I had planned to be in London in this week for a great event at Google but, due to travel complications, a recorded version of myself will be presenting a short white paper I published on SeeClickFix. The focus of the event is to measure the 'fix-rate' of social ventures. 'Fix-rate' by many other names is fast becoming a key performance indicator for many social ventures. 'Fix-rate' measures the frequency that the intended result is returned to the individual or individuals who have engaged with the platform.  In a highly functioning system, the energy that goes in is dwarfed by the energy that comes out. The time it takes to snap a photo is now worth 100 positive affirmations from friends on Facebook, a repaved road on SeeClickFix, or a launched product on Kickstarter.  

From Emmanuelle Kunigk of Integrity Action:

As London is currently celebrating accountability and transparency week, you may be aware that there are a series of events taking place in London culminating in the Open Government Partnership (OPG), a big international conference on openness and transparency.  

To acknowledge the importance of this week, Integrity Action, a British based NGO committed to designing out corruption in development programmes through building #integrity in local communities,  is hosting a conference with Google (UK) on "Closing the Loop with Transparency, Accountability and Integrity". 

By closing the loop Integrity Action means the triggering of an intelligent or informed response to a specified problem. The organisation just recently published the Fix-Rate paper (http://www.integrityaction.org/statistics-measuring-fix) which gives some examples of how the loop may be closed. At today's conference, Integrity Action aims to compare and learn from experiences that actively seek to achieve this. In order to have some comparability the conference focuses on the handful of initiatives - some by government, others by NGOs - that are able to close the loop on specific problems. In most cases, these are interventions that have been conducted at least twenty times and where there were at least 10,000 direct beneficiaries.  It is important to note that although a large number these interventions are technologically driven, all cases involve some from of citizen engagement.

Commenting on the conference Fredrik Galtung, CEO of Integrity Action, said that "far too many anti-corruption efforts fall short of closing the loop. Closing the loop ensures  that citizen have the opportunity tell us how it really is and that they are empowered to ensure that policies are appropriate, information can be trusted and that fewer public funds are wasted".

You can follow the event on-line today at