Britain’s best-loved children’s hospital and charity, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Trust (GOSH), contracted me to lead a two-year project to modernise the hospital’s web presence and take its brand into the 21st century. GOSH is both Britain’s first children’s hospital and a pioneering child health institution (along with its partner the Institute for Child Health). The hospital’s outstanding reputation meant the project was carried out under intense public, media and professional scrutiny, and required a keen awareness of new media developments and the needs of the hospital’s patients, their families and the public.
The project was developed in three, distinct phases. Screen grabs from these phases are now available for download and evaluation. They also include web traffic statistics. This unique snapshot of a complex project as it unfolded, should prove useful for other e-health practitioners.
A great way to track the historical development of a web project is to use the Wayback Machine’s internet archive here. By typing in the web address (for example, www.gosh.nhs.uk, and www.gosh.org), you can see a chronological history of the website by month.
Content produced for the GOSH Child Health Portal (now MyGOSH) in 2003 on the ketogenic diet and how it can help with the treatment of epilepsy.
Annual Clinical Governance Report 2000/2001.
Read here about the child health portal project’s vision and strategy, its launch and overall impact. Or download a brief Powerpoint presentation here: GOSH Powerpoint.
In 2003, the UK’s Guardian newspaper called the Children First website one of the “three most admired websites in the UK public and voluntary sectors,” and a UK government assessment called the overall GOSH child health web portal a role model for the NHS.
The GOSH Child Health Portal team receive the Childnet Award in 2003 at London’s Science Museum (Photo: CBBC Newsround).
In 2006, The Times of London called Children First the Top Child Health Website in its Wellbeing on the Web: The Best Portals survey (November 11, 2006).
It was 10 years ago this month that Southern Innovator‘s first issue launched in New York during the UN’s General Assembly week (UNGA). It focused on mobile phones and information technology for a reason: these connectivity transformations were re-shaping how people lived their lives, even in the poorest and remotest places on earth.
The content was based on global research, beginning in 2007, funded by the United Nations.
“What a tremendous magazine your team has produced! It’s a terrific tour de force of what is interesting, cutting edge and relevant in the global mobile/ICT space… This is great, engaging, relevant and topical stuff.” Rose Shuman, Founder & CEO, Open Mind and Question Box, Santa Monica, CA, U.S.A.
Every issue was launched somewhere new around the world. While Southern Innovator’s digital presence has been key to its success and global reach, the hard copy of the magazine was designed with special features. The magazine needed to be robust and able to stand a fair bit of abuse and hard wear. It needed to be easy to read in low light conditions. And it needed to look sharp and eye-catching to reach as wide an audience as possible.
In 2010, as we prepared to launch Southern Innovator, the branding and website for David South Consulting was re-visioned by Icelandic graphic designer and illustrator Sólveig Rolfsdóttir. David South Consulting has been working with clients around the world since 1991.
Graphic Designer and Illustrator: Sólveig Rolfsdóttir.
A pioneering technology social enterprise has found a way to connect people around the world to the new digital economy, transforming their lives and providing long-term employment opportunities. It is closing the digital divide in a very practical way, teaching new skills and, most importantly, providing income to the poor and vulnerable.
The San Francisco, USA-based non-profit social enterprise Samasource (samasource.org) uses what it calls microwork – a virtual assembly line of small tasks broken down from a larger project so they can be completed over the Internet – to outsource work to its network of workers around the world.
The tasks in this virtual piecework range from writing to transcribing to organizing online content.
The company organizes the projects using its own online work distribution system connecting workers around the world to the SamaHub in San Francisco. Most of the workers are women, youth and refugees. When they complete their task, it is sent back to the SamaHub in San Francisco where the staff check it and assure its quality. Once approved and completed, the project is returned to the client.
The company was founded in 2008 and draws on experts in “distributed work, economic development, and outsourcing.”
The microwork is divided into three areas: content services, data enrichment and transcription.
Content services can include writing descriptions for online business listings, organizing large databases on information or creating brief descriptions of existing content to make it easier for search engines to find it. “Data enrichment” tackles the vast quantity of information on the Internet that needs to be kept up to date and reliable. It also includes ‘tagging’, where text or images on the Internet need to have appropriate ‘tags’ or labels. And finally, transcription services include digitizing paper documents like receipts or books or transcribing audio and video files for the web.
All these tasks are labour intensive and require high attention to detail. And they are critical to any online business’s success if it wants a reputation for accuracy and consistency.
Samasource is optimistic about its future potential because of the sheer size of the market for business process outsourcing: estimated to be worth over US $100 billion. What Samasource does, called ‘impact sourcing’ – outsourcing to people in the developing world living in poor or remote communities – is a market worth US $5 billion, according to Samasource’s website.
