Global NGO

The following steps will help get Global NGO up and running:

Step 1: Test the waters.

Many new activists are ready to commit their lives to “the cause.” Some are even willing to die for it. Most of these enthusiastic newbies are nowhere to be found a few months later.

There’s no need to turn down the volume of your enthusiasm, but before starting your own NGO, consider joining one that does similar work for a while.

Maybe you’ll find that NGOs are not your life calling after all. Better to learn that early on, before making a big commitment.

Step 2: Start on the right foot.

“The leader’s main job is to make themselves obsolete.” –Lao Tsu

Becoming obsolete should be the fundamental goal of all NGOs. You must constantly strive to work yourself out of a job.

Becoming obsolete works on two levels.

In terms of your personal involvement, you should build the NGO to the point where it can function independently of your leadership. The long term goal of your NGO should be to solve a problem and thereby become unnecessary.

Put Lao Tsu’s advice into practice and you’ll be able to help more people in more profound ways, and enjoy every minute of the experience. If you try to maintain control, dependencies will develop, and once dependencies start they are hard to stop.

Dependency can leave NGO volunteers feeling trapped and sometimes even leave negative impacts on the people you are trying so hard to help.

Step 3: Clarify your goals.

Set clear and achievable goals for yourself and the NGO.

“Ending world hunger” is a great goal and looks good on your NGO’s t-shirt, but it’s not a problem you can seriously hope to solve.

Finding a niche is good place to start. Positive change usually comes from picking something small, doing it well and following through.

Step 4: Make an action plan.

A plan of action is your chance to make an NGO effective, address any potential negative impacts and make sure your NGO will attract donors and volunteers.

Make sure you are able to follow through with what you start. Think hard about your action plan. Hard work is important, but hard work without a good plan is a waste of time and money.

Step 5: Make a website.

It’s never too early to make a website for your NGO. A good website helps you to spread the word, attract volunteers, secure funding and establish a professional appearance. An interactive website can also minimize your need for meetings and micro managing.

Attention spans on the web are very short. Be clear and concise.

Be sure to make an online profile for your NGO at Matador, where you can tap into a network of thousands of potential donors and volunteers.

Some hosting companies give free hosting to NGO sites. Ask around.

Step 6: Get in the know.

Local knowledge is indispensable to every NGO. Even if you grew up in the city where you want to start an NGO, you still need to research and make contacts. Making solid local contacts and understanding the locals’ worldview is especially important if you want to work in a foreign culture.

Good use of local knowledge can really make an NGO effective. Without local knowledge, you may do more harm than good.

Step 7: Assess your NGO’s financial needs.

Money, when it does come, usually requires great amounts of paperwork and sometimes has strings attached. The quality of the work an NGO does and the amount of its funding are often inversely related. That is to say, the NGOs with less money do better work per hour and dollar spent. The crucial point is to to minimize your NGO’s need for money.

That said, money can be really helpful sometimes. Here’s how to get it. Filing for  (official non profit) status is a pain and involves costly lawyer fees. No need to waste your efforts there.

Get an established NGO to accept you under its umbrella. Tax deductible donations and grants will go to them, care of your NGO. Setting up this arrangement could be as easy as a 30 minute talk with your local peace center.

Now you are ready to ask for money from businesses, grant foundations, and governments. A Paypal donate button is a quick and easy way to accept donations from visitors to your website.

Step 8: Network, network, network.

Make friends with people and organizations doing similar work so that you can learn from their successes and mistakes. Networking also helps you to know when to team up and when to divide your efforts for maximum effectiveness. The links below are good places to start networking:

UNDP’s guide to NGO networking

Idealist.org

Matador’s Grassroots NGO network

Step 9: Find balance.

Be realistic about how much time you want to give to your NGO. Taking on projects beyond your comfortable limits won’t yield much benefit in the long run.

You are worth more to your NGO as a part time activist for 5-20 years than letting your passionate burn out in two years. Finding balance between work and personal life is key to success.

Step 10: Re-evaluate everything.

Take a step back and look at what you have done and where it is all headed. Take joy in what you have accomplished, but also make sure your NGO is not becoming self aggrandizing.

How much time, effort and money are being spent on the NGO itself? This is the biggest problem facing all organizations, non-governmental or otherwise.

Your own awareness is the best tool to avoid over-emphasizing the NGO to the detriment of the cause, but don’t hesitate to ask someone from outside of your NGO for an evaluation.

With constant awareness, you can keep your focus and resources flowing to your original goals.

