribute information about the bad things in society might be a good starting point ... fraud, corruption, misrepresentation can all be reduced with better use of information. This is what Community Accountancy (CA) will help to do ... good things get on the record and earn praise. Bad things get on the record and people can respond accordingly. Mobile telephony ... SMS messages ... are potentially a great way of collecting organized pieces of data very cost effectively ... but the key is the framework for storing these data points and using them to inform society. This is what accountancy has done for the corporation ... now we want to have it do something similar ... better ... for society.

Dear Colleagues I am coming to this discussion late. WHY? Because there is a crisis of information overload and more and more communication with less and less substance. I want to help reverse this trend and am looking to use a system of Community Accountancy (CA) to help sort out what is useful from what is not. The same techniques have been used in corporate accountancy very effectively and it is anticipated that CA can do something similar for society.

Dear Colleagues Thanks for the clarification and feedback. I am actually quite impressed with the material that seems to be accessible courtesy of the FAO website and the GlobeFish information system. I am reminded of a conversation with Dr. John Gulland FRS when he was still at the FAO. The mathematics of fisheries population dynamics improved immensely over a period of several years, and more and more analytical material was able to be published. But the issue was not the analysis, it was the underlying deterioration in the quality of the data available for analysis. My guess is that the quality of raw data flowing into the FAO is rather weak, if not completely useless. Obviously some data will be OK ... but I think that a lot of the data is questionable, if not absolutely wrong. The issues are (1) the money available for data collection and (2) the drivers about the use and value of information. Does a corporate fishing company really want its fishing catch data to be in the system or not? Yes: there are some systems in place to get correct data ... but are they working or are they seriously compromised? My guess is the latter ... but I cannot prove it. Can anyone prove that the dataflows are good information? Probably not either. It's a conundrum, but important for the management of fish resources. Peter Burgess The Tr-Ac-Net Organization