This one's a little different. Python West Midlands is hosting a hackday to kick off a new open source project for a very interesting little charity called Evidence for Development(EfD). EfD wants to help people make better decisions about aid projects – at local and national level – by putting real data about the real situation in the hands of the people making the decisions.
If you want to know if your aid programme is making a difference to the right people then you need to model the economy of your target village or district, before and after. Makes sense; simple science right? Problem is you can' afford a bunch of western econometricians crawling all over the place (cost too much, takes too long) and anyway their cash-based economic models don't work that well in a place where cash is only a small part of the economy (grow your own; harvest wild food; get paid in kind or cash or both for day labour; trade crops, labour or other goods; etc, etc). So EfD developed simple economic models that work in this environment, that can be learned and applied by locally trained people and that, are built to run on laptops. No reliance on big foundations' data centres.
Last year EfD, in partnership with Chancellor College of the University of Malawi and The University of Wolverhampton developed a Python/MySQLapp to model local economies that is already in use in several countries in Southern Africa.
This year the challenge is bigger – to build software that can model national and international economies. The model exists and works (it has a great track record of predicting famine effects from annual summary surveys of rural economies). But the only current implementations are proprietary, ill-supported and not extensible. Smells like open source spirit.
So for this hackday we're going to have with us the two developers who led the IHM development last year (from Chancellor College in Zomba, Malawi) and the developers of the modeling methodologies from EfD (from Barnes and Surrey – exotic eh?). We'll have a pretty completeMySQL database schema to work on and we hope to finish the day with a simple demo scenario that downloads reference data about a geographical area (a livelihood zone) produces a spreadsheet template to capture information about that livelihood zone (what they grow there, what they eat, how they make a living) runs some local completeness reports and uploads the captured data for merging (with other livelihood zone surveys) to allow analysis of a national survey.
I'm not a software developer, can I still contribute?
Yes! Absolutely. There are a number of jobs that can be contributed without writing any code. We would really appreciate the support of contributors who can build a web presence for these projects, write user and developer documentation, help spread the word and any number of jobs! If you're keen to help out, there will definitely be a place for you.
When:
10:30 onwards, 26th May 2012. Please sign up here.
Where:
Thyme Software, Coventry University Technology Park, Puma Way, Coventry, CV1 2TT [map]
