Rapportive for development

(rapportive is a gmail plugin that gives you a pseudo CRM experience) Goal: to lower the barrier for project managers in aid organizations to coordinate and learn from their peers internationally who may be currently working on have worked on similar projects. To make co-ordination and peer learning the default. Approach: Develop a simple tool that connects people in the aid / development community to each other based on the details of a project they're about to start. The platform connects to existing aggregated published aid agency information (either via the IATI registry, world bank finances site or projects portal). These data contain contact details for project managers, evaluators, and other participants in the project - the platform tries to connect these contact information to all other available contact / bio information (e.g. linkedin, twitter, facebook, devex) and presents these to the user in a ranked fashion with easily actionable contact information (e.g. an email address or a phone number) To be used by: Key audience is project managers in aid organisatoins, but anybody working on a project can benefit from quickly connecting with their global peers. To Impact/Benefit: project managers, Governments, local development experts, beneficiaries, donors

Example:

1) A user inputs the size of the project (in financial terms), the project duration (years, months etc.) the region / country and the topic areas it covers. (e.g. health, finance, education, even with more specific terms from taxonomies like those in the IATI standard / DAC) 2) The tool returns a ranked (by relvance) list of individuals with as much contact, bio and professional experience information of the people involved with similar projects (or similar-ish) as well as connections with any published documents / evaluations (some in IATI files) making it easy for a project manager starting to know who to contact or what to read to co-ordinate and learn from experience in a simlar topic or region.

User Stories:

Similar Projects and Resources:

What existing financial data would you use?

Data from the IATI registry: http://iatiregistry.org/dataset (not all publishers have detailed per-project contact information

Data form donor-specific portals like the World Bank Projects Site:

e.g. http://www.worldbank.org/projects/ site that returns results like:

http://www.worldbank.org/projects/P081771/e-lanka-development?lang=en for a specific project on e-government in Sri Lanka managed by Henry K Bagazonzya email: hbagazonzya@worldbank.org

Data for this stuff available via World Bank Project API: http://search.worldbank.org/api/v2/projects with some documentatoin at: http://data.worldbank.org/developers

Potentially some data from finances.worldbank.org for context / high-level discoverability.

A lot of this could be done with just one data source (e.g. WB data) as a proof of concept to show that it is possible to generage a good list of contacts / mini community to engage with white starting / running a project. What additional financial data would you like?

financial / operational data that's published with better and more current contact information for project managers, evaluators, staff, participants, counterparts etc.

Any other data sources?