Right now I am doing a short consultancy helping IFRC with a Learning Conference in Haiti. So we are having some interesting discussions on what a learning organisation is; how important is it to have a plan, or is it it enough to just have a vision and work out how to get there as you go along. Well it seems Linus Torwalds has neither a plan nor a vision ... Linus is the inventor of Linux, the operating system (well, kernel actually) at the heart of over 90% of the world's supercomputers, most of the the computers that serve up the internet, and Android, the world's number one smartphone OS. Found these two great quotes at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/20/linux_founder_linus_torvalds_tech_prize/. One of the main reasons I think Linux came to be successful in the first place was that I never had very lofty goals. The goalposts for me were always a few weeks out - never some kind of "one day, this will change the world". It was much more pedestrian than that, and I actually think that's the only way to make real progress: one small step at a time, not looking too far ahead to see the details. People like to idolize the "ideas" and "inspiration", but in the end, almost anybody can have an idea. Getting things actually done is where people stumble.
I’ve never been a visionary - the thing I tend to worry about is actual technical issues, and my goal has always been to just make sure the technical side of Linux (and other projects I’ve been involved in) have been as solid as possible.
So, is an OS just a special case? Or can you succeed at anything just by loving the nitty-gritty?
I felt I had to share this gorgeously simple trick for finding the colour name you need in R. col.wheel <- function(str, cex=0.75) { cols <- colors()[grep(str, colors())] pie(rep(1, length(cols)), labels=cols, col=cols, cex=cex) cols } #then just do: col.wheel("slate") #or: col.wheel("dark") #or whatever. Kudos to http://www.stubbornmule.net/2011/11/colour-wheels-in-r/
We quite often ask if a ToC is "evaluable"; but what does that mean?
On his blog Rick Davies suggests:
- Understandable
- Verifiable
- Testable
- Explained
- Complete
- Inclusive
- Justifiable
- Plausible
- Owned
- Embedded
Powell, Steve, Joakim Molander, and Ivona Čelebičić. ‘Assessment of Outcome Mapping as a Tool for Evaluating and Monitoring Support to Civil Society Organisations’. In Governance by Evaluation for Sustainable Development: Institutional Capacities and Learning, edited by Michal Sedlacko and André Martinuzzi. Edward Elgar Publishing Limited, 2011.
Great idea in principle. The yellow dots show where the accused live, and the redder districts are the poorest. But I guess these are the districts with the highest population density so the graphic doesn't mean anything on its own. Pity
Freiwilligendienste und ihre Wirkung - vom Nutzen des Engagements
"Voluntary Service and its impact - the point of getting involved." Well done Joern!
At proMENTE social research we use lyx (www.lyx.org) and zotero (www.zotero.org) to produce our project proposals, expressions of interest, etc.
I just did some more work on this and thought I would document some useful steps and tricks.
Overall approach. Basically we have a single lyx file with all the material we need - information about the organisation, methods we use etc., combined with various bibliographies, project lists, and CVs included using pdfpages. Then we just hide what we don't need for a particular proposal by using branches in lyx.
Using unicode bibtex files. We export out bibliographies from Zotero which produces unicode by default. We need this for all our special characters, especially čćžšđ etc. Lyx is not supposed to work with unicode characters in its bibtex files, but if you just set the encoding to utf8 in the document settings, it seems to always work, except for a few special characters like long hyphens which we can delete in Zotero. It also doesn't work with Russian characters.
Using bibliography for project lists. We decided to use bibliographies to list our projects too. So we use zotero to store information on projects just as if they were publications.
Sectioned bibliographies. We need to break up our publication list into reports, book chapters etc. So we just select "sectioned bibliography" in the document settings in lyx and then link to a series of blbtex files further down the document. These are all set to show "all references". This means in the main text at the start of the document we can cite our own publications and projects.
Including CV pdfs. This is a nice benefit of lyx - we can include our CVs very simply using insert/file/external material/pdfpages. The only trick is to make sure the links are relative as we use dropbox to sync between different computers.
Fancy page headers. We use \usepackage{fancyhdr} and \usepackage{graphicx} in the document preamble to customise the appearance of headers and include a little logo on every page.
Fancy section headings. We use \usepackage{xcolor} in \usepackage{titlesec} in the document preamble to customise the appearance of section headers.
Removing title page. We decided not to use the title page at all, so \renewcommand{\maketitle}{} gets rid of it.
I have attached an example output pdf, without the CVs.
