This year Digital@DAI published more than 120 posts, covering everything from our work in human-centered design (HCD) to advances in remote sensing.

We featured digital experts from organizations such as Panoply, BanQu, Omelas, and Bamba, and had almost 40,000 page views. We continue to explore the potential of digital technology across sectors, geographies, clients, and constituents in the blog and in the work that we do.

In our final blog of 2016 we reviewed the top five most read articles of the year. With our audience and total number of blog posts expanding, we’ll look at our top 10 of 2017, which showcase a broad range of topics, content, and writers.

1. Lush Green Remote Sensing—Last winter, we wrote a series of posts on remote sensing. This article looks at the method of using satellite imagery to identify healthy plant vegetation from space.

2. Digital Insights: Would Haitians use Mobile Money for Banking?—Using HCD, our team investigated the digital financial sector in Haiti, and wrote about our work to determine whether mobile technology could be a viable instrument for financial service providers across multiple demographic groups.

3. Digital Insights Bangladesh: How Urban Youth Stay Connected—In another article on digital insights, we wrote about our research on urban youth in Bangladesh: How do they connect? What sources of information do they trust? What are their favorite apps?

4. Women in Agritech: Profiles from Ghana—In this blog, we wrote about the Kosmos Innovation Center (KIC), a DAI-supported initiative that helps young entrepreneurs build tech startups that address challenges in Ghana’s agricultural industry. Find out more about this project in previous Digital@DAI posts here and here.

5. Open Source Series Part 1: What is Open Source?—In this introductory article to a series on open source technology, we explored the definition of open source as a concept, and discussed some of the pros and cons of relying on open source technology for professional work.

6. I Made a Facebook Chatbot (And You Can, Too)—Have you considered building a chatbot to reach wider audiences? In this article we discussed our efforts to build a chatbot that integrates with Facebook Messenger, and its applications to the job market in Indonesia.

7. Meet Honduras’s Innovation Community—During a trip to Honduras, our team visited an innovation community meetup in Tegucigalpa. In this article, we showcase the innovators and companies we met during our visit, and conclude that top-down, proposal-defined, pre-proscribed solutions are out; co-created, tech-enabled, iterative solutions are in.

8. Open Source Series Part 2: Spatial Analysis with QGIS—In part one of a two-part article, we explored the open source geographic information system (GIS) software package, QGIS, through a look at its history, and took a sneak peek at version 3.0.

9. Three Key Takeaways from USAID’s New Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit—The USAID Global Development Lab released the Gender and ICT Survey Toolkit this fall. In this article we discuss three major takeaways from the report.

10. 5 Podcasts from Human-Centered Designers—In this article we shared five podcasts that shape our understanding of design. We hope you’ll take the time to give them a listen.

Stay tuned for what 2018 brings. In the past months, we have been researching the application of blockchain to some of our development projects and we started to leverage new machine learning tools. We are working on new products for the coming year. We will continue to use this blog to investigate emerging trends in digital technologies for global development, hold conversations with some of the field’s foremost experts, and deliver innovative content to you on a weekly basis.

Thank you for reading, and have a happy new year.