First of all well try to
formulate a good definition of a MFI. Secondly well check how many people
really know something about a MFI and what their opinion is on this subject.
Well examine this by taking a small survey, consisting of a few questions like
for instance what do you know about MFIs, would you give money to a MFI,
Next well discuss MFIs more into detail, well look into how a MFI is funded,
what the criteria are to offer people a loan, well compare different MFIs and
also look into their results. In order to offer people like you and us a clear
view on MFIs.
Why:
We were all, as a group, very
interested in MFIs and what the role of the internet could be on these
institutions. We were surprised that a MFI could have such a big impact on
peoples lives. So it was obvious that we wanted to know more about it.
Charlotte Deknudt; Toon Declerck; Pavel Verstraete;
Wouter Deleu
Suggesting
frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government
Web 2.0 provides numerous advantages for many people, but wikinomics might be
the biggest help for governments all over the world. Mainly in the USA,
government is trying to benefit as much as possible from the so-called
citizen-sourcing. In this way
politicians try to collect public information, provide services and take part
in policy processes. Obamas open government directive is an obvious proof of
Americas intense belief in this new way of policy making.
First of all they hope to achieve a citizen engagement, which means that crowds
help looking for solutions on actual problems via social networking services (
Netlog for example), multimedia sharing ( DailyMotion) and microblogs such as
Twitter. Next to it, government wants to create a value of strong collaboration
with and between the people. At last, by using the crowd-sourcing, there arises
a lot of collective intelligence which can be useful to base their policy
making on.
Nevertheless, the paper from author Taewoo Nam mentions an important complication
as well. There is namely a knowledge gap, which means that the vision for
employing government 2.0 and the reality sometimes differs. By writing this
paper, Taewoo hoped to bridge the knowledge gap and promote the crowd-sourcing
projects in progress.
Personally I think that the influence of wikinomics on policy making might be
an interesting feature. This paper deals mainly with the situation in America,
but it seems to me that the influence on dictatorships and communistic
societies will certainly be an interesting topic as well.
Taewoo Nam, 2011, Government Information Quality, University of Albany, State university of New York, USA, 12-20
When we talk about collaborative innovation people
do not always notice some cons, entailed by wikinomics. A complicated attempt
to create a kind of legislation, which has to protect others from peer-to-peer
file sharing computer programs, is one of them. DRM ( Digital Right Management
) and DMCA ( Digital Millennium Copyright Act) are only two examples of laws.
The competition between the traditional markets on the one hand and the upcoming
IT markets on ther other hand reaches its top nowadays. It seems that consumers
prefer the more dynamic method of the world wide web.
In this paper, author Rachel Avidor-Hershkavitz
denounces the strict legislation and wonders how far IT markets can go by
limiting the choice of the consumers. An important term in her refreshing
report is the Antitrust Law, which forbids
anti-competitive behavior and unfair business practices.
This new point of view seems to me a very
interesting research area because of its critical vision on a widely supported
phenomenon, wikinomics. I think that the tradeoff between protection of online
products, like Apple does with its iPad and iPhone (only iTunes can be used to
make listening to music possible) and the freedom of the consumers entails a
lot of research material.
Rachel Avidor-Hershkavitz,2010, Antitrust Law- A
stranger in wikinomics world, The John
Marshall Journal of Computer and Information Law, 102
The era of students just sitting in the classroom and listening to what the teacher has to say, is over. Nowadays, educators want their students to collaborate and to be more active in class.
At The University of Adelaide, students now all have an iPad, which allows them to search for extra information during class and give extra input to the subject. In another Australian university, The University of Sydney, a 'learning management system' (LMS) has been introduced. This system makes it possible for educators to post documents, links to similar topics, videos and other instructive material. In the first year chemistry a forum for opinions, questions, etc... is available to both students and teachers. In this way, the university wants to promote the collaboration between students and educators.
Furthermore, in order to make the panel discussions more popular amongst the students, the tutors organized a competition. On the chemistry forum there is a little window in which the names (or nicknames) of the top 3 contributors are mentioned. It's very effective because everybody wants to be in the list. The page also has links to Twitter and Facebook, which gives chemistry students or other interested people easy access to the latest information.