#beefban

• President Pranab Mukherjee has given his assent to the Maharashtra Animal Preservation (Amendment) Bill, 1995, nearly 19 years after the Maharashtra Assembly passed the Bill during the BJP-Shiv Sena rule in 1995.
• Slaughter of cows was previously prohibited in the state under the Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act of 1976
•   allow slaughter of water buffaloes, which provides carabeef [25% of the total beef market]
•  found selling beef or in possession of it can be jailed for 5 years and fined Rs 10,000
• poor man’s meat, costs almost a third of mutton.

Maharashtra joins many other states where cow slaughter is banned.
Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Rajasthan, Punjab, Odisha, Puducherry, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Gujarat, Delhi, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh all have bans on cow slaughter. The implementation of the law differs from state to state depending on the political climate.

Daman & Diu and Goa permit slaughter of those cows which are old or sick, or for medical purposes. Other states such as West Bengal allow slaughter of all cattle but require a 'fit for slaughter' certificate.

Bulls and bullocks, and buffaloes are permitted to be sold and eaten in most states even where cow slaughter is banned. But some states—Rajasthan, Punjab, J&K and Himachal Pradesh—have more stringent laws that ban the slaughter of all cattle.

On the opposite end are states such as Kerala, Manipur, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, and Nagaland, that allow slaughter of all cattle, and do not require any certificate. They are in a minority.

No national law banning the sale or consumption of beef.

None of the state laws explicitly ban beef eating either.

Bans on cow slaughter have fuelled an underground business

Over a quarter of India's population is scheduled tribes and scheduled castes who consume beef.

    This year has seen beef exports rising much faster than in 2013-14.
India's beef shipments in the last year to October rose to 1.95 million tonnes, 5 percent more than for the whole of 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, due to higher demand from China and other beef-consuming countries.

India's beef is exported - with a 20% share of the global market

$4bn (£2.6bn)  24 000 Cr Indian rupees a year

"STOP KILLING BEEF……….. I LOVE MY BEEF"

Basic Concerns

·       What happen to 177 million Beef trading poor Muslims in particular

·       What will happen to bulls and bullocks or to cows too old to produce milk or to give birth???

·       Mostly farmers could now be stuck feeding them for years until they die of natural causes.

·       What will happen to all Beef traders and their families?

·       Are the reason just for un employing these much already poor population

·       Is it humane to target only single community traders?

·       Is it constitutional or communal?

Twitter Firehouse

Only 4 companies

1.     Gnip twitter owns it : https://gnip.com/

2.     Topsy  apple owns it :: http://topsy.com/

3.     Datasift :: http://datasift.com/platform/datasources/twitter/

4.     NTT Data. :: http://www.nttdata.com/global/en/

 Users send 400 million tweets every day.

The only way to access 100% of those tweets in real-time is through the Twitter “Firehose”. The other option for accessing tweets is using one of Twitter’s direct API offerings.

Twitter’s Search API

First up is Twitter’s Search API, which involves polling Twitter’s data through a search or username. Twitter’s Search API gives you access to a data set that already exists from tweets that have occurred. Through the Search API users request tweets that match some sort of “search” criteria. The criteria can be keywords, usernames, locations, named places, etc. A good way to think of the Twitter Search API is by thinking how an individual user would do a search directly at Twitter (navigating to search.twitter.com and entering in keywords).

How much data can you get with the Twitter Search API?

With the Twitter Search API, developers query (or poll) tweets that have occurred and are limited by Twitter’s rate limits. For an individual user, the maximum number of tweets you can receive is the last 3,200 tweets, regardless of the query criteria. With a specific keyword, you can typically only poll the last 5,000 tweets per keyword. You are further limited by the number of requests you can make in a certain time period. The Twitter request limits have changed over the years but are currently limited to 180 requests in a 15 minute period.

Twitter’s Streaming API

Unlike Twitter’s Search API where you are polling data from tweets that have already happened, Twitter’s Streaming API is a push of data as tweets happen in near real-time. With Twitter’s Streaming API, users register a set of criteria (keywords, usernames, locations, named places, etc.) and as tweets match the criteria, they are pushed directly to the user. Think of this as an agreement between the end user and Twitter – you agree with Twitter that whenever they receive tweets that match keywords relating to “hockey”, they will deliver the tweet directly to you as they happen.  This is a push of data by Twitter, rather than a pull of data initiated by the end user.
The major drawback of the Streaming API is that Twitter’s Steaming API provides only a sample of tweets that are occurring. The actual percentage of total tweets users receive with Twitter’s Streaming API varies heavily based on the criteria users request and the current traffic. Studies have estimated that using Twitter’s Streaming API users can expect to receive anywhere from 1% of the tweets to over 40% of tweets in near real-time. The reason that you do not receive all of the tweets from the Twitter Streaming API is simply because Twitter doesn’t have the current infrastructure to support it, and they don’t want to; hence, the Twitter Firehose.

