Two Sides to Open Development

Ever since Robert Zoelick’s speech on “democratizing development” there has been a lot of buzz around the idea of open development and lots of discussion about what it really means. Some of the recent discussion is nicely summed up on this post on the Bank’s public sphere blog “Openness for Whom? and Openness for What“. I’ve also tackled the related issue of “Development 2.0” or the new way we can/should be doing development work taking advantages of changing technologies and business models now open to us.

Trying to unpack this a little bit I realize that there are two related but different aspects to the open development discussion that often get a little mixed up:

1. Transparency and reducing friction – i.e. making use of technology to make it easier to share information and knowledge in a standard way so it can be easily assessed, compared, mashed up, acted upon.

2. Participation – using technology to give people a voice and to change existing power structures, and decision-making processes...