Adam J. Bridgeman, 2011, collaborative and active elearning: contributing, ranking and tagging web resources in first year chemistry, Proceedings of the Australian Conference on Science and Mathematics Education, University of Melbourne, pag 54-61
The Age of Responsibility: CSR 2.0 and the New DNA of Business
CSR (cooperate social
responsibility) is a business model that implies the company to exam itself,
rather than outsourcing this feature to another company, on its actions and
behavior and insures that the company is consistent with the law, moral ethics
and international norms. Well, this system has failed. The most significant
prove of this statement is the crisis we are currently enduring since 2008.
Wayne Visser came up with three words and called them: the Three Curses of
Modern CSR. These words are: incremental, peripheral and uneconomic. The first
one, incremental, means that CSR does not match the scale nor urgency of the
problem. The second, peripheral, connote that companies are frequently
applying CSR only on a couple of departments rather than integrating it in the
whole business. And Uneconomic refers to some imperfections such as the
short-term markets that are still rewarding firms that impute their costs to
society. These Three Curses are to be switched with the next five principles:
scalability, creativity, locality, circularity and responsiveness. The new DNA
model for responsible business is based on those 5 principles.
Wayne Visser, 2010, Journal of Business Systems, Governance and Ethics, Vol. 5, No. 3, p. 7
Is there a difference in use of Wikipedia between developed and developing countries?
Wikipedia is the most known example of web 2.0, which means that not only experts can write information on the site, but also everyone who has the knowledge and a computer with access to the internet.
One can wonder if there is a difference in use of this online search engine between developed and developing countries. Research shows several important differences. The higher a country's Human Development Index (HDI) is, the more developed a country is. Developed countries, like Japan or Denmark, have a higher reach (amount of Wikipedia users) and richness (edits per article) of Wikipedia than a developing country like one of the BRIC-countries. However, although internet penetration (the percentage of internet users) is significant to the HDI-score, it isn't perfectly correlated to the number of contributors.
Mr. Rask, the author, draws the attention of the reader to the fact that there are 2 problems within his research. First of all he tested only 12 countries, which is a small amount to generalize. Furthermore, Mr. Rask realizes that it is difficult to trace the difference between several countries because Wikipedia only offers the choice between several languages instead of countries. Solving this problem would significantly improve the outcome of this research.
Morten Rask, 2008, The reach and richness of Wikipedia: is wikinomics only for rich countries?, First Monday, Vol 13, N° 6
Education and technology, the solution for poverty reduction
It's often said that education is the best way for people in developing countries to crawl their way out of poverty. Professor Yunus of the Grameen Bank proved that you can also reduce poverty by offering small loans (microfinance) to people in developing countries to establish their own business and to let them take their lives in their own hands. In Bangladesh the Grameen Bank already introduced the cell phone to the rural population and now they also want to offer them internet access. In this article we'll discuss whether it is possible to accelerate this process of poverty reduction and to improve the quality of life of poor people by offering them a combination of microfinance and proper education and this via communication technology. Especially in times like these, where globalization and technology play a very important role in the development of the economic world. If this should have a significant impact on poverty reduction we may have found a new way to reduce poverty a lot faster than we did earlier on and in a much more efficient way.
Kathryn M. Gow, 2001, How Access to Microfinance and Education Through Technology Can Alleviate Poverty in Third World Countries, International Journal of Economic Development, Vol. 3, No. 1
Originally microfinance institutions (MFIs) were developed for people who had no access to normal banking facilities. MFIs received their money from private and public donors and aid organizations, mostly without expecting to make some money out of it. This is still the case, but lately MFIs also caught the attention of institutional investors and commercial banks. So called microfinance investment vehicles (MIVs) have become more and more important in today's financial world. In this article we'll examine, by using mean-variance spanning tests, whether it is possible to make a profit by adding microfinance funds to your international assets. In addition we'll also compare whether there is a difference between Latin America and Africa, whether it is more lucrative to invest in MFIs in Latin America or in MFIs in Africa, and last but not least whether there is a difference in profits between MFIs and NGOs (Non-governmental organizations). After all, wouldn't it be great, you making money by helping other people?
Rients Galema, Robert Lensink, Laura Spierdijk, 2011, International Diversification and Microfinance, Journal of International Money and Finance, 30, 507-5015
