Comment armchair humanitarians (Score 1) 477
It may surprise a number of folks in this thread that there's a rather large community of people who spend their whole lives trying to figure out how to turn money into sustainable development. So all the "what we really need to do is teach the poor civics/give them farm tools/train them to fish" comments are a little late, by maybe forty years.
Where Google has a chance to make a serious difference is not simply by pumping money into development programs, and their hiring choice shows they know it. Google has something no major NGO has: a vast supply of world-class tech resources. IMHO, they should leverage what they've already built to make powerful tools for humanitarian use: adapting Google Earth or Google Maps to make a rapid assessment tool for emergencies, for example. As someone who's worked for several big NGOs and watched them struggle with their tech needs, it seems to me that the best way for Google to change the world might be to help existing organizations who do successful development work (and yes, you cynics, they do exist) by doing what Google.com does best - setting up incredibly stable, well-thought-out, easy-to-use tools to improve some of the key humanitarian challenges, such as assessing need, identifying and fixing problems in a distribution chain, or measuring the impact of development work on a large scale in real time. In addition to making a significant philanthropic impact, such a move would also promote the Google brand, thus adding (you guessed it) shareholder value.
Where Google has a chance to make a serious difference is not simply by pumping money into development programs, and their hiring choice shows they know it. Google has something no major NGO has: a vast supply of world-class tech resources. IMHO, they should leverage what they've already built to make powerful tools for humanitarian use: adapting Google Earth or Google Maps to make a rapid assessment tool for emergencies, for example. As someone who's worked for several big NGOs and watched them struggle with their tech needs, it seems to me that the best way for Google to change the world might be to help existing organizations who do successful development work (and yes, you cynics, they do exist) by doing what Google.com does best - setting up incredibly stable, well-thought-out, easy-to-use tools to improve some of the key humanitarian challenges, such as assessing need, identifying and fixing problems in a distribution chain, or measuring the impact of development work on a large scale in real time. In addition to making a significant philanthropic impact, such a move would also promote the Google brand, thus adding (you guessed it) shareholder value.
