Akvo.org - See it happen - Latest Comments

Re: Training Akvo RSR users in Ghana

Fulinjua Elisha — Mon, 07 May 2012 06:36:59 -0000

great work done

Re: Football becomes a bridge to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

Npower Championship — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 02:34:46 -0000

The majority people who watch football games in the Netherlands
aren’t aware of Dutch development aid plans.. So a goal of Football for WASH is to use football matches to bring the reality of
these local African projects back home to the Netherlands. Akvo Really Simple
Reporting that will be used to share the stories and updates about the progress
of the program.

Re: Walking for Water 2012 in the Netherlands

Riverside Plumbing — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:16:26 -0000

This is indeed a great move to awaken the community for there responsibility in taking good care of our surroundings. I hope that this will be done not just in Netherlands but to the whole nation as well.

Re: Walking for Water 2012 in the Netherlands

B Ogendi — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 04:02:13 -0000

Thank you very much the people of Holland. special thanks to the all the children who took part in the WALKING FOR WATER campaign.
It will help many people especially kids whose education is interrupted to look for water in Kenya. Ben Ogendi ,Kisumu, Kenya.

Re: Football becomes a bridge to Water, Sanitation and Hygiene

FairWater Paul van Beers — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:55:36 -0000

Great initiative, and we hope for FairPlay and that many kids will have water. At the same time, we are worried. In all the media attention on water for Africa, one of the most important present issues is not getting attention: Sustainability.

FairWater.org is putting this strongly on the agenda. Why? Evaluations showed that in Africa, 40% to sometimes 70% of the donor water points are now out of order. This is mainly due to inadequate provisions for long term maintenance of the water points.

For instance community handpumps on average last 3 to max. 5 years. Of course that was not the intention of NGOs to donate a pump only for a few years. But statistics are hard to beat and now Africa is crowded with abandoned handpumps, sadly rusting away.

Every handpump serves on average 250 people or more, including at least 50 to 100 kids. Small children are very sensitive to unsafe water, so when the handpumps breaks down, they are the first to suffer the consequences. Most of the rural kids therefore, have lost some sisters and brothers. And the broken handpump plays an important role in this disaster.

FairWater.org therefore focuses 100% on sustainability and rehabilitation of these broken community handpumps by a durable pump with an innovative, solid and proven “BlueZone” maintenance concept. This re-enables communities to take control of their water supply at a very low and affordable price.

We sincerely hope, that the football initiative will do it’s utmost to assure that every water point will be sustainable. Fairwater has support partners in Kenya and Mozambique and offers to join hands to also make these football water points sustainable.

The Dutch have a great name in water. Let’s make sure that these kids can benefit our funding for more than just 3 to 5 years and make it sustainable.

Fairwater.org
Paul van Beers
…

Re: Upgrading London

Mark Charmer — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 13:45:33 -0000

Thanks Lorenzo!

Re: Upgrading London

Lorenzo Wood — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 22:50:00 -0000

Good idea to get a RAID NAS, but don't confuse RAID with backup. You have some protection against a drive failure but much less against some other hardware or software problem with the box, and still less against your just deleting something you didn't mean to.

Supplement what you've got with on-line backup. I like Backblaze; I hear Carbonite is also very good. Both give you unlimited automatic backup for $5/month or less per machine. Quite a bargain.

Cheers

Re: The Akvo platform – Akvo FLOW

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:01:50 -0000

Thanks Peter. We are hard at work making it just that! :)

Re: The Akvo platform – Akvo FLOW

Peter Boonman — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 11:09:43 -0000

Thumbs up, AKVO! Well done and I hope that it will become the tool of choice for organisations and governments alike.
Peter Boonman, Pump Aid, London

Re: Akvo and Water For People sign FLOW agreement

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 08:25:00 -0000

Thanks Juergen! That is certainly something we’ll be interested in looking at: aggregation of data on subject areas. Let us get settled in and we’ll have a look at things like that.

Re: Akvo Track Day. Amsterdam, March 2012

Marten Susebeek — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:15:17 -0000

Thanks Akvo for organizing this inspiring day! Really useful for my start-up.
I am wondering if the presentations given on track day are (or become) available in pdf, ppt, or on slideshare?!

Re: Akvo and Water For People sign FLOW agreement

jke — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 11:08:32 -0000

Great news indeed.

Thomas, how about if we use one deployment for such a map on sanitation? I already have the sanimap.com domain (which is sort of idling since some time).

Re: How do you value web-based platforms?

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:38:17 -0000

Hi Ben, yes that is actually quite interesting. There is a tension between measuring everything you can measure, and measuring only what is important and what you can actually have an impact on. I am of the opinion that at the top level you should have max 5-7 indicators and if any of them are performing badly then you should be able to influence that with actions you are in control of. Otherwise you are measuring the wrong things.

Re: How do you value web-based platforms?

Deepak — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 21:19:41 -0000

Hey Peter,

Thank you for thinking and writing about this aspect. Converting the measurements into a traffic signal light is a sound idea, and maybe we might borrow it for India Water Portal as well ! The traffic signal system should be complemented with narratives that make the story complete. Anecdotes help the numbers make sense. I am not a fan of complex measurement metrics, because at its best it is information overload, and at its worst, an implementation nightmare.Questions that are important to ask: Who owns the 'metrics' game? Is it better to centralize the metrics collection? Or decentralize it to individual team members? Is it better to have a static measurement criteria, or add/drop metrics based on learning?Can Technology ease the process?Is it merely a management tool? What do the employees think about this? Let me throw you another challenge."Throw all the metrics in the air, and catch only the ones you really like" Good post, Peter. Got me thinking early in the morning :-)Hope things are swell with you work wise, and otherwise !
Cheers,

Deepak

Re: How do you value web-based platforms?

Ben — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:52:48 -0000

I thought this was a pretty interesting read - The full story of "the one important thing" for startups.

http://blog.asmartbear.com/one...

Re: Losing Gino

Zacharysifuentes — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:13:44 -0000

Gino was instrumental in making the Bow & Arrow Press, a letterpress studio in Adams House at Harvard, a real success in the mid 80s. We now run a hugely successful and popular bookmaking and design center on campus, and we owe it to Gino. Our first Open Press Night for the spring semester will be a homecoming and reunion in his honor.

Re: Losing Gino

Kenneth. — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:55:31 -0000

Gino was a amazing creative and wonderful person. I am deeply saddened by his passing.

Re: Akvo and Water For People discuss FLOW

Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 11:04:42 -0000

Noah, don’t hesitate to write about the work we do.

Re: Akvo and Water For People discuss FLOW

Noah Morgenstern — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 10:07:07 -0000

Wow! Great technology. I would love to feature it on my bog: waterqualityandsecurity.wordpr...

The blog focuses on water quality monitoring technologies and water security issues. Id love for your to check it out and if you're agreeable I will link the story back to akvo.

Thanks,Noah
blog manager
waterqualityandsecurity.wordpr...

Re: Training our South American partners

Chris Amsinger — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 08:35:03 -0000

Great update guys!

Re: Akvo RSR 2.0. Now it’s all about you.

Jvds — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 10:14:29 -0000

Congratulations with this important step! Jeroen

Re: Building a new Akvo hub in East Africa

Stephen Musyoka — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 09:24:20 -0000

looking forward

Re: Keeping video really simple – an introduction

Dan Shemie — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 21:12:56 -0000

Thanks for sharing the the many lessons learned. Brilliant.

Re: Keeping video really simple – an introduction

Isabel Ordoñez — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 06:44:39 -0000

Beautifully put... the video interview in the end is the cherry on top, really. Inspiring

Re: Developing Akvo’s performance indicators

Saskia — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 06:01:27 -0000

Thanks for sharing Stefan! In terms of thinking through impact, you could consider asking questions such as : 'what does the tool/service enable its users to do? How does this relate to the users' own expectations and needs? (in all their diversity)', ' What effective opportunities do AKVO users have to exploit the tool/service?' , ' How can users act on the information obtained via AKVO and run with it to do their own thing?', etc. :) It will be interesting to follow your thoughts further - thanks for sharing them publicly! Cheers!