The first thing to note is that it has the interesting title “Where is the Money?”, explicitly tying the future of aid to the financing of aid. We can all agree that funding – both the amount and the sources – are vital to humanitarian aid, but it worries me that discussions about the future of aid might be reduced to a discussion about finance rather than principles.

The second thing to note is that the poll shows that the aid community is as unimaginative as the rest of the population. There’s no shame in that, but it does show that we need a bit more grit in the vaseline. If we’re responding to disasters, we need to actually predict disasters, not just predict business-as-usual with a few extra people living in cities. A word from Noah Raford:

In the end, futures work is rarely about accurate prediction. It is almost always about staging a useful intervention which encourages discussion of the most challenging aspects of the present… The best futures projects take on difficult subjects of today, cast them forward, then reflect them back upon the present in order to make them discussable, now.

The problem with the Alertnet poll is that it does take on difficult subjects of today but it fails to cast them forward. What do I mean by this? The poll notes that one factor increasing humanitarian need will be high and volatile food prices, which is true; but it’s been true for the last four years. Another factor noted is increased urbanisation, which is also true: but 50% of the global population became urbanised in 2008, so that’s also been true for at least the four years¹.

The same is basically true for every single item on this laundry list of future problems. They’re all problems that we should have been planning for ten years ago, have only recently noticed that they’re a big deal, and are now assuming that those are the problems that we’ll face in the future. In military terms, this is what’s referred to as “fighting the last war”, and it’s generally agreed to be the quickest way to lose the next war.

Exhibit A: the factor deemed likely to increase humanitarian need was an increase in climate-related disasters. The reason for this selection is that climate change is now the dominant meme in environmental circles – which isn’t to say it isn’t important, but it might not be important in the way you think.² Exhibit B: The biggest challenge to the delivery of humanitarian aid was thought to be the politicisation of aid. The reason for this selection is the war on terror – but the politicisation of aid is baked into the aid industry, and calling it a “challenge” completely misses that.

I could go on, but hopefully you get the point. The reason why this Alertnet poll is wrong is not that the responses are “wrong” – they accurate reflect what people believe to be true – the problem is that what they believe to be true is wrong, in the sense that it doesn’t actually reflect the future of aid. Visit the site, read the results and watch the video anyway: it’s still interesting, even if it’s wrong.

And now, a vision of the future we definitely won’t get:

Click here to view the embedded video.

1. In fact urbanisation has been a critical issue for much longer, but completely overlooked due to the rural bias of traditional livelihoods interventions.
2. There are a whole host of environmental problems that are not necessarily climate-related (eutrophication, topsoil degradation, deforestation, you choose) or that are climate-related but don’t come at us from the obvious direction of “more flooding!” Boy, am I looking forward to the first famine due to ocean acidification.

Related posts:

1. Welcome to the future
2. Heuristics for this discussion
3. Ushahidi: crowdsourcing in their own words

Embedded Decision-Making in Peace Operations

The diagram illustrates a dynamic, where the lightening bolt is any given action that the mission undertakes. Each of the three MPD elements is nested, with the military is embedded in political decision-making, and the political embedded in the requirements of social and economic development. The problem is that each element operates on a different timescale, with decision-making happening at different speeds, creating feedback loops that are completely out of synch with each other.

In a peace operation, the military can’t wait for the political level to reach a final analysis before it reacts to any given situation (for example, a rebel attack); as a result the political level often reaches a premature conclusion while the political feedback loop is still completing. This goes double for the development loop, because social and economic development processes happen in terms of decades rather than days.

Within this triple feedback loop, for any given action the three cycles may come together at a single point (temporal or spatial), but the effects are felt over different timescales and in different ways, each feedback loop may be positive or negative; and of course there is no guarantee that the three loops will even come together again. If this model is anywhere close to useful, then it’s always going to be impossible to predict how the three will play off each other from any given starting point – let alone for the wider range of interlocking actions the international community usually undertakes.

As a result it seems unlikely that we’ll ever be able to reconcile the three to create a truly coherent MPD approach. MPD is complex rather than complicated, and this means that linear planning tools – which currently dominate thinking in all three of these elements – aren’t up to the task. While systems thinking is making its way into each domain and will no doubt provide new tools to deal with this problem, there’s still a long way to go before that will have any impact on the ground.

