While many people were watching the final match of the Women’s World Cup last week, the Hacking Team was hacked. Hacking Team, an Italian digital security company, provided surveillance software to law enforcement agencies. Their clients are government agencies, but they have been accused of selling to oppressive regimes, despite embargoes like the Wassenaar Arrangement. Last week’s hack proved that they have in fact sold software to Sudan and a number of other oppressive regimes, including Ethiopia, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia.

Why should you care about these hackings? And if a digital security company can get hacked, what can you and I do to prevent ourselves from becoming victims as well?

The power of a strong password is not a myth
Passwords are an important aspect of digital safety because they act as a form of authentication, often times as the only method. It’s important not just for individual accounts, but also for bigger organizations. So, how strong were the Hacking Team’s passwords?

Apparently, not strong enough. Their Twitter account was hijacked and used to spread the cache of files published in the hack. The Twitter password was one of many passwords that were stored in files that anyone with access could read (i.e., in plain text). I can presume this was how their Twitter account was compromised.

Poor policies around how passwords are selected and stored are what led to the publishing of passwords for the Hacking Team and one of their software engineers, Christian Pozzi. As lampooned by security professionals on Twitter, the majority of the passwords Pozzi used were variations on the word ‘password.’

What’s the major takeaway here? That the best practices of choosing strong passwords, not reusing passwords and storing them safely are just as important as we’re always told.

A strong password isn’t enough: Get to know your software
With the exception of having a long password, not everyone agrees on what constitutes a strong password. If you know your password has been compromised, you can be notified and immediately change it. But not all threats to one’s digital data are as transparent and easy to address. You especially need to be aware of what kind of software you have installed on your computers.

In the world of cyber warfare, there are holes in software that are discovered but remain undisclosed and unpatched. They are known as “zero-day exploits” (0-day) because they are released on or before the day an exploit is publicly revealed. It essentially means that some person or some organization/agency might be able to install malicious software without you, the software provider, or any defensive software (e.g., antivirus) knowing.

This issue is serious because there is a thriving market where people can purchase these exploits, which disincentivizes security researchers from disclosing their findings.

Hacking Team used 0-day exploits to hide their surveillance software. As of today, three 0-day exploits for flash have been revealed from Hacking Team’s files. How can you avoid this yourself? Always make sure that you upgrade your flash player and keep it updated. Or better yet, consider having it set to run selectively by using the option “click to run” when on a website that requires flash.

The more software you have installed (especially out of date and/or unnecessary software), the more chances there are for exploits to be used to compromise your system. This is even truer on mobile phones, which receive fewer software updates.

In addition to removing unnecessary software and keeping necessary ones updated, it is crucial to understand the limitations of software you are using. While not a new vulnerability, Hacking Team also had a Skype decoder to listen in on Skype calls. The published files revealed that they had this software from around 2006. Understanding the software you are using is essential to prevent having a false sense of security.

In the now immortal words of the Hacking Team “If your company hasn’t been #hacked, it will be.”

If your organization works with personally identifiable data,it is crucial to make sure the data is safe. Learn more about digital safety in our brand new upcoming course, Basics of Digital Safety. The course begins on August 17, lock in early bird rate now!

This is the second post in our Digital Pedagogy series, where we will share how we are trying to make online social learning even better with new learning activities. Check out the previous post here.

As an educator, I’m always looking for new and more effective learning activities that fit with my philosophy of learning. Teaching in this digital age is very exciting with the availability of new tools for different types of activities and distance education. Despite these advances and advantages of online learning, it is not always easy or possible to adapt in-person activities into an online environment.

My role at TechChange focuses on our online facilitated courses that we run. All of these courses run for four weeks and are based on our learning model, which uses social learning and game mechanics. Course completion is assessed by interaction (indicated through TechPoints) as opposed to grades.

Introduction to Collaborative Syllabus Building

With all of our courses, we try to be as responsive to the participants’ learning goals as possible. One of the first questions we ask participants in the first week of a course is whether or not we have missed something in the general content or direction of the course. We then try our best to incorporate these topics and resources into weeks three and four.

As we were designing our upcoming course on Mapping for Social Good, we found ourselves discussing the topic of content and scope once again. With mapping, there is a lot that can be discussed, from the very technical (there are masters programs just in digital mapping/GIS) to the ways mapping has been and can be used for social good. Instead of having the course facilitators decide on the content and potentially miss key topics that the participants want to cover, we have implemented a learning tool called collaborative syllabus building (will now be referred to as CSB in this post).

