Non-Profit Tech Blog

Netsquared just presented a list of the top 21 applications that won its recent contest. I’m very disappointed that Idealware didn’t win. Apparently, the “wisdom” of the crowd strikes again. Although, it’s not the “wisdom of the crowd” that’s really the problem — it’s the lack of good contest design that allowed it to be simply “the wisdom of the friends you managed to cajole into voting”.

There were THREE entrants that basically served the same or similar population. These were:

• Addressing Africa’s Problems Through Social Networking Sites
• Kabissa 2.0: Strengthening the Social Web in Africa
• Social Web Tools for Developing Countries: Yankana.org

Apparently, “social” is the key factor in serving the developing world’s ills.This is not to say that you can’t serve people with different websites but in the context of a contest that claims to fund innovative projects, this seems to bear out the criticism that topicality and the ability to get people to vote for you are more important than actual innovation or even technical merit, especially in the case of MyKenyanSpace which somehow managed to take the fourth spot.

Looking at the registration page for MyKenyanSpace, you look at the bottom of the page and realize that it’s really a private-label social networking site from Web Crossing. I didn’t realize that one could win the Netsquared competition simply by entering some clip art on a pre-fab social networking site and calling it a day. I understand that the Netsquared people are looking to “accelerate” given initiatives, but perhaps it’s just possible that some initiatives just can’t be “accelerated”.

To Netsquared’s credit (and their smart decision to squeeze even more page views from the contest), they let people leave comments. Holden from GiveWell made what I believe to be the most salient comment:

Then I saw the “get out the vote” emails Net2 sent me, and I really wondered whether they have ANY interest in a contest determined by proposal quality. I’ve been concerned this whole time that if it takes 3 hours to make an informed decision (I think that’s a minimum with 150 projects), and 5 minutes to vote for a friend, that the voting is going to be flooded by those who haven’t even tried to inform themselves. But far from discouraging this, Net2 has encouraged it. I’ve been told to email everyone I know, set up a website to walk them through the process, provide my suggestions so they don’t have to make any decisions for themselves, and generally make this something they can do in seconds, thereby guaranteeing that they don’t consider other projects aside from my say-so.

Now Net2 asks for feedback, and rather than bringing up ANY of these issues, people have focused on making voting EASIER. 3 hours to make an informed decision, and everyone is thinking about how to cut the time it takes to vote for your friend from 5 minutes to 30 seconds.

So at this point, I’m not even sure whether I have a criticism. There is no question that this “flood the vote” attitude has generated way more publicity for NetSquared than trying to focus on project quality would have. And maybe that was the goal all along. So here’s my question: were you trying to find the 20 best projects, or trying to generate as much “buzz” as possible around 20 essentially random (or already popular) projects?

Also, Holden also made a great point about hacking the contest — possible, but unlikely this year but almost a certainty if the prizes increase in size.

I think it’s clear here that the fund behind the contest is wrongly named. It shouldn’t be called the Technology Innovation Fund as clearly technology innovation is not the unifying characteristic of the 21 winning entries. It should be called the Random Social Networking Application Fund or perhaps the WYVFIWYG (What You Vote For Is What You Get) Fund. Holden’s suggestion that there be two rounds of entries also makes sense especially if the final entries are whittled down to 20.