Top 10 blog posts from last 10 years

I’ve been writing this blog for ten years! Here is the ChewyChunks top ten list over the last decade.

The year in memes

Each year I do a year-end lookback at major events and in memes. I am on my 7th consecutive year: (2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012) See also my 2016 Gratitudes list.

Millions of lives saved by Good Government in Japan, following the 2011 tsunami.

For passion week (Easter) I wrote a 7-part series about rethinking aid and international development in the context of Jesus’s life and teachings.

Have you ever been in a meeting and someone said something preposterous, and you wanted to challenge this assumption? This is how I used Amazon Mechanical Turk in Real Time as Focus Groups

Innovation, data, and ideas

Five things every aid worker should understand about evolution — the future of evaluations and the solution to ending poverty is going to come from this.

In a related post, why The Future of Big Data is quasi-unstructured

In 2016 I created a phylogenetic tree of all types of aid and charitable work and a complete NGO ecosystem map — showing how all sorts of programs are related to each other in a needs hierarchy.

Why the poor don’t speak up

This post combines the ideas behind GlobalGiving’s partner rewards, Information is Power, and Feedback Labs in a single theory of change. See also “Features of Great Organizations” an analysis that shows how a community-led mindset is correlated with achieving one’s intended impact.

Marc’s dating dashboard

Simplicity Beyond Complexity – illustrates the one time in my career I was able to freely iterate on a design. I had a good boss who let me tinker with everything so long as I kept a few key performance targets and design goals in mind, and we re-examined our assumptions and goals every 6 months over 2.5 years.