It’s worth noting as well that this applies not just to peace operations in the traditional UN blue helmet sense, but also occupations such as Afghanistan and Iraq, and it should be a counsel of caution for anybody who still thinks that regime change is a linear process of Stop X, Start Y. Also possible to adapt this very basic model to change processes in e.g. Arab countries in 2011-2012, but that’s a story for another day. Also:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Related posts:

1. Is the relief-development continuum a figment of your imagination?
2. No comment on Haiti
3. Ever have one of those years? And Darfur, mapped.

In a couple of previous posts, I outlined why I think open data poses serious difficulties for the humanitarian sector. A lot of those difficulties stem from endemic weaknesses in the humanitarian sector, because at root I believe that failure has been built into the humanitarian system, and I really need to get around to explaining what I mean by that. That can wait for next time, because right here I want to lay out what I think needs to happen if humanitarian organisations are ever going to survive the changes that the information age has brought, as it relates to using data effectively.

Two things to bear in mind. First, that this is taking the perspective of organisations as they are now; but I also think that organisations will evolve into new forms in the course of this century, a greater variety of forms than the traditional “corporate” model allows (and yes, most NGOs are set up on a corporate model). Second, that all of these steps are not merely realistic, they’re actually relatively easy, and especially relatively easy compared to the path that most organisations are currently taking. The reason that they’re not being widely pursued is that they emerge from a view of the humanitarian system as just that – a system, with multiple interacting layers – rather than as a hierarchy reaching from global headquarters down into “the field”.

Training

1. Create freely available training modules and support material via e.g. Moodle, so our staff can start doing it for themselves. Then open up that training material so that anybody can benefit from it – local government, local NGOs, affected communities, national universities, anybody.
2. Create an accreditation system for info management trainers, initially based on prior experience. Don’t accredit people in “information management”, they can do a university course if they want a diploma; but accredit trainers so that you can reach into the professional training community.
3. Run facilitated online and onsite courses, provided by accredited trainers and leading to accreditation for participants. Okay, I lied – it’s okay to accredit people in information management. The reason that I hesitate about this is because accreditation only really works if there’s an infrastructure around it that recognises and value accreditation.
4. Integrate accredited info management course into existing accredited programmes (e.g. RedR, Clusters, etc). This step deals with that infrastructure issue, but only to a certain extent. There’s a lack of recognition of “management” a professional skill in the sector, which is always going to work against us.

Data sharing

1. Establish data standards, mainly to stop the UN agencies from dicking around with their data and refusing to agree on e.g. basic demographic categories. Data standards are not complicated but they are difficult, especially when people don’t get the basic point. It’s a minimum set, not an exhaustive set; it’s for practical implementation, not policy roll-out.
2. Adopt common data sets and agreements on e.g. which population figures we’re going to use. OCHA has done the groundwork on Common Operational Datasets (pdf), but I don’t know what the latest state of play is. What I do know is that by this point there should be an online interactive map with those datasets easily searchable behind it AND THERE ISN’T. ; the next step is working out how to leverage those datasets more effectively in the field to create better decision-making tools. (Thanks to Ben in the comments for correcting my ignorance, and my apologies for shouting at OCHA when I really should have checked my own bookmarks folder – and well done to all involved.)
   
3. Begin capacity building from the field-level up in managing data and using information more effectively. I can’t stress this enough – all capacity building should start as far out on the “edge” of the organisation and work inwards, not the other way around.
4. Lobby from the HQ-level down on integrating actual information into decision-making. This is where HQs have the requirement – not for info management skills, but for decision-making skills based on good info. Don’t bother sending managers on info management courses, they’re never going to be crunching spreadsheets; they need to be able to read spreadsheets and connect that with their actual work.

Advocacy

• Operational level – lobby to solve location-specific data issues using time-limited task forces, as a way to raise awareness that IM is essential for decision-making.
• Country office level – lobby to create better environments for information management within organisations and meetings, focused on staff not technology.
• Head office level – lobby to integrate data into decision-making, and for HQs to make reasonable and informed calls about what information they’re requesting from the field.
• Global level – promote of data standards, CODs and capacity building strategies, and stop having high-level meetings that pretend to be designing tools for the field.