Read the rest of this post »
Logframe bloat causes headaches, tiredness and indigestion in M&E staff. This post is about one cause of it. Sometimes I have to help organisations with their existing results frameworks or logframes and I am struck by how often I see, below a composite result, what one could call “redundant results”: subsidiary results which are supposed to contribute to the higher, composite result but which are in fact just parts of its definition. For example, suppose: “Result 1: increased awareness of HIV amongst schoolchildren and their parents”, which we could call a composite result, has below it two subsidiary results: “Result 1.1: increased awareness of HIV amongst schoolchildren” and “Result 1.2: increased awareness of HIV amongst parents”. Does this kind of combination of results strike anyone else as weird? 1.1 and 1.2 are redundant, aren't they? Can't we just strike the two lower-level results? Leaving them in is a major cause of logframe bloat. Manuals like the USAID TIPS series correctly teach that results have to be logically independent of their parent result; they can be measured independently from it, and collectively they can causally contribute to it. Whereas in the example, 1.1 and 1.2 together are the very same thing as 1; taken together, they logically imply it and are implied by it. If A and B are the same thing as C, they cannot cause it. It can't be part of our theory of change to achieve C by doing C. There are many occasions where we just have to have composite results; when we are addressing changes in related but different groups of stakeholders, or geographical areas, minority and majority groups, etc. Or where we are aiming for a bunch or series of related but different products or achievements or regulations adopted or whatever. That's OK. But then isn't it always a mistake to add a redundant level of superfluous results below such a composite result? Sure, one can (correctly) respond “oh this just goes to show the fatal flaws in this kind of sequential, deterministic program design” but that doesn't help the tens of thousands of organisations who are bound by contract to exactly these kinds of designs, and are going to be bound by similar contracts for the foreseeable future too. This leads to a bunch of other issues. First, unfortunately, there are many different ways in which subsidiary results can fail to be logically independent of the parent result. Here are some possibilities. Exact overlap: subsidiary results overlap exactly with the parent. In this case we can just delete the redundant lower layer as discussed above. The parent can include content which is not covered in the subsidiary results. So if we change Result 1 to “increased awareness of HIV amongst educational stakeholders”, 1.1 and 1.2 are part of the definition of 1, but we have left out teachers, principals, the education authorities etc. Now, do we assume that the subsidiary results (or any other results elsewhere in the framework) can make a causal contribution to this additional coverage in the parent? If no, we just have superfluous content in the parent which we are not programming to change and which should just be deleted (and then the subsidiary level is entirely redundant and we can delete that too). If yes, for example because we believe the children and their parents will influence the other stakeholders, we have got a bit of a mess and we should redesign this part of the framework. The subsidiary results can include content which is not covered in the parent. So if we change Result 1.1 to “increased awareness of STDs amongst school children”, 1.1 is still part of the definition of 1, but it also includes material which is not covered in 1. Now, do we assume that this additional content in the subsidiary results can make a causal contribution to the parent (or to any other results in the framework)? Again, there are two cases: If no, we just have superfluous content in the subsidiary results which does not lead to higher-level change and which should probably just be deleted (and then the subsidiary level is entirely redundant and we can delete that too). If yes, for example because we really believe the children's knowledge of other STDs will influence or reinforce their or other stakeholders' awareness of HIV, again we have got a bit of a mess and we should redesign this part of the framework. Of course various combinations of case B and case C are possible too. Second, what are we going to do about the indicators? Composite results need composite indicators. But donors want commitments to simple targets for simple indicators. So for a composite result we have to both define a set of subsidiary indicators for each of the dimensions of the result and specify how to combine them into a single indicator. I will look at composite indicators in a subsequent post.
My operating system of choice is ubuntu. There has been a lot of fuss about the new desktop environment for ubuntu called unity, which marks ubuntu's partial departure from gnome. Personally I can't see one single advantage for unity over gnome, which has also changed its interface, gnome-shell, for the new gnome-3 roughly in parallel with unity but just offers a better implementation of the same ideas IMHO. I have been using gnome-shell as my desktop manager quite a bit over the last year or so.
But now I am back once again to awesome window manager, a wickedly small, fast, light and efficient window manager. It is in the ubuntu repositories and is easy to install. What it offers, and why you might prefer it over any other window manager if you regularly have more than six or so windows open at one time:
- You can configure it to your heart's content but the defaults aren't bad either.
- Starts up in just a couple of seconds after the log-in screen
- Awesomely stable. Never freezes.
- Allows the best possible space-saving options for smaller screens.
- Awesomely fast. Switch amongst dozens of windows like lightning.
- Allows you to organise your windows into tabs, which are like workspaces on steroids.
- Helps you to arrange the windows on a tab in awesomely efficient ways - switch between fullscreen and different tiled layouts at the press of a key. No more fishing around with the mouse to organise three or four windows in a logical way.
- Totally keyboard driven, and you can use the mouse too if you feel like it.
- Lots of features, like being able to define where different kinds of window from different applications appear and how they appear.
- Ugly as hell. No iCandy whatsoever.
FWIW, here is my config file: http://pastebin.com/XDT0MDgL
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