The final way to access data is by having access to the full Twitter Firehose. The Twitter Firehose is in fact very similar to the Twitter’s Streaming API as it pushes data to end users in near real-time, but the Twitter Firehose guarantees delivery of 100% of the tweets that match your criteria.
The Twitter Firehose is handled by two data providers, GNIP and DataSift, which have tight relationships with Twitter. Similar to the streaming API, the firehose consists of an agreement between an end user and distributors of the Firehose (GNIP or Datasift) on what tweets the end user should receive in near real-time. As the data providers receive tweets they are pushed directly to the end user.
The two differences between Twitter’s Streaming API and Twitter’s Firehose access is that you are guaranteed delivery of 100% of the tweets and it’s not free. The Twitter Streaming API is free to use but gives you limited results (and limited licensing usage of the data). Access to the Twitter Firehose removes a lot of the usage restrictions imposed by Twitter but is fairly costly for access to all the tweets.

Gnip

Complete Twitter Data Access

Realtime and Historical Twitter Data To Meet The Needs Of Your Business

Gnip was the first authorized reseller of Twitter data. We provide realtime data as well as access to every publicly available Tweet dating back to the very first Tweet from March 21, 2006. Whether you are looking for Tweets about specific keywords, high volumes of data, or historical data, we've got you covered!

  

API

(Application Programming Interface) An API dictates how two interfaces work with each other. In the case of social data, most information is shared through a streaming API.

Backfill

Backfill is Gnip's product that allows you to briefly disconnect from your realtime stream and easily get all of your data when you reconnect.

Big Data

Big Data is a term to describe the value that companies are seeing from using data to create actionable insights.

Choice of Protocols

Choice of protocols means you can receive the data in the format you prefer GET, POST, or Streaming.

Complete

Complete data is when customers have access to the entire set of data on a platform so they never miss a conversation.

Data Collector

Data Collector is Gnip's product that collects and normalizes data from public APIs including Instagram, Flickr, YouTube & more.

Data Mining

A method of computer science that sifts through data to find patterns using machine learning, statistics, database systems and more.

Data Scientist

Considered a relatively new field, the profession of data scientist means different things to different companies and often is a combination of statistics, machine learning, business intelligence, etc.

Data Scraping

Data scraping is when a company doesn't get the data from a social media publisher but rather scrapes content where they can find it. It is never complete, reliable or sustainable.

Decahose

Gnip's decahose provides a random 10 percent sample of the full firehose. We'd also like to openly admit it should be called a decihose, which means a tenth while deca means ten.

Enrichments

Enrichments are how Gnip provides additional metadata to its data streams making it easier for our customers to digest data. Examples include Klout scores, geo location, expanding shortened URLs and more.

Firehose

Firehose is a term first coined by Twitter to describe their complete set of data. Now firehose in conjunction with social media means that you have access to the full set of of a social media publisher's data.

Geotagged

Geotagged data is when a social media publisher lets the user decide if they want to provide the exact location of their content. Geotagged content more often comes from a smart phone.

JSON

(Java Script Object Notation) JSON is a text-based open standard designed for data interchange that even the human eye can read and is easy for computers to parse. JSON is the format Gnip delivers its social data in.

Machine Learning

Machine learning is the concept that you can teach a machine to make better predictions and decisions based on data.

Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is the discipline of teaching computers to understand the human language.

Node.js

A Javascript framework making it easy to build network applications. It's another way to connect to Gnip and consume data.

Predictive Analytics

The ability to predict future behavior and actions based on past data using machine learning, statistics, dating mining and other techniques.

Public API

Many social media publishers offer a public API providing access to their data but it is often rate limited.

PowerTrack

PowerTrack is Gnip's powerful filtering language that gives you the ability to get complete coverage of the data you need.

RESTful API

With a REST API, you make a request to the server within a certain time period, and get data back only after you make the request.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment analysis is a technique for determining the feelings expressed in text aka whether the sentiment of text is angry, sad, happy, etc.

Social Data

Expresses social media in a computer-readable format (e.g. JSON) and shares metadata about the content to help provide not only content, but context. Metadata often includes information about location, engagement and links shared. Unlike social media, social data is focused strictly on publicly shared experiences.

Social Media

User-generated content where one user communicates and expresses themselves and that content is delivered to other users. Examples of this are platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and Disqus. Social media is delivered in a great user experience, and is focused on sharing and content discovery. Social media also offers both public and private experiences with the ability to share messages privately.

Streaming API

With a Streaming API, your requests are ongoing as is the data coming your way after you make the requests.

XML

Extensible Markup Language - a markup language that defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable.