Results matching “hans rosling”

Should CISV get into the data mining business?

The latest edition of The Economist has a special called "Data, data, everywhere" (full-text PDF for download free at the moment!). It's about the fact that things like digital cameras, Walmarkt records and your footprints on the web create more and more information that can be stored and used for different purposes: Private companies build internet tools on free Government data (like crime reports), Google built a spell check created from trillion spelling mistakes made in the search box and Amazon "knows" what books and movies you may like by mining through other customers data.

Of course one of the articles also refer to one of my favourite guys, Hans Rosling and his Trendalizer software*, which I used to create the CISV bubbles. Yet, one of the most interesting paragraphs of the special report was the description of an emerging executive job:

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extrac the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.

This is exactly what I've been trying to do, with all the "Statistics Nerd" posts here at FTB. But whereas my amateur attempts may have sparked a few ideas, I wonder if CISV should take the issue more seriously. How about building a database, that contains much more than just how many camps where hosted by whom in which year? Let's add cancellation data and  evaluation data. Let's try to track down costs (of travel and hosting). Finally, how about getting somebody into IO who's good working all this out to benefit CISV?

Of course collecting and handling such data will lead to privacy and security, even legal issues. Already now German parents find it difficult to register their kids at CISV friends. But I'm sure there's so many things we aren't aware of, that could be extracted: Maybe some camps in some chapters are way more expensive than others? Or maybe there is a quality trend, that summer camps for 15y olds are much worse than the others? With that information, maybe trainings and programme development could be applied in a more targeted way?

On a different note, the special report also contains the following paragraph:

Best Buy, a retailer, found that 7% of its customers accounted for 43% of its sales, so that it reorganized its stored to concentrate on those customers' needs.

It reminded me that Arne-Christian/NOR, then IFC-chair, told the board in 2002 that 10% of the NAs were hosting 60% of all camps. Should CISV concentrate on those NAs needs?

*The artilcle calls the software "Gapminder", which is in fact the name of his organization, which shows that the mighty Economist is sometimes a bit sloppy in checking their facts.
 

At a recent birthday party I met a lady, who works for a charity that supports a children's cancer center in St. Petersburg. She proudly explained that the mortality had gone down from 80% to 20% in the past 10 years since her charity has been involved. We also spoke a lot about CISV, but I found it hard to come up with a similarly impressive figure, to pinpoint the results of CISV's work.

In an earlier post I  already tried to outline the problem of "measurability". A lot of things in CISVs are just not measurable, like the effect of education, the true quality of a camp, the motivation of volunteers. A few years ago a study was done to see, what happened to all the CISVers we educated, and found that lots of them became teachers. Does that tell us anything? Measuring CISVs success by the percentage of participants going into the educational field? Obviously not. But how else can we measure our success?

Hans Rosling, my favourite "development statistician" explains how this problem also exists in Human Rights and Democracy.




(Sidenote: As in all of his talks, he draws a great conclusion: That democracy and human rights are not means to another goal (like health and wealth), but have values of their own.)

A rather new project by Facebook tries to measure world peace by the amount of friendships between nationalities that are politically "not-so-friendly":



 
Looks like friendship is growing everywhere, but I guess it's simply more Facebook users over time. Useful or not, an interesting indicator. (Maybe somebody can find a formula to extract CISVs impact on this data?)

While corporations simply measure their success in profits, CISVs output - awareness, attitutes, skills and knowledge - seems impossible to grasp. But, the fact that things are hard to measure, doesn't mean we should forget about it, but find pragmatic tools to rate our work. I think the much critisized PDPEF is one way to measure educational success. Certifying trainers is another way to monitor the spread of qualified trainers, as a quality indicator. Here at FTB I'm trying to find indicators for NA performance with the Balcony Index.  For the future, we'll need even more tools to evaluate our work if we are serious in our mission for peace. And also, if we want to impress potential participants, leaders and sponsors.

Further reading:
GOOD magazine has some good takes on evaluation and measuring success in the non-profit world. Here's a starter that is part of a series of articles.

A graphic representation of CISV's development from 1996-2008

Anna brought the Annual Review from Guatemala, so I decided to update the Motion Graphic Chart of CISV's development (see original post): It now displays the development of CISV in all NAs since 1996. Just press the play button:


A few interesting facts:

• Look at the two dinosaurs in CISV, Canada and Brazil: With about the same amount of chapters and same amount of hosted camps, Brazil sends almost twice as many participants abroad!
• The only two countries that seem to make some significant growth in the last 10+ years are Austria and China
• Did you see the dive that Canada took in 2003 - that was when their insurance broke.
• The size of the bubble represents the number of chapters - Australia's bubble is way bigger than the other chapters in their area - so apparently their chapters are all very small.
• It comes as no surprise that Africa is hardly detectable in this graphical representation of CISV.

Of course it would be even more interesting, to look back beyond 1996 and also into the development of the individual programmes. I'm working on it!

Also, I found another brilliant speech by Gapminder's Hans Rosling at TED - 18 minutes of pure greatness and plus a surprise ending:

Non-governmental organisations you should know (NGOYSK), is a new section in this blog, where I will present organisations, that I find interesting and relate to the work of CISV.

So today I'd like to present Gapminder. Before I tell you anything, please, please, please, can you spare 20 minutes to look at this wonderful, wonderful, wonderful talk. In fact, I like to say, that this is probably the best, funniest and most entertaining presentation I have ever heard. Have you ever followed a lecture in your university, where the presenter sounded like a football world cup match commenter? Now watch:



The way I understand it, is that Gapminder offers a software and data that helps the world where development is happening, and where help is needed. As you can see from the video even well-educated people have wrong ideas on which countries are poor, undeveloped or even starving.

Now, Google offers the software to create those animated bubble graphics for free, so I decided to give it a try and created one for the development of CISV between 1998 and 2007 of the first 6 countries in the alphabet: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil and Bulgaria (data from the annual reports):



(Click here for a larger version)

Click the play button and you will see how CISV Austria increases their number of chapters (a structural reform) which is followed by a strong jump forward in hostiing and participation. Also you can see how Brazil grows strongly in the ninetees, but then continues to fall especially in the number of hosted camps while participation stays roughly the same. You may call me a statistical maniac, but I'd love to see somebody enter more countries and years into database and we'll watch how CISV developed globally in the past - in fact, I've enabled free-for-everybody-editing on the original spreadsheet, so if you like, you can add your country's numbers as well.