As anyone who has spent time in tech knows, “designing good software” is as complicated as the term is simple. It’s easy to come up with ideas and improvements for your products. But the actual implementation is full of pitfalls that keep you from a high quality product. Buggy code will make your product unusable; feature creep can make it overly complex; and poor user experience (UX) design can make it impossible to navigate.
I was recently discussing with a colleague what software development means to a non-profit like NDI. My thinking on this has evolved quite a bit over the seven (!?) years I’ve been working in international development, drawing on our team’s successes - and failures.
Sarah and I are on the ground here with POECI for the parliamentary elections today - we'll be sharing some anecdotes from the field as time permits. Most recent at top.
Good afternoon, Readers! The official results are in, reporting that President Edgar Lunga of the Patriotic Front party was re-elected in a closely contested vote for the 2016 Zambia presidential and National Assembly elections. 90% of polling stations during the elections, which were held last Thursday, opened around 6:30am, and some remained open until 2am due to the high volume of voters.
Happy Monday, Readers! Google Maps is taking the Olympics from sport enthusiasts’ TVs and into their homes - you can now dive into the heart of the favelas of Rio through Beyond the Map.
On December 9, NDI will unveil DemTools 2.0, which upgrades and expands NDI’s existing suite of tools that promote democratic practices through the Internet, along with three innovative new applications for managing government petitions, crowdsourcing community problems, and open data, mapping and visualization.
If you are in Washington, D.C., we would like to invite you to join us for this event. RSVP here.