CSB is an activity used effectively in classrooms to improve motivation and performance of students by asking the learners to provide input on the curriculum, grading, course activities, and/or course expectations. For an in-person class this often occurs before the course starts or during the first few weeks.

Collaboration for setting topics is not confined to academia. Unconferences (also called OpenSpace Conferences) have become popular for their participant-driven focus. Typically, the unconference has no set syllabus and the participants set the agenda and sessions. Instead of having a conference organizer decide what the participants want to hear or learn, the participants vote by their attendance.

Educators and facilitators are already using technology to aid this collaborative participant-led process. For instance, educators have used Moodle to administer a survey prior to a course or a wiki for the collaboration. There are a number of other collaboration tools that can be used for this purpose. Most often, these tools are used in conjunction with in-person or hybrid (online and in person) events.

Adapting CSB for TechChange

At the core of social learning, a key component of TechChange’s learning model, is the idea of collaboration. We decided to adapt CSB for our 4-week online courses and will be trying it out this week for our mapping course!

In order for CSB to be effective, the course participants need to feel comfortable enough to ask questions about the topic. So with all of our CSB activities, we will be providing a short introduction to the topic and forums for participants to explore the content before the course begins. Having enough time to incorporate feedback and allow participants from diverse time zones provide input, we will run the CSB activity for a week prior to the course beginning.

For the syllabus itself, we will have learning objectives and course activities that we feel we need to cover in order to discuss the content. The rest of the syllabus, including additional learning objectives and course activities, will be based on what the participants want. While we can’t promise that everything participants recommend will make the syllabus, we will do our best and share the final syllabus at the beginning of the course.

We’re very excited to be trying out CSB this week with Mapping for Social Good! Have you used CSB in an online course before? Tell us how it went by tweeting @NormanShamas and @TechChange or comment below!

What does urban design have to do with mental health? By 2050, at least two-thirds of the global population will live in cities, which means urban public health is fast becoming a priority. Policymakers, architects, designers, urban planners and others are starting to think seriously about how to design our cities in ways that reduce health issues like obesity or breathing problems, but one key aspect of urban public health can find itself under the opportunity radar: mental health.

The Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health (UD/MH) hopes to change this. Launching this week in Washington DC, this startup think tank seeks to answer one question: how can we design better mental health into our cities? UD/MH plans to bring together interdisciplinary thinkers and doers to share ideas and find solutions. They will curate research, provide analysis, showcase innovation and host interdisciplinary dialogues in cities all over the world.

We know cities can make us happy. For example, they can facilitate social interaction, deliver low-stress commutes, and may provide us with lovely green spaces. But we also know that cities can also make us less than happy. City living is associated with increased depression, anxiety, and even schizophrenia.

Can we adapt the urban environment to improve our mental health and wellbeing? And how can mobile technology help?

Right now, mHealth is emerging as a promising tool to help us understand how urban design affects mental wellbeing. The Urban Mind Project is a current London-based pilot research project that invites people to regularly track their mental wellbeing over the course of a week via a mobile app, which relates their feelings to different aspects of the urban environment. The researchers hope their results will inform future urban planning and social policy on urban design and mental health.

“We can use digital technologies to try to understand how the built environment affects us, affects our well-being and our health, and maybe it sounds a bit too optimistic, but I think it must be possible to build better environments,” says Andrea Mechelli, the lead investigator on the study. “It seems an obvious thing to do, but it’s not really happening. Often, urban planning is motivated by other reasons. Why should it not be motivated by people’s well being and health?”

The Urban Mind Project is a collaboration between King’s College London, J&L Gibbons, Nomad, A&E, the Van Alen Institute and the Sustainable Society Network+. They aim to analyze the data and demonstrate how urban environments affect mental health. One example is looking at the way urban environments can influence whether a person is more or less likely to develop an addiction. If you happen to be in London, you can sign up to participate here.

Screen shot: Urban Mind Project

If you’re not in London, you will soon be able to start tracking urban design and mental health via your phone using Gensler’s new PoppySeed app. PoppySeed plans to crowdsource how different city locations make people feel, and direct them to locations that others associate with positive emotions. The data being gathered by this app is also poised to feed into future decision-making around urban design. Right now, you still need an invitation code to join the fun but here’s a video that gives an overview of the app. mHealth for urban design and mental health is in its infancy, but it is growing and this is an exciting time.