It differs from conventional business process outsourcing in a number of respects, including the educational background of the workers. Most conventional outsourcing goes to college graduates in cities in India, China and the Philippines. Impact outsourcing is done by people with at most a high school education.
The digital economy needs these workers to handle the many millions of detailed tasks required to link together information. It is easy to take this for granted because it is hidden from view, but it is what enables the Internet to function and businesses to thrive. Samasource provides outsourcing services including content moderation and data entry to clients like LinkedIn, Intuit and the US State Department.
“We bring dignified, computer-based work to women, youth, and refugees living in poverty,” said Samasource’s founder and chief executive officer, Leila Janah.
Janah has a background in development studies and formerly worked for the World Bank. This experience convinced her that much foreign aid was failing to target what poor people are really looking for: a job that pays well.
Samasource sees what it does as work, and not handouts.
It also believes it is changing perspectives, proving people from the poorest places on earth can become trustworthy, hard-working knowledge workers.
The Internet is a unique medium because it transcends borders and smooths contact between people with varying linguistic, cultural and educational capabilities.
“The Internet reduces the friction of collaboration across all of these centres and time zones, and with a highly distributed workforce,” said Janah.
Samasource claims to have paid out US $1 million in wages to more than 1,500 workers around the world. Ambitiously, it wants to expand this to reach some of the 144 million youth between 16 and 24 living on less than US $2 a day.
Youth are a particular focus for Samasource. Samasource targets young people who are literate and have received an education but still can’t get a job.
As for the many women employed by Samasource, they were either unemployed or earning poverty-level wages doing precarious work in low-level manufacturing and not building their skills.
Samasource currently has 16 partnerships in Haiti, India, Pakistan, Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. Criteria to work with Samasource includes being in a high-poverty region. Another criteria is for most of the money earned to stay within the region where the work is done and adhere to the standards laid down by Samasource.
Samasource’s success means it has attracted further funding. In December 2011, it was given a US $1.5 million grant from Google.org – the Google.com search engine’s charity. It has also raised US $5 million from non-profit investors, including the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the eBay Foundation. The challenge for the Samasource model will be to prove, with this new funding, that it can scale its operations to pay out more to its workers than it is taking in to meet its operating costs.
Microwork is turning out to be big work indeed!
Published: January 2012
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
Like this story? Here is a dirty secret: this website is packed with stories about global South innovators. We spent 7 years researching and documenting these stories around the world. We interviewed the innovators to learn from them and we visited them to see how they did it. Why not use the Search bar at the top and tap in a topic and see what stories come up? As for my work, I have been involved with start-ups and media ventures since the early 1990s. In the years since I have learned a great deal about innovation and digital and have shared these insights in the stories on this website as well as in the 5 issues of Southern Innovator magazine. So, stick around and read some more!
While Southern Innovator’s digital presence has been key to its success and global reach, the hard copy of the magazine was designed with special features. The magazine neded to be robust and able to stand a fair bit of abuse and hard wear. It needed to be easy to read in low light conditions. And it needed to look sharp and eye-catching to reach as wide an audience as possible.
In the past decade, there have been many devastating natural disasters, from Iran’s 2003 Bam earthquake and the Asian tsunami of 2004 to Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 and the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti in 2010. All of these events received extensive media attention and drew a large aid response. Those who track natural disasters have noticed a serious increase in frequency over the past decade (http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article26290.html).
But rapid aid and media attention do not necessarily lead to long-term recovery. More than a year after the earthquake in Haiti, pace of recovery remains slow. Numerous media stories highlighted the lack of progress.
For the people caught up in these tragedies, quickly returning to a normal life is paramount for psychological and physical health. But this is often the hardest part. Some countries do this well and others do not.
On January 26, 2001, an earthquake laid waste to a large region of the Indian state of Gujarat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Gujarat_earthquake). Ten years later there is a remarkable recovery that has taken place. So how did they do it?
The 7.9-magnitude quake killed an estimated 20,000 people, injured 150,000, made a million homeless, and destroyed around 8,000 villages. It devastated the Kutch district capital, Bhuj, and other major towns.
In the decade since the earthquake, the state has averaged double-digit growth. Despite having only five percent of the country’s population, Gujarat racks up impressive economic achievements: it has a fifth of India’s exports and a sixth of its industrial production. It has a long-standing entrepreneurial culture based on trade. It can draw on a well-connected global diaspora that ensures a steady inflow of new thinking and investment. Members of this diaspora also contributed to the US $130 million in aid that poured into the region after the quake.
