Going data driven on a budget
0Going data-driven on a budget.
The Web Foundation is an organization many people are familiar with, due in some part to being led by someone like Sir Tim Berners Lee who is credited with the invention of the Web, and in other part to its central role in the development of the Web.
Although the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI) is not as well known, this coalition of organizations is led by the Web Foundation and its mission is a complementary one: to advocate for policies for affordable internet access everywhere in the world.
A4AI is a data driven organization, collecting, integrating, and analyzing data on a global scale while working on a budget. In a way, this is fitting to advocate on behalf of those with little or no access to data. Case in point, recent results from A4AI show that the majority of the world's population does not have access to affordable internet.
The process of concretely defining and measuring something as vague as affordability and using this as an instrument to communicate and advocate change on a global scale, while working with limited resources, is one that may have interesting lessons to teach. ZDNet discussed with Dhanaraj Thakur, Senior Research Manager at A4AI.