Most people think setting principles out and getting agreements down is important. I don’t. I would drop having principles in favour of signing up agencies to a ‘pathway’ of simple practical steps which incorporate the principles at an implicit level. Introducing principles makes it possible for everybody to nod their heads at the next meeting and then do absolutely nothing to follow up. And finally, that Shorty Long track at the top has literally no relevance to the blog post, except to the extent that I believe that I AM DE JUDGE.

Related posts:

1. Disaster Response Capacity in Guatemala
2. How to build capacity in humanitarian NGOs
3. Avian Influenza Capacity Map

“I have talked to teams of students designing new de-mining tools without ever having visited a mine field, students designing tools to make charcoal without understanding how poor people improve their incomes by selling the charcoal briquettes they make, and teams of students so convinced that they will create the next revolutionary product and make a fortune doing it that they forget to talk to the customers they are designing for. If these patterns of design arrogance and lack of respect and curiosity about customers and markets become institutionalized in the hundreds of new courses now springing to teach design for the poor, their impacts will be just as trivial as design for the rich.”

- Paul Polak, The Life and Death of Big Institutions

Related posts:

1. 36 years of police archives in Guatemala opened up
2. Ever have one of those years? And Darfur, mapped.
3. New Year High Resolution….

Having said that, open data in government 2.0 [Wow, has that term dated quickly.] does not necessarily mean the same as open data in the humanitarian sector; importing of principles and approaches wholesale from one sector to the other is almost never effective. In more practical terms, if governments are already signing up to release their data in general, that already covers data that might be deemed humanitarian specifically. There is almost no data which can be labelled solely ‘humanitarian’ [most of it relates to population movements] and there’s an increasing amount of ‘development’ data online. Since we’re already seeing a big push in the open data movement globally, I’m content to let that play out rather than try to shoehorn it into the humanitarian sector.

While we are seeing is movement in open data on the development side, that seems to have translated into more transparency regarding development finance, rather than a push to turn everybody into Hans Rosling. Rosling’s work is fantastic, and has done a lot to raise the visibility of development issues, it’s not intended to provide serious tools for decision-making at the national or regional level; the data simply isn’t detailed enough. That’s changing, and will continue to change, as the Age of Big Data bears down on us; but Big Data doesn’t resolve policy issues, and technocrats are often misguided in their expectations.

So what do I think open data can achieve? Simply put: more effective assistance to disaster-affected communities. What sort of data do we need to achieve that? Equally simply: operationally relevant data. I don’t care about data being shared as much as I care about data being collected; you can’t open up data that you don’t have, so our first priority should be getting decent data in the first place. The problem at the supply end is the lack of systematic data collection, which needs to be addressed with better survey work; and data should be collected solely in order to facilitate better decision-making – there’s no other reason to collect it. If that data isn’t being used for decision-making, then sharing it is irrelevant, which means that advocacy for and training in using data for decision-making is a higher priority than making data open right now.

The next consideration is that there’s always a cost to sharing data: although that cost has become substantially lower (great job, internet!), it still exists. Do the benefits of sharing data outweigh the cost? Please don’t argue that the costs are neglible, because they’re not – it’s a massive investment in an organisational change process just to get on the first rung of data sharing, there are lots of technical costs, and the potential for disaster is high (as the UK National Health System can tell you). I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but we need to build a stronger case than currently exists, which means we need to do a better job of drawing the dots between data and impact.

And this is where it gets tricky. Government 2.0 is all about transparency and accountability, and Development 2.0 is an extension of that, with an additional component of aid effectiveness. I would argue that this effectiveness component is much, much more important in Disaster 2.0 (ha!), but there’s also a tension around the role of government that a lot of people are in danger of missing. Hopefully everybody can agree that the big push for better data needs to be at country level – but humanitarian organisations frequently have a more adversarial relationship to government than UN agencies. We can’t expect MSF to participate in open data sharing with the Government of Sudan.

This isn’t just a question of context, this is a question of ensuring that humanitarian principles are preserved in any data sharing agreement: for example, if neutrality is in tension with transparency, which principle wins out? That’s a question that the current discussion around open data has simply not addressed, but it may turn out to be the most important question of all.

Related posts:

1. The Bear versus Shark of Data Entry
2. Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds
3. Back on the data wagon

Ossification (noun): the natural process of bone formation: the hardening (as of muscular tissue) into a bony substance; a mass or particle of ossified tissue; a tendency toward or state of being molded into a rigid, conventional, sterile, or unimaginative condition.

Remko Berkhout has pointed out that there is an increasing amount of research that tries to envision the future for the NGO sector, to which I would add work by the Humanitarian Futures Programme and the Feinstein Center. Publications such as these, providing a useful focus on the rapidly changing external environment, are necessary but not sufficient for the changes that need to take place if the underlying spirit of the NGO community is to survive.

Paul Polak has described institutions as “radical ideas cast in concrete”, and INGOs are no exception. The concept of the INGO is around 60 years old, more than enough time for their initially lean muscles to harden into rigid institutional bones. That isn’t to say that INGOs have lost the capacity to change, sometimes in radical ways, and to raise issues that would otherwise go without discussion; but we all have the unsettling feeling that INGOs have not delivered on the promises they made to their publics.

A child of their time, INGOs clearly filled a niche in the international system, particularly as a counter to a post-war foreign policy based on military-industrial interests. Yet INGOs were based on assumptions shared by that same establishment, and took on forms that were familiar with that establishment. The fundamental problem for INGOs – as for governments and corporations – is that the world is changing in ways which are increasingly difficult to manage for these old forms.

The worst case scenario for INGOs is that they find themselves filling in where government has failed, providing alternatives that are not alternatives at all but simply poor substitutes for the old system; or find themselves filling gaps where corporations have proved unable or unwilling to extend their reach, creating pseudo-markets which are largely unsustainable. Where these scenarios come to pass, INGOs will twist themselves into new shapes not in order to challenge the systems which lead to these governance and market failures, but to prop them up instead.

Why is it important for INGOs to survive? The short answer is: it isn’t important. NGOs are simply vehicles for realising a range of social and economic outcomes that cannot be realised through other means. The form of the INGO is not important: it’s the function that’s important, and those functions can potentially be delivered through different forms. A focus on whether the form of the INGO will survive runs the risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, dismissing the still-important functions in the same breath as the obsolete form.

Mike Edwards writes of INGOs reaching middle age and offers three possible futures: retirement, rejuvenation or replacement. There is a fourth possibility: radical transformation in response to the rapidly changing external environment, transformation which can contain all three of Edwards’ proposed pathways and more besides. Complexity theory gives us some of the tools we need to face that future, but to make use of those tools we need to acknowledge not just that the world has changed, but to reflect that change, rather than attempt to manage it.

We cannot pretend to be agents of change if we are not prepared to change ourselves. The future needs flexibility, not stability; the future lies in collaboration, not competition; the future belongs to the network, not the corporation.

Related posts:

1. Exit strategies for Sudan
2. I’m not liveblogging the Global Symposium +5 in Geneva
3. Beware of Geeks bearing Gifts

Click here to view the embedded video.

The institutional resistance of aid agencies to Open Data isn’t based on their archaic views about the proprietary nature of data. Most of them don’t have archaic views – in fact most of them don’t have views at all, they just copied and pasted from whatever they could find (human rights organisations tend to be better at this, although still nowhere near as good as they should be). The reticence of aid agencies to share their data is based on the fact that their data is crappy, and somewhere deep down, they know it’s crappy.

I’m currently working on a mid-term review for ACAPS, which is turning out to be a glimmer of hope in an otherwise terrifying landscape. Everybody we’ve spoken to so far for the review has said the same thing: ACAPS’ technical work in developing needs assessment methodologies and tools is excellent, and there’s nobody else in sector doing anything like it. Their simple revolution has been to introduce some proper survey expertise into the needs assessment process as part of an end-to-end service. It’s not necessarily innovative in terms of statistical analysis or data management – just good practice.

Thanks to the foresight of its founding members, it was written into ACAPS DNA that it provides support to the Needs Assessment Task Force of the Inter Agency Standing Committee.¹ The NATF approach to solving the crappy data problem is to develop a single inter-agency rapid assessment form and process, which will at the very least get us a baseline that everybody can agree upon. The problem with this solution is that it doesn’t solve the wider problem of crappy data (and let’s not even talk about the widerer problem of crappy decision-making that doesn’t even bother with data in the first place), it just covers our backs when the donors ask why we allocated resources the way we did in the first two weeks. What the NATF is developing is a good idea in many ways (although a bad idea in others) but I think they’d be the first to agree that it ain’t no magic bullet for what is an endemic problem.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that while open data is inherently good (both from a technical point of view, but also in the sense of a ‘public good’), it’s not going to be much use if the data that you’re opening is crappy. I might think that crowdsourcing doesn’t deliver much value, but I’m not going to single out the crowdsorcerors for the sake of it – the sad truth is that their data is just as crappy as everybody else’s.² I should clarify crappy: I mean data that isn’t collected in a systematic way within a sound theoretical framework using tested techniques appropriate for the situation. Crappy data will only generate crappy open data. True fact.