One of the factors contributing to the successful recovery is effective government action.
The disaster has been turned into an opportunity to jolt the region out of the “Middle Ages and into the modern world,” NGO worker Navin Prasad told the BBC.
All the media attention, support and cash at the time forced the Indian government to pay attention to a region it had ignored in the past.
The army came in to help with the emergency and the Indian government allocated US $2 billion to the reconstruction that followed.
Aid was used well and in the first two years many of the damaged villages were rebuilt. And not just rebuilt to what they were, but completely modernized. New houses were constructed to high standards, with more rooms and lots of light. They also came with running water and a toilet. New facilities like medical centres and communal areas were put in place.
The district capital of Bhuj was levelled in the earthquake. But new plans for the city were drafted in the following years. Now Bhuj has two new ring roads, a new airport, parks and shops. Streets were widened and new water and sewage works installed.
But along with the new infrastructure and plenty of cash, came something more important for the region’s long-term recovery: economic growth. The Indian government created tax-free zones drawing in private investment. An astonishing US $10 billion in private investment has come in with US $7 billion more to come, according to the BBC.
One miraculous turnaround is in the former tiny fishing port of Mundra. Prior to the earthquake, it sat in the middle of a salt marsh. It is now India’s largest private port and rivals Mumbai with its Mundra Port and Special Economic Zone (http://www.portofmundra.com/), incorporated in 2003. The Adani Group, a very large Indian private company with global interests (http://www.adanigroup.com/index.html), owns the port now worth US $7 billion, hiring many people once dependent on aid agencies for income.
The head of the Adani Foundation the charitable wing of the Adani Group, Sushma Oza, told the BBC how the company is spending its profits on further developing the area: “Our own budget for social development in this region is $6m a year, so you can imagine how we are trying to change the lives of people to live in a better way,” she said.
In the western portion of the state, in the administrative district of Kutch which is home to Bhuj, around 300 businesses have been established, including the Welspun towel factory (http://www.welspun.com/content.asp?Link=Y&SubmenuID=24). The biggest towel factory in the world, it was built in just nine months and makes 250,000 towels a day. An ambitious firm, it bought the British company Christy (http://www.christy-towels.com/), maker of the official Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championship towels.
So why towels in Kutch? Welspun chairman Balkrishan Goenka laid down the incentives to the BBC: “There were no local taxes for the first five years and no excise duties. Nor were there indirect taxes to government – they were exempted for five years.”
“Those were the primary benefits,” he said. “More than that there was huge support from the local government so industry can come faster.”
Since the earthquake, 110,000 jobs have been created in Kutch alone. More importantly for the area’s future, it is has gone from neglected backwater to a significant pillar of the Indian economy.
Another driver of recovery was the growth of the dairy industry. The Bhuj dairy plant collapsed in the earthquake and was then rebuilt by the National Dairy Development Board (http://www.nddb.org/). The plant can now process 50,000 litres of milk a day and is run by the Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation (http://www.amul.com/organisation.html), India’s largest food products marketing organization. It has 2.9 million producer members and represents 15,322 village societies.
Not everyone has turned their lives around, however. Aid workers estimate thousands are still living in temporary shelters. They defecate in the open and few have clean water. Just getting two meals a day is a problem.
There are complaints about the landless and tenants not receiving the same help.
“Many are tribal, others are low-caste communities, some are Muslims – but they all have one thing in common: poverty,” Bharat Parmer, program coordinator for ActionAid International in Kutch, told Alertnet.
“A large number of these people were tenants and did not own land and so it has been much harder for them to claim their rights as rehabilitation was very much focused on home and land owners.”
But local authorities say rehabilitation schemes have been comprehensive, covering all those who were hit by the quake.
“I don’t think that there are people who did not get what they were due – there may be a rare case here and there but we have rehabilitated all that were in need,” said Gunvant Vaghela, the second-most senior civil servant in Kutch district.
Published: February 2011
Resources
1) How to activate support from the global technology community in a disaster. Website: http://crisiscommons.org/
2) UNICEF: Community-Based Disaster Preparedness Projects (CBDPs) in India have been helping communities restructure to survive when disaster strikes. Website: http://www.unicef.org.uk/campaigns
3) The US Government has extensive resources online on how to prepare for a wide variety of natural and man-made disasters. Website: http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/
4) The magazine Popular Mechanics has excellent resources on how anyone can prepare their family and community for disasters. Website: http://www.popularmechanics.com/survival/
5) Telecoms Sans Frontiers: Focuses on providing communications in the first days after an emergency. Website:http://www.tsfi.org/
Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP’s South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South’s innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.
David South Consulting 
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