Tim Berners-Lee, the British engineer, computer scientist and MIT professor who is credited with inventing the World Wide Web, singled out for praise one of NDI's technology projects in a talk at the Technology Education Design (TED) conference in Long Beach, Calif. The conference brings speakers from around the world to talk about technology, creativity and ways their work can change the world.

Berners-Lee cited www.afghanistanelectiondata.org, an innovative online mapping tool for analyzing election results data from Afghanistan's Aug. 20, 2009, presidential election. The site uses demographic, ethnographic, topographic and security information and also identifies areas that had significant electoral irregularities. Its goal is to make the election data more accessible and transparent.

At the February conference, Berners-Lee spoke about the importance of open data in increasing transparency, safety and foreign aid. "There is an open data movement afoot now around the world," he said. He explained the Afghanistan elections data site as a way of visualizing and segmenting elections data. "This is a mashup of the data which was released about the Afghan elections. It allows you to set your own criteria for what sort of things you want to look at."

Watch the full video below. The reference to the Afghanistan Elections site starts at 3:11.

This project was conducted in partnership with Development Seed, an online communications firm that specializes in data collection and visualization.

• Read about the Afghan Elections Data site»
• Read about NDI's work in Afghanistan»
• Read about NDI's work with democracy and technology»

 

Published March 12, 2010