Next post: Disaster 2.0 vs Government 2.0, and why open data matters.

1. The IASC is the single most important policy body in the humanitarian sector, which is why the UN hasn’t given it a separate website, but shoehorned it into the shockingly poor HIC website. The HICs are no longer functional, the main website isn’t being updated, you can’t even navigate to the IASC website from the HIC site, and if you do manage to find it, it’s like navigating in fog; if you’re interested, this is pretty much a textbook example of how not to build a website.
2. Okay, maybe a bit more crappy – although notice how Ushahidi deployments have tended to morph from crowdsourced to directed monitoring or survey – and potentially a bit less crappy if and when those tools are implemented within an effective framework.

Related posts:

1. I dream of the ECB4 Assessment
2. PreventionWeb launches
3. Disaster Prediction, Social Networking Boosted by Geo-Data Feeds

But hey! We work in a sector where every crisis is also an opportunity (poor translation ahoy),  so perhaps this is an opportunity to redesign the UN, to eliminate the problems it suffers from and maybe even make it relevant again. Ask yourself the question, what might the UN look like if you devised it for the world we actually live in? The UN has accreted so many layers that such a restructuring will never happen, since the system will collapse before it reforms in any significant way. If we were playing Fantasy Palais des Nations, however, here’s what I would like the humanitarian elements of the UN to look like:

1. All operational work should be stripped from the agencies. Generally they’re just not that good at it, and would be more effective if they focused on advisory services, policy development, advocacy campaigns, and possibly capacity building. “No operations” should be built into their mandates in order to prevent the mission creep that has crippled them over the years.
2. Funding responsibility should also be stripped. As well as costing money on administrative costs and exchange rate losses, it’s an extra layer of bureaucracy that clogs up the works. The only argument that can be made for the UN controlling funding is that this enables better coordination, but the evidence suggests that anybody making this argument is delusional.
3. Break down each agency into functional units comprised of small clusters of specialist staff. These staff would be distributed around the world through virtual office technology, with only small centralised headquarter offices for basic management of these teams and coordination of activities such as advocacy. Lean and mean is the way to go.
4. These staff would then deploy only in situations where their specialist expertise is required, preventing the clusterf*ck you get when every section of every agency tries to get its foot in the office door in a big disasters. These staff would work within other organisations – civilian and military, government and non-government, donor and recipient – and be project-focused.
5. When not deployed, UN staff would act as critical nodes in a global network of humanitarian actors that would all contribute to policy development on a more equal footing. This would create flexible and iterative processes, instead of the sclerotic nonsense that the IASC has to go through every time it wants to issue a proclamation about how many mickle makes a muckle.
6. Operational work would be done by anybody who was capable, funded through bilateral funding on a country basis, possibly through donor secretariats, especially in conflict areas. Since NGOs and other actors already do most of the heavy lifting, this would be a direct contract scheme, with UN nodes playing an advisory role on grants approval and possibly implementation.
7. WE NOW RETURN YOU TO YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. The World Bank is monitoring your buzz
2. Third World Farmer
3. William Easterly versus the World (Bank)

I realise that lolcatz are yesterday's news.

The second round of Humanitarian Innovation Fund grants have now been decided, and should be posted on the HIF large grants website before too long. Once again, the Grants Panel discussions about innovation were as interesting as the projects themselves – possibly more so this time, because I had a feeling that the level of innovation in the proposals submitted for this round was even weaker than the last round.

That evening I had a chance to catch up with Ben Ramalingam, whose work on complexity and aid is some of the most interesting research being done in the sector at the moment. We had a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion that took in landscape engineering, urban mathematics, humanitarian futurology and the relative merits of the Sandman and Lucifer comic books (I’m down with Lucifer, Ben with Sandman – but he’s going to give Lucifer another chance).

