There is an issue in the donor world that really bugs me. It has bugged me since 2004, when I was sitting in a small NGO in Ukraine that had a poor internet connection, and I found myself really struggling to find grant information that could help these people-this was largely attributable to web design that, instead of making it easy to find information, actually made it harder.
This issue bugged me enough that I finally finally did something about it. I was in Anne Nelson’s New Media and Development Communication course at SIPA, and capitalized on the opportunity to research this issue, put together a lot of my own thinking and experiences to create a list of recommendations and “how-tos”, and publish “Web Design By Donor Organizations For Low Bandwidth” on our wiki detailing a wide range of projects/findings/conclusions on real world new media and development projects.
I am certainly not alone in this frustration. In fact, I was talking to a fellow media developer who had a similar story. “I remember waiting many many minutes in ethiopia for silly pages to load that were just too heavy and finallly giving up,” he said.
