Prodded by my LSE department, I finally got round to creating a personal webpage this week. As well as an exercise in gross narcissism, it’s super helpful (for me) to have a single place to direct any enquiries, and remind myself (and perhaps others) about stuff I’ve done and forgotten – distant past, random interviews, papers I’ve co-authored but didn’t

I spent the summer toiling away on updating How Change Happens. Luckily the weather was pretty rubbish, so I didn’t resent it too much. Most of the chapter updates were just that – adding more recent stats, a few new references, a generally more sombre take, given that the first edition appeared just months before Brexit and Trump. But there

I started reading Power and Progress in a fairly sceptical frame of mind, because I didn’t much like Why Nations Fail. But it won me over in the end, especially the final chapter on what to do about the current tech clusterfxck of AI, filter bubbles, mis- and disinformation, gig economy exploitation etc etc. Main message: Since roughly 1980, something

In response to Friday’s post on AI and Development, PS Baker asked when FP2P would publish its first AI generated post. Here you go. My Question: Write a 600 word blogpost on the risks and opportunities of AI for international development, in the style of Duncan Green’s From Poverty to Power blog ChatGPT’s response: ‘Introduction: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged

Spent a mind-bending day this week discussing AI and development with some NGO and legal folk (Chatham House Rule, so that’s all I can say, sorry). Everyone in the room knew at least ten times more than me on the subject. Perfect. Some impressions/ideas. The catalyst for the discussion was the UK Government’s new White Paper on AI and Innovation,

ChatGPT. Discuss. Isn’t everyone? Right now, everyone seems to be playing with it, writing and/or worrying about it and with good reason. Some are already losing their jobs after publishing faked interviews. There are refuseniks – this is crowdsourced plagiarism and must be kept at bay. Students must not use it. Massive health warnings etc etc. That feels both King

Been catching up with my reading backlog over the Christmas break…. According to the publisher’s blurb ‘Africa 2.0 provides an important history of how two technologies – mobile calling and internet – were made available to millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and the impact they have had on their lives. The book deals with the political challenges of liberalisation and privatisation

Spoke on a panel last week in UCL’s Policy and Practice lecture series. The topic was Nina Hall’s new book, Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era (putting in the discount code ASFLYQ6 will get you 30% off, btw). Some thoughts. The book explores a new-ish generation of digital advocacy organizations with professional staff. MoveOn was the first, established in the

In the second of their four-part blog series (first published on Global Policy), which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor (two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort), use Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to ask how activists can use the internet to achieve new forms of power and

This is the first of a four-part blog series first published on Global Policy, which seeks to spark new ways of thinking about digitally-mediated activism. Written by two of my LSE students from last year’s cohort, Nina Newhouse and Charlie Batchelor, it uses Timms and Heimans’ New/Old Power framework to interrogate power: asking how activists can use the internet to

Hi everyone, have you stopped putting HNY on your emails yet? Kicking off the year with the usual round up of stats and most-read posts from 2021 – buys me a bit of breathing time to start generating this year’s first batch of posts. 2021 saw a lot of tech hassle – turns out ‘one man and his blog’ is

I approached Building Better Systems: A Green Paper on System Innovation, by Charles Leadbeater and Jennie Winhall, with a fair degree of initial scepticism – these kinds of papers tend to involve a lot of hand waving, and not many specifics. But I warmed to it as I read. First, some nice crunchy case studies on things like young adults