I don’t agree with Ben on everything, but his views are always interesting, and this started me thinking. Where are the interesting thinkers in the humanitarian sector? There’s a lot of thoughtful people working on aid issues (some of whom blog), but being thoughtful isn’t always enough to qualify as an interesting thinker. The blogs I linked to are consistently insightful, but they’re tightly focused on aid, without much effort to introduce tie together new ideas in an innovative way.

While I was in London for the HIF, I also had the chance to drop in on the Truth and Beauty sessions curated by Vinay Gupta. Up front, I disagree with Vinay on a lot of issues – but he has the ability to pull together widely divergent thoughts into something coherent and his views are never less than interesting. Vinay is in a different (if tangentially related) space to the humanitarian sector, and I actually struggle to think of many individuals in the humanitarian sector who have the same capacity.

Since then I’ve chatted with a few friends and colleagues, and asked them the question: who are the interesting thinkers in the humanitarian sector? So far I haven’t been able to build a list, and that worries me. The humanitarian community is struggling at the moment with a range of issues which we’re ill-equipped to deal with, and the default solution to tough challenges is to add more layers to the bureaucracy. There’s a serious lack of vision within the sector, and nobody’s close to addressing that gap.

Related posts:

1. Response to Chris Blow 3: Please Prove Me Wrong
2. Stating the obvious about technology
3. How to avoid humanitarian rickrolling

Bill and Phil at the wheel

Posting on The Humanitarian Groundhog Day, the always efficacious Ben Ramalingam pointed out the coordination is a wicked problem [pdf] – essentially a planning challenge that can’t be dealt with using linear planning tools.¹ Broadly I agree, although I don’t accept that coordination has all the characteristics that are usually identified for wicked problems, but I’m not convinced that’s the primary reason why the humanitarian sector acts like Bill Murray.

Our work for ICVA wasn’t looking at the meta-issue of coordination, but the specifics of how NGO coordination in the field actually works (leaving aside the question of whether it works). However the overview did point out lack of progress in developing a functional definition or tools for coordination that could do any heavy lifting.² The reason why those things are important (if dull) is the same reason why we keep repeating our mistakes – not just in coordination, but in a number of areas.

Short version: while I agree with Ben that this is a systemic problem, and that a large part of that problem is misaligned incentives, we have to pay attention to a) the people who work in that system and b) their relationship to those incentives. That’s because a) system behaviour emerges from the behaviour of the agents in that system (although it can’t be reduced to that behaviour, because! Complexity!) and b) different individuals respond to the same incentives in different ways. At root, this is a human resources problem, or rather a set of HR problems.

So: staff turnover is high, because of the stress and unpredictability of disaster response work; compounded by rapid growth of the sector (particularly NGOs), because the increase in staff demand has not been matched by a corresponding growth in supply. This has lead to increasing reliance on young and inexperienced staff in increasingly senior positions (in a sector which already relied quite heavily on them). I could go on, but in the words of Paul Simon: “It’s every generation throws a hero up the pop charts”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Which is to say that the wheel keeps getting reinvented because the humanitarian community lacks any sense of its own history. That applies even to the old hands³ who are usually so overloaded that they struggle to remember what happened yesterday, let alone what happened ten years ago. It’s too obvious to say that we lack the tools for knowledge management, when the real problem is that we lack historical perspective; on the ground, this leads to a Year Zero approach to issues like coordination.

Interestingly, specific sectors such as health or shelter do make progress in terms of professionalism, although any such progress is hard won. I’d argue that’s because those sectors are populated by sector-specific professionals with links to a professional sector that exists outside the humanitarian sphere, providing a ready-made set of continuity tools and professional resources. Whether we could turn humanitarian coordination (or “humanitarianism”) into a similar sector is an open question.⁴

Some people might read this as an argument for certification, in the interests of professionalising the sector. It’s actually an argument against certification, but that’s a post that will have to wait for another day when it’s not so sunny outside. For now what we need to remember is this: while Ben’s proposals are a useful part of any solution to this wicked problem, there’s a high chance of failure unless some more elementary problems are addressed at the same time.

Related posts:

1. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 2
2. The Innovation Fallacy, Part 1
3. The Innovation Fallacy Series