International development
Posted by Sonal Shah, Head of Global
Development Initiatives, Google.org and Bob Boorstin, Washington
Director of Policy Communications
Last month, Google and Google.org hosted more than 80 technology
decisionmakers from international development non-profits for an
interactive discussion at our Washington D.C. office. Over lunch,
case study presentations and hands-on sessions, participants
discussed the ways technology is changing the landscape of
international development — and how to take advantage of new tools
for fundraising, communication, data visualization, and online
collaboration.
Speakers highlighted the benefits of
computing and demonstrated how to display data on maps and
interactive graphs with products like
Earth and
representative from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum discussed
how the Museum created a
>Darfur layer on Google Earth that gives
"publicly accessible evidence of destruction to help visually
refute claims of minimal collateral damage from war." The
YouTube breakout session explored how cheap video cameras paired
with an on-the-ground presence can help document and spread
awareness of ongoing crises abroad. Participants even made their
own videos to talk about how the Internet is changing the
development world:
Special thanks to our friends at the
>International Rescue
Committee,
>MercyCorps, and the
>U.S. Holocaust Memorial
Museum for sharing stories of their experiences in taking
advantage of new technologies. For those who are interested,
we're posting the
id="pafl" >presentations on YouTube.
We hope that this event will be the first of many discussions,
workshops, and other public events we hold with non-profits in our
new D.C. space.
Tags: , Development, Global, Head, Initiatives, Posted, Shah, Sonal