As the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health gets underway, we can look forward to the results of these experiments, and to others sharing their innovative mHealth projects on the think tank’s Sanity and Urbanity blog. In the meantime, other ways in which urban design can improve mental health will be explored at the UD/MH launch event on July 7th. A limited number of tickets are still available here.

Interested in learning more? We will be exploring initiatives like UD/MH in our upcoming Mapping for Social Good online course that begins on July 20.

About Layla

Layla McCay, a TechChange mHealth alumna is a psychiatrist, health policy specialist, and adjunct professor in international health at Georgetown University. Trained at the Maudsley Hospital and Institute of Psychiatry in London, she has worked for the World Health Organization, the World Bank, and several global health NGOs. She is passionate about the determinants of mental health and how people interact with the built environment. Layla is the Director of the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health, launching on July 7.

In a previous post, we wrote about how ICTs were helping people all around the world respond to the Nepal earthquake. Today, Luther Jeke takes a closer look at the mapping efforts during the response.

Do you remember where you were the morning of April 25, 2015? I will never forget. I was at my home in Washington D.C. catching up on emails and the news. I was shattered when I saw the headlines for the earthquake in Nepal. The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that was going to later claim more than 8,800 lives and injured more than 23,000.

I’m based in Washington D.C. through the Atlas Corps fellowship and have Nepali friends in the fellowship here as well. After getting the details of the devastation in Nepal from several news sources, I reached out to the other Nepali fellows, including Samita Thapa, who is based at TechChange. I knew that Nepalis who were living abroad may feel helpless being so far away and I had the thought: what if they could volunteer digitally?

Nepali volunteers

I have been a member of the Standby Task Force (SBTF) since 2011. The SBTF organizes digital volunteers into a flexible, trained and prepared network ready to deploy in crises. Launched at the 2010 International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010), the SBTF was created “to streamline online volunteer support for crisis mapping, following the lessons learned in Haiti, Chile and Pakistan, and to provide a dedicated interface for the humanitarian community.”

But just having a digital mapping community isn’t enough. Having local information and networks on the ground is crucial, so the three of us coordinated a group of Nepali volunteers to assist the SBTF digital humanitarian efforts that mapped the Nepal earthquake by analyzing social media content. Together, we were able to recruit around 200 Nepali volunteers who tirelessly helped the mapping team by feeding, translating, and verifying information from our social media network in and out of Nepal. We were constantly on Facebook, Twitter, and Skype over a period of two weeks to help with this digital humanitarian deployment and to map the crisis.

The Mappers

We helped the SBTF collect, verify and map over 1,000 lines in the information management database of the Nepal earthquake. About 5 million tweets were processed by the Artificial Intelligence in Disaster Relief platform (AIDR). Our volunteer group was instrumental in helping the SBTF click through more than 60,000 images and 10,000 messages that were being geolocated onto this map below, with around 200 volunteers joining the Nepal Advisors deployment.

Tweets and images geolocated by SBTF volunteers on MicroMappers

The data was used by many humanitarian organisations like Doctors Without Borders, Nepal Youth Foundation, Government of Nepal, governments of various other countries responding to the earthquake, and more. It has been used to assist and accelerate the coordination of humanitarian groups on the ground. We processed an extraordinary range of data streams during the 12 days of the deployment and geolocated pictures and messages of needs and offers of assistance, provided maps and tables and supported other organisations and groups to streamline their processes. Our team worked closely with many other groups throughout this deployment. You can read about our efforts and success over on the SBTF blog.

I have learned from my mentor, Patrick Meier that anyone can be a digital humanitarian. All you need is a big heart and access to the Internet. I reached out to the Standby Task Force and with huge efforts from Medha and Samita, we founded a volunteer group of Nepalis to digitally support the work of the SBTF in Nepal. To learn more or to get involved, check out their website here. They can alway use your support whenever disaster strikes.

Digital mapping has been used in disaster response, maternal health, WASH programs, and more. Interested in learning more ways mapping is being used for social good? Sign up for our upcoming Mapping for Social Good online course now!

About Luther

Luther is an Atlas Corps Technology for Development Fellow serving at Creative Associates International (Creative). Luther provides support to the Technology for Development (T4D) unit which is responsible for incubating new ideas of how to use technology interventions at Creative. Learning about the latest in information and communication technologies for development and contributing innovative solutions are his two key missions at Creative. He has four year of experience in the nonprofit sector, and earned a Bachelor’s of Arts in Sociology and has a wealth of experience in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector. In his most recent capacity as iLabLiberia’s Director of Training, he and his team provided more than 3,000 Liberian and foreign nations the opportunity to use the innovation lab and gain new technology skills. You can learn more about Luther here.

