Gapminder Foundation

Gapminder Foundation is a non-profit venture registered in Stockholm, Sweden, that promotes sustainable global development and achievement of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at local, national and global levels.

Gapminder was founded in 2005 by Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Hans Rosling. The name Gapminder was derived from the "Mind the Gap" warning messages on the London Underground.

Overview
The Foundation initially developed the Trendalyzer software, which produced the now famous animated bubble graph. This software was acquired by Google in March 2006. The team of developers for Gapminder joined Google in April 2007. In 2010 Anna Rosling Rönnlund and Ola Rosling left Google and returned to Gapminder with the goal to develop free teaching material.

The current version of Trendalyzer is Gapminder World, a web-service displaying time series of development statistics for all countries and many sub-national regions. Gapminder world uses "Google Motion Charts" to power its graphics.

The founding board of the Gapminder Foundation was composed of Ambassador Gun-Britt Andersson, Professor Christer Gunnarsson of Lund University, Professor Bo Sundgren of the Stockholm School of Economics, Professor Hans Rosling of the Karolinska Institute, and Professor Hans Wigzell of the Karolinska Institute.

The current president of the foundation is Ola Rosling. Anna Rosling Rönnlund is the foundation's vice president.

The medical doctor Helena Nordenstedt is head of research. The head of software is Jasper Heeffer.

Projects
The Gapminder Foundation has produced a number of other projects, including:


 * World Income Distribution, an interactive display of statistics on household income distribution for Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Nigeria, Pakistan and USA and the World as a whole in each year from 1970 to 1998.
 * Dollar Street, an interactive display of the world as a street. The street number is the daily income per person in the family. All people of the world live on Dollar Street. The poorest live in the left end and the richest in the extreme right end. All other people live in between on a continuous scale of daily incomes.
 * Human Development Trends 2003, a linear thematic Flash presentation is developed with United Nations Development Program (UNDP) for the release of the Human Development Report 200.
 * World Health Chart 2001, a display of 50 to 100 years of health development for all countries of the World with time series for 35 indicators provided by the World Health Organization.

Mission statement
Gapminder's stated mission is ' Fighting devastating ignorance with fact-based worldviews everyone can understand.'

The object of the Foundation is to promote sustainable global development and the achievement of the United Nations Millennium Goals by increased use and understanding of statistics and other information about social, economic and environmental development at the local, national and global levels.

The object of the Foundation shall be achieved by:
 * 1) use and development of information technology for easily understandable visualization of statistics and other information;
 * 2) ownership, protection and free dissemination of development results;
 * use, together with various cooperation partners, of the development results with a view to making statistics and other information about development available and understandable to broad user groups via the Internet and other media.