Meet-N-Meter iPhone app

The Center for Global Development is an independent, nonprofit policy research organization that is dedicated to reducing global poverty and inequality and to making globalization work better for poor people. CGD conducts research and analysis on a wide range of topics related to how rich-country policies impact people in the developing world. Drawing on the research, we propose practical solutions and push for real-world implementation. Our research topics include aid effectiveness, climate change, education, health, migration, and trade.

We, like you, attend a lot of meetings- and we sometimes wonder if the value of a meeting is equivalent to or greater than what we might have done instead. Most of us are economists, after all.

So we designed a simple iPhone application, Meet-N-Meter, to tally the person-hour cost of a meeting and convert the dollars into development-related items such as insecticide-treated bed nets, vaccines, and school uniforms. With Meet-N-Meter, next time you're stuck in meeting of questionable value you can quickly figure the opportunity cost in real-world equivalents that matter to poor people and email the results to your colleagues, boss, or even the meeting organizers. (See this April 1, 2010 blog post for more information about how we created this app and plan to use it at CGD.)

Don't stop having meetings, just start having them better.