This post originally appeared on the Atlas Corps blog.

A few weeks ago I touched on how you might use APIs to access data for visualizations. The response was great, but it definitely wasn’t lost on me that there’s a steep learning curve associated with getting started on using an API. Fortunately, you don’t necessarily need to be a programmer in order to make use of some great API combinations.

As a quick recap, an API is a way that servers on the internet can communicate with each other to exchange data and ask each other to do different things. For example, you can connect your Facebook account with Twitter so that whenever you post to Facebook, you also tweet out your status. The ability to configure different web applications (like Facebook and Twitter in our example) to interact with each other has led to the advent of what some folks call “The Programmable Web.”

Now, web applications like If This Then That (IFTTT) and Zapier are working to make the APIs that power the programmable web accessible to non-programmers. We’ll be focusing on IFTTT here, but you should also definitely check out Zapier’s guide to APIs.

In IFTTT, you create API “recipes” by picking a trigger API (let’s say you receive an email in your Gmail inbox with a certain heading) and then associating it with an action API (lets say Twitter). IFTTT has over 100 web applications that it can integrate, so the possibilities are huge.

When you make the recipe live, IFTTT acts as the intermediary and connects these two services on your behalf, so that (for example) when you get an email saying that someone has followed you, your Twitter account automatically tweets a thank-you note.

That’s it! At its core, IFTTT is just an engine for taking inputs from one web app, and then outputting information in another app. (If you’re interested in the example recipe above, register for IFTTT and follow this link). Integrating Gmail and Twitter is great, but can the programmable web do more? You bet it can. Here is a list of my top 5 IFTTT recipes that you can use to save time:

1) Send yourself emails for new Craigslist postings from any search you’re interested in

Craigslist is a great social marketplace, but let’s face it, nobody wants to spend hours combing through their listings. Looking for a new bike, piece of furniture, or new office space? Now you can get emails when something matches your search criteria and avoid repetitive browsing.

2) Log your work hours on Google Calendar when located at work

This IFTTT recipe uses your phone’s location to determine if you’re at work, and then adds a new appointment to a Google Calendar that lasts for as long as you’re at work. If you hate keeping track of your hours, this recipe could be super helpful.

3) Email me my new iPhone photos

If you’d rather get your photos off your phone as soon as you take them, this recipe is fantastic. It’s especially useful for events, where you might want to send photos that you take to another team member so that they can post the best photos you send.

4) Email me / add event to my calendar when the U.S. Congress does something

Well, depending on your definition of “does something” this may take a while to trigger. But IFTTT does offer several fantastic integrations for both The New York Times and Sunlight Foundation. For example, you can get an email alert when congress schedules a vote, or have the vote added to your calendar. Triggering an event when the president signs a bill into law is also possible. While not necessarily helpful to everyone, if you’re working on policy issues in the US, this recipe could be essential to your work.

5) Transcribe a voicemail and email it to me

This recipe allows you to call IFTTT, leave a voicemail, and then have the transcribed version be send to your inbox. A great way to take notes, although the transcription service is still a little rough around the edges. If you’ve heard about this feature with Google Voice, you can now get similar functionality with IFTTT for free.

That’s it for the roundup! I’ve left out some other cool integrations with smart devices and wearables, simply because they’re not as relevant to everyone. If you’ve made if this far, I’d love to hear your ideas for API integrations in the comments, or feel free to tweet @techchange and @charlieweems.

There are many lessons to be learned from on-site organizations doing implementation.

As a personal account, I was recently reflecting on exploratory calls I conducted while at Results for Development (R4D). Water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) organizations had a thing or two to say about how data and mapping technologies influence their work.

One trend I noticed was that innovative WASH organizations felt their voices were not being heard in Washington D.C. During the calls, they explained how they needed a new means of communicating with large donor and funding organizations. The solution? Data.

Data has caused a craze, a buzzword for new bandwagon technology enthusiasts. However, we must proceed with caution. Like a previous post on TechChange, The Case for Gender Data, research questions and our own cultural frameworks can easily slip in and create a biased data set, even with general survey assessments for water, sanitation and hygiene challenges.

From my experiences collaborating with organizations in South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya and India, similar themes presented themselves. The encroachment of new ‘innovative’ technologies and the cutthroat need for greater data collection has turned social good work into a narrow-minded desire to show off results rather than produce long-term outcomes.

Water quality and sanitation organizations feel the pressure to collect more data to prove their work’s success through the ‘x’ number of water pumps rather than ‘x’ amount of water being used. (Water Forever or Maji Milele translated in Kenyan, is a unique organization that addresses this issue through the sales of prepaid water meters to water utility companies in Kenya).

This means that maps need a skeptic’s eye, too. GIS applications have become a runner up in the bandwagon club. Maps are only as good as its data and the underlying story it tells. Too many maps in the field of International Development are merely tracking funding allocations and project placements rather than highlighting practical analysis tool sets to benefit socially marginalized populations.

Nonetheless, I have learned from working in this space that data collection, monitoring outcomes and mapping visualizations can most certainly help address water issues, but by no means is the solution.

Innovative technologies can help address the water and sanitation crisis but it’s not a ‘Silver Bullet’ Solution that will change broader social and political structures. It’s when these tools have real world applications to support policy and resource management that new mapping technologies are better equipped to get things done.

A great example of this is IWMI. International Water Management Institute (IWMI) is a pioneer in the field of international water and ecosystem management research. IWMI creates practical tools that are free and open to the public to help address water related issues through climate change vulnerability assessments, groundwater quality monitoring and water resource management.

These are three examples of mapping tools that are initiating a movement towards practical mapping applications with analysis that goes beyond just a point on the map.

Vulnerability of Nepali Districts to adapt to shifts in rainfall and river runoff linked to climate change

“The Himalayan region is considered to be very sensitive to climate change due to the high variation in altitudes. Changes in cloud cover and rainfall, particularly over land; melting of icecaps and glaciers and reduced snow cover are some of the prominent threats due to rise in temperature. “

“The main objective of this study was to identify and prioritize sub-basins/watersheds in the Middle and High Mountains of Nepal that are significantly vulnerable to Climate Change (CC). ”

Assessing the chemical quality for Sri Lanka’s primary groundwater resource

“The absence of perennial rivers or major water supply schemes to the Peninsula highlights the importance of groundwater as the predominant water resource for domestic, industrial and agricultural use. Intensive irrigation, higher inorganic fertilizer usage and a comparatively dense population may result in over-extraction of groundwater resources and a deterioration of the water quality over time.”

“The objective of this study was to characterize the chemical quality of the Chunnakam aquifer, map the spatial distribution of water quality and making the information easily accessible to future research studies and water/land-use managers.”

Sri Lanka’s water portal on water availability and risks

“The Water Information System for Sri Lanka aims to provide a web-based framework with access to information on water resources in Sri Lanka in order to ensure the sustainable use and efficient management of water resources. Information on Sri Lanka’s available water resources, how it is changing over time in quantity and quality, the present and future demand for water resources, and how climate change is impacting the overall situation of available water resources.”

If you’d like to learn more about mapping, I encourage you to sign-up for TechChange’s newest Mapping for Social Good certificate course and to join the conversation with me on Twitter at @EvaAdler44 and @TechChange.

This post is kicking off a monthly series where we’ll discuss how TechChange uses digital pedagogy for its platform and learning model and explore how the #edtech industry is being disrupted as a whole. Join the conversation on Twitter using the hashtag #digpedseries and with @techchange and @normanshamas.

As someone whose job title includes the word pedagogy, but doesn’t work in academia, I find myself often explaining what it means. This isn’t to say that people don’t know about it or aren’t thinking about how to teach, but the different terms used to refer to teaching and people who teach act as barriers to sharing knowledge. My passion lies in teaching, whether I’m called a teacher, instructor, trainer, facilitator, organizer, or any other term. This series is my way of helping bridge these conversations to so we can further improve education online.

Many people can appreciate or see the effects of good pedagogies. For example, learners might be engaged and retain content better. Course activities may be designed in a way to develop critical thinking skills that go beyond the content. Or quite simply, the course may just make learning more fun. In this post and throughout the series, we’ll be covering different types of pedagogy and learning models and how they affect the ever-evolving online education space.

So, what IS pedagogy?

Pedagogy is the philosophy behind and practice of creating a learning environment. It informs the structure of the course and how outcomes are evaluated. To put it simply, it’s the “why” and “how” of learning.

At its core, pedagogy is an intentionality towards learning and instruction. It is a recognition that course design matters just as much, if not more, than content.

In online education, pedagogy is trying to provide access to great educational experiences and environments instead of just access to educational content.

What about pedagogy and online education?

Here at TechChange, we’re building off the experience and research of in-person and blended learning. We work to contribute to the conversation by analyzing how online tools and environments can be used in a learning environment and push the boundaries by trying to bring what works in highly interactive in-person courses to an entirely online environment.

We treat our participants not as passive students to be lectured to, but active participants in defining the course curriculum and sharing information. Students sharing their own knowledge and work becomes an important source of knowledge and we work towards creating a flipped classroom by the end of the course.

Academics have started to look more closely at how online social tools can be used in education. Rhizomatic learning, the idea that the ‘community is the curriculum,’ has emerged as one of the conversations around critical pedagogy online. While rhizomatic learning has embraced how the internet and online social networks can be used for learning inside of a classroom, few people are thinking about how it can improve learning outside of academia and traditional learning models, such as the one TechChange has created. Additionally, journals such as Hybrid Pedagogy are using new social technology to advance digital conversations on and provide trainings around digital pedagogy.

As a company, TechChange exists at this exciting intersection of digital pedagogy and technology. We are working to create the best online software for high quality educational experiences with elements of pedagogy built into the platform, and we’re excited to see what the future holds.

Last Friday marked the beginning of a new series of conversations around online pedagogy here at TechChange. Each month we will be talking about a new aspect of pedagogy and how it applies to online education, then sharing those insights through our blog and on Medium. Follow along with us and send any ideas you have for topics you’d like to see us cover to info@techchange.org.
We hope you’ll join this conversation by sharing your thoughts with us on Twitter using the hashtag #digpedseries and interacting with us at @techchange and @normanshamas.

Knowledge Management may sound intimidating, but you’d be surprised at how many of us are already following it’s principles every day at our organizations. Knowledge Management (KM) is about connecting different sectors and ideas by making sure that the right people, processes, and technology are in place to support knowledge exchange.

Why should you care about knowledge management?

In today’s knowledge-driven economy, 25 to 45 percent of the workforce is made up of people who work with knowledge and information. The knowledge economy depends on our ability to rapidly analyze, recombine and add to existing information. KM helps make sure that we don’t waste time digging up existing knowledge, which can decrease organizational efficiency by more than 12%. Also, without proper KM practices in place, organizations risk losing up to 90% of knowledge due to an employee transition.

So what are the three essential elements needed to manage knowledge flow, and what is the role of the Knowledge Manager?

1. Tech tools
Though a small part of the KM equation, tech tools are probably the most visible aspect of KM. Technical tools and digital platforms enable people to connect with each other, to document processes and to house information. Wikis, blogs, databases, project management portals, and a bevy of cloud-based collaboration tools are all designed to help avoid the perils of email overload and/or losing information into the ether. Newer technology like data mining and visualization techniques are opening up new avenues of information and knowledge that were previously inaccessible to the average knowledge worker.

But just like agricultural or industrial tools, every KM tool has its appropriate use and can end up causing frustration or decreased productivity if it is used incorrectly. A Knowledge Manager should understand which tool is the right one to tackle a particular KM problem — or if it is appropriate to use a technology-based tool at all.

2. Processes
Have you ever completed a project and thought to yourself, “Wow, I wish ALL our projects could be as successful as this one!” KM processes such as “After Action Reviews” and peer assists help practitioners share what works and learn from each others’ mistakes. Taking a reflective step back from the hustle and bustle to assess how things went, and how things can be improved, is a great process to incorporate into your workflow, and can eventually lead to another KM stalwart: the best practice. The act of making a checklist is a simple yet proven KM technique to ensure that standards are met and procedures are followed. After all, checklists save lives.

Once KM processes are in place, knowledge managers are responsible for ensuring that the they are being followed and relevant to workers needs. Processes should not be ossified, confining structures that limit the creativity of workers, but should instead evolve with a changing understanding of their utility.

3. And most importantly, people
In the end, KM is all about making sure that people have access to the right information and knowledge. People are both the source of and destination for knowledge, so building out an active community is the key to any successful KM project. Sometimes that literally means getting folks in a room together to share their experiences, but it often also means setting up virtual spaces for them to do the same.

A Knowledge Manager’s role in their community is to first understand who knows what and where to facilitate the knowledge exchange, either through a knowledge audit or a social network analysis. Next, they can attempt to connect the dots by hosting process or technology-based knowledge sharing activities. A sense of trust amongst participants is fundamental to any knowledge sharing amongst participants, and a Knowledge Manager should always be focused on creating a welcoming and supportive space for people to share.

Want to get started?
The good thing about KM is that you’re probably already following some of its principles, you just didn’t know you were. There are also a number of guides out there that can help you dip your toes into the KM waters. Or better yet, you can join me and other KM experts in TechChange’s Introduction to Knowledge Management course to start creating a KM culture at your organization.

About author

Marisol Pierce-Quinonez is a Community & Knowledge Management Consultant in support of the World Bank’s SecureNutrition Platform. Prior to joining the World Bank, Mari was a Knowledge Management Specialist in support of USAID’s Bureau for Food Security, and worked for several nonprofits in New England dedicated to bringing people together to share knowledge and collaboratively improve the domestic food system. She will be facilitating TechChange’s Introduction to Knowledge Management online certificate course.

3D printing has been around for a while, but the global development community is only recently exploring how it can be used for social change. From printing low-cost prosthetics to providing basic supplies after a disaster, 3D printing’s potential to benefit society is undeniable. These were the kind of topics we set out to explore with participants from 10 different countries in TechChange’s first 3D Printing for Social Good online course.

We started the course with a deep dive into 3D printing, examining how it works, how it can be used, and the tech ecosystem in which it exists. We enlisted the help of guest experts like Jeremy Simon of 3D Universe and Colin McCormick, who brought us a live 3D printing demo. Course participants also had the opportunity to learn more about free CAD tools and practice creating digital 3D models of objects, as well as find a makerspace or Fab Lab near them.

Then we examined how 3D printing is being used for social good through the work of e-NABLE, techfortrade, and Field Ready, and course participants had the opportunity to interact with key stakeholders in each organization. Based on the insights from our sessions with e-NABLE’s founder Jon Schull, Matthew Rogge of techfortrade, and co-founder of Field Ready, Dara Dotz, participants discussed the potential for adapting the models of these organizations to create change in their own contexts.

Finally, we focused on the challenges and opportunities in 3D printing for social good. In particular, we learned how 3D printing fits into the larger Maker Movement and explored how the methods, mindsets, and tools adopted by the Maker Movement could be leveraged for social good with the help of guest experts Robert Ryan-Silva of DAI Maker Lab and Kate Gage of USAID Global Development Lab.

Here’s a recap of our guest expert sessions:

Gabriel Krieshok of the US Peace Corps spoke from his experience implementing technology solutions and shared his excitement about the potential that 3D printing holds for underserved populations living in low-resource settings.
Jeremy Simon of 3D Universe shared his experience with a variety of 3D printing technologies and demonstrated the power of 3D printing on a personal level by discussing projects he has worked on with his family and the e-NABLE community.

Sara and Colin, during the 3D printing demo

Colin McCormick brought us a live 3D printing demo, walking us through the process of finding, modifying and printing an object from a digital 3D model he found online. In addition, he described his experience building a 3D printer from a DIY kit.
Matthew Rogge of techfortrade explained the work that he’s doing in Latin America with ethical filament, and in East Africa with 3D printers made from e-waste. Through both of these projects, techfortrade is using locally-sourced materials that are available in abundance to improve livelihoods and increase access to 3D printing technology.
Jon Schull, founder of e-NABLE, provided insight into e-NABLE’s crowdsourced model for providing low-cost prosthetic devices to people in need, and the future of the e-NABLE Community Foundation.
Dara Dotz, co-founder of Field Ready spoke about her experience 3D printing in extreme environments, from implementing Field Ready’s pilot program to 3D printing medical supplies in Haiti, to designing a 3D printer used in the International Space Station with ‘Made in Space’. Dara demonstrated how 3D printing can disrupt the supply chain in both extremes by dramatically reducing costs and the time it takes to access or produce parts; recycling, reusing and reprinting parts; and prototyping and producing tools from waste.
Robert Ryan-Silva of DAI Maker Lab talked about how increasing access to maker tools, such as 3D printing, CNC tools, and electronic building blocks, can help people create, champion, and iterate upon solutions that meet their needs, in their own context.
Kate Gage of the USAID Global Development Lab provided examples of innovative solutions that have come out of the Maker Movement. She also stressed the need to create pathways that help makers apply their skills to some of the world’s greatest challenges and create viable, human-centered solutions.

While all the developments in the field of 3D printing are exciting, it is important to understand that implementing 3D printing technology in low-resource settings comes with a few challenges. Limitations like slow print speed, the resilience of 3D printed objects and 3D printers themselves, and access to resources like filament and a steady power supply to complete a 3D print job are important realities to consider when taking 3D printing to low-resource settings.

3D printing technology is advancing at a rapid pace to address some of these limitations. Far greater than the challenges inherent in 3D printing, conversations with guest experts and among course participants, as well as the projects highlighted in this course, have demonstrated the potential that 3D printing holds for social good- from improving healthcare delivery, to creating breakthroughs that can contribute to sustainable global development.

Who are the other players using 3D printing for social good? Or if you own a 3D printer, what are you using it for? Comment below or tweet at us @TechChange

About author

Sara Pitcairn is Co-Director of Instructional Design at TechChange, where she works with clients to develop and design custom online learningexperiences , ranging from webinar series to facilitated and on-demand courses. She is also the facilitator for TechChange’s 3D Printing for Social Good course. Prior to TechChange, Sara taught middle and high school STEM courses at the Barrie School, where she also led an Engineering Product Design program for high school students. Sara graduated from Yale University with a degree in Mechanical Engineering, which sparked her passion for design thinking and human-centered design. In her spare time, Sara enjoys reading, traveling, and perfecting her guacamole recipe.

When I hear the term “artificial intelligence”, my first thoughts go to HAL9000 and Data from Star Trek before settling on some vague notion about the Turing test. Clearly I’m not a computer scientist.

While reading Patrick Meier’s book, I realized that I had missed out on a wide range of advances in the field of machine learning, some of which also fall under “artificial intelligence”, which can help us make sense of the onslaught of information that we are faced with whenever a disaster strikes.

When the crowd gets overwhelmed

While nothing can beat the collective intelligence of a sufficiently large group of people that focus their energy on processing a lot of data, the problem with this type of crowdsourcing is that you need a very large group of people – and volunteers are a scarce resource.

Projects like Artificial Intelligence for Disaster Response (AIDR) from the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) are striving to make better use of the volunteer’s time. To do this, the AIDR algorithm is basically looking over the volunteers’ shoulders while they are processing a small amount of data. The machine learns from every decision, until it understands the patterns well enough to process the data itself. Datasets it is unsure about are returned to the volunteers for review and their decisions then improve the algorithm further. According to QCRI, the algorithm frequently reaches confidence levels of over 80 per cent, meaning that huge amounts of data can be analysed in a fraction of the time it would take volunteers.

You can test AIDR for free one the project’s website. If you want to know more, take a look at the video below.

Image analysis

The EU’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) as well DigitalGlobe, a company that provides satellite imagery and analysis, go even further: they are training their algorithms to interpret images. The JRC algorithm for example is already able to detect rubble for damage assessments in a city after an earthquake with up to 92% confidence, while DigitalGlobe is asking the crowd to teach its software how to recognize buildings on satellite photos. That information will no doubt be used to improve the company’s commercial products, but it is also being used to help fight malaria in Swaziland by providing aid organizations with a better idea of population density. This in turn can help program managers make decisions about where to commit the most resources.

You can support the malaria project through DigitalGlobe’s Tomnod platform here.

Another example, where this type of automatic population density data would have been useful, is the Ebola response, where population data had to be estimated manually, based on houses that first had to be mapped by OpenStreetMap volunteers. An algorithm that can automatically identify homes would have been much faster.

What I find amazing is that these tools are already working and available today. And while there are definitely still ways to improve them and bugs to work out, they make me very optimistic for the very near future of information management and needs assessment in disaster response.

What do you think about the role of artificial intelligence in disaster response? Comment below or tweet at us @TechChange. This post originally appeared on Social Media 4 Good.

If you are interested in learning about technologies like artificial intelligence that are helping in disaster response, join us in our upcoming online course “Technology for Disaster Response” which starts on 22 June.

About author

Timo Luege, TC103: Technology for Disaster Response Facilitator

After nearly ten years of working as a journalist (online, print and radio), Timo worked four years as a Senior Communications Officer for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) in Geneva and Haiti. During this time, he also launched the IFRC’s social media activities and wrote the IFRC social media staff guidelines. He then worked as Protection Delegate for International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Liberia before starting to work as a consultant. His clients include UN agencies and NGOs. Among other things, he wrote the UNICEF “Social Media in Emergency Guidelines” and contributed to UNOCHA’s “Humanitarianism in the Network Age”. Over the last year, Timo advised UNHCR- and IFRC-led Shelter Clusters in Myanmar, Mali and most recently the Philippines on Communication and Advocacy. He blogs at Social Media for Good.