March | 2017 | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

Featured image credit: Janjua Amolksimranjit Singh

It was an immense pleasure to be a part of the two-day TechChange course ‘Mobile Phones for International Development’ with Nick Martin and fellow George Washington University classmates. Over the course of one weekend, we covered several themes that lie at the intersection of technology and development. We studied several ICT4D case studies where countries were working to develop technology-based solutions for specific issues, and delved deep within the intricate world of International Development as practitioners. Resonating with me the most were our discussions centered on normative practices which (should) go hand in hand with developing sustainable solutions for communities in varying contexts.

Of the 9 Principles for Digital Development, the first, “Design for User” prove how crucial it is for policymakers and practitioners to listen and learn to the needs and proposed solutions identified by the target communities themselves. As practitioners, we tend to view the communities as passive recipients of our conceptualized development framework. For truly sustainable solutions, policymakers must avoid this thinking, and view the target communities as independent agents of change to find avenues for meaningful collaboration, rather than imposing paternalistic policies that perpetuate dependency and powerlessness. The technology-based development approach presents opportunities and challenges that have been generally associated with development policy and practice. Technology can be a potent catalyst of positive change in impoverished communities if the designers and implementers pursue the noble task of aiding these communities as partners with a mutual respect. If we exclude the target population from the designing part of interventions, technology can provide symptomatic solutions at best, without addressing the underlying factors that cause and aggravate the problem in question.

The lively discussions throughout this course made me realize that technology-based development approach can amplify its effectiveness and outreach through innovative participatory community-driven solutions. The answer to the sustainable development puzzle does not lie in a grand design or state-of-art technology, but in home-grown adaptive initiatives. The proposed solutions of target population seem to be the missing link in much of the ICT4D discourse. If we truly want to change the world, our first step is to listen to the ones whose lives will be affected by our policies and projects.

About Obaid

Obaid Arshad Khan is a Fulbright Scholar from Pakistan, and a current M.A. Candidate for International Development Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Previously, he has worked with Interactive Research and Development as a Research Associate for projects focusing on electronic vaccines registry, social business model for Tuberculosis case detection and treatment, and Health Market Innovations. His core research interests lie in the behavioral economics, cutting edge technology, public health and other international development policy and practice themes.

Can design thinking improve lives on topics that matter?

Last year, TechChange collaborated with Catapult Design to create a short animation to provide three tips for how to make the most out of socially-driven design. Catapult Design is a non-profit based in Denver, where an accomplished team of designers, engineers, and business strategists offer a comprehensive approach to product and service development for low income and underserved customers.

The video is embedded below, but these tips include: 1) Engage designers early where they add the most value; 2) Design is a process to define opportunities and constraints; 3) Every project can benefit from design thinking.

Heather Fleming, the CEO of Catapult Design will be showing the video at Skoll World Forum, and we wanted to learn a bit more about her work:

Q: Is socially driven design as relevant now as when we first created the video? Would you update it?

Absolutely. Just in the past few months we’ve witnessed the repercussions from communities who feel excluded from our nation’s progress as well as unheard by their local governance. This is what socially-minded design and designers do best — promote inclusive and participatory processes with constituents in order to arrive at solutions that take into account their needs and aspirations as well as the bigger picture. FastCo posted a fascinating article about the contributions of designers working with the federal government in the 1970s, helping a variety of agencies with visual consistency and communication that would ultimately save federal dollars. The outcomes of this work are still visible and relevant today, and yet these are just the programs that the new administration seeks to cut. For these reasons, I’d say that socially driven design is relevant now even more so than when we collaborated on this video 12 months ago.

Q: Let’s say somebody watches the video and wants to start incorporating socially driven design. What would you tell them?

There’s a variety of on-line resources such as webinars, classes and toolkits. Those are all good and fine, but like all new things, it takes practice and discipline to master a new skill and learn new behaviors. You wouldn’t expect to master Chopin at your first piano lesson, and the same goes for applying design to projects. The common way of learning the piano, learning a new sport, and so on, is to work with a teacher or coach. I’d say the same goes for building the discipline, mindset and creative support to execute a solid design-driven project.

Also, like the video says — design principles should be incorporated at the very beginning. Instead of speculating on how to fix problems for your customer or constituents, work with them to identify and deconstruct the problems. Go into a project with confidence that you’re addressing the right issue that will create the change you want to see.

Q: Are there any initiatives or projects that you’re working on that are relevant to the information in this video?

About the time that we were working on this video with Tech Change, we were also kicking off an initiative on the Navajo Nation affecting economic development. There is an alarmingly low number of locally-owned business on the Navajo Nation, and the government and its constituents lose out on approximately $200M in potential sales tax to border towns each year. We began working with Navajo entrepreneurs and local small business agencies to re-think how to communicate the process and the steps to starting a business on the Navajo Nation. By mapping out these issues, exploring root cause, and prototyping ways to address the problems, we were able to launch Build Navajo, a web-based map for Navajo entrepreneurs who want to start a business on the reservation. Build Navajo also collects information from users as to where they get stuck in the process, which we intend to quantify and use as an advocacy tool for reform on business registration and site leasing processes.

Those who know Catapult Design primarily associate us with product development and the creation of physical things. But the process we use applies to most “products”, whether that be a physical thing, a service, or an experience. As we promote in the video, design and designers are champions of a broad mindset, or way of thinking, that can be applied to a variety of sticky challenges.

Want to learn more about Catapult Design? Make sure to visit their website or follow @Catapult_Design on Twitter!

We are very excited to announce console-to-slack, our first package of the year! One of our main goals for 2017 is to contribute more to the open-source community, so it is a good first step to be contributing this early in the new year. As an organization that has invested a lot into the open-source movement, we are excited for its future and how we can play our part.

So, what exactly is console-to-slack and how do we use it here at TechChange? Console-to-slack is a small module that utilizes Slack’s webhooks to send anything that normally is printed to the console to a Slack channel of your choice.

We recently made a push to update our authentication processes to use JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to more align with a trusted, industry standard for authentication. As we were working on this update, we needed a way to debug our changes in real-time without having to constantly monitor our application logs. In the past, we had tried out a module which would email us with any errors, but a few thousand emails and about 30 seconds later, we decided that wasn’t the best idea.

As an organization, TechChange uses Slack for our team messaging and we take advantage of Slack webhooks to post messages to a Slack thread anytime we update one of our courses. We quickly put two and two together and about 100 lines of code later, we had a module which would post any application errors to a Slack thread, complete with an embarrassing, childhood photo of our CTO.

Our initial use case was debugging the rollout of JWTs into the world, but we soon discovered its perfect use for low-risk error monitoring and reporting. Since then, we have packaged console-to-slack as a npm module, added a few more features, and beefed up the documentation.

Despite being such a small module, console-to-slack has had a large impact on our code base and best practices as a tech team. We decided to be more intentional with our use of logging in order to filter out unnecessary messages. As a result, we discovered subtle mistakes in other sections of code that were unintended behavior.

As a developer, it is a great feeling to contribute to the open-source community and we hope that TechChange’s contributions can help fellow developers as they see fit. We highly recommend that you dig up an embarrassing photo of your CTO, should you decide to give console-to-slack a try. Stay on the lookout for more open-source contributions from TechChange throughout 2017 and enjoy!