Category: Blog

This has been reposted from the DataDyne blog. If you’re interested in learning more about this topic and Magpi, check out our upcoming course with the mHealth Alliance on Mobile Phones for Public Health. Class starts on June 3!

More features, more speed, more ease of use, same prices!

In January 2013, DataDyne will unveil a completely new version of EpiSurveyor — including a new name! Yes, we’re retiring the venerable “EpiSurveyor” — with 10,000 users in 170 countries easily the most widely used mobile data collection system in the development sector, and the most successful ICT4D (ICT for development) project ever — and replacing it with “Magpi”.

We chose Magpi (rhymes with “sky”) because we realized that a lot of people thought a product named “EpiSurveyor” could only be used for epidemiological surveys.

That’s understandable, but we want to make sure people know that EpiSurveyor is being used to collect all kinds of data: in health, agriculture, supply chain, consumer surveys, and more. So we’re losing the name.

More Than 40 New Features!

Our Nairobi development team has added more than forty new features, more speed, more ease of use — and all the same pricing, including the free version. Magpi is a completely new application, written from scratch, that works like EpiSurveyor (so you’ll have no trouble using it if you’re used to EpiSurveyor).

Mapgi’s beta testing is ongoing, and the 1.0 release will be in January 2013. Note: there will be NO interruption in service when we make the switch. Sign up for our mailