Be Collaborative
Being collaborative means sharing information, insights, strategies and resources across projects, organizations and sectors, leading to increased efficiency and impact. This Principle brings all the others together in practice. People working in digital development have a shared vision to create a better world, and collaboration is essential to making this vision a reality. No single initiative or organization can make it happen alone. We have the most impact when we work together across geographies, focus areas and organizations and in partnership with local communities and governments. By collaborating, those working in digital development and beyond can pool their resources and expertise not only to benefit each initiative but also to strengthen the global community. Collaborating does not just happen accidentally; it requires time, planning and dedicating resources to look for and develop opportunities.
Core Tenets
- Understand how your work fits into the global development landscape. Identify others working on the same problem in other geographies, and determine if there is a community of practice. Find the technical leaders in global and regional organizations (such as the World Bank, the World Health Organization, etc.) who can help you disseminate your work to other teams, regions and countries.
- Engage diverse experts across disciplines, countries and industries throughout the project lifecycle. Create an engagement plan to apply this expertise at all phases, and incorporate insights through feedback loops. Look for tools and approaches from other sectors, and publish your findings so they are available to other groups and countries.
- Plan to collaborate from the beginning. Build collaborative activities into proposals, work plans, budgets and job descriptions. Identify indicators for measuring collaboration in your monitoring and evaluation plan.
- Document work, results, processes and best practices. Share your code with the open source community, publish documents under a Creative Commons license, and participate in digital development conferences and other forums to share lessons you have learned and to learn from other practitioners.
- Define how your project will contribute locally. Collaboration is the first step in interoperability; define how your work can connect with local systems and which standards you need to adopt to make these connections. Engage with organizations that support these standards, and participate in local technical strategy groups and roundtables to ensure that you are a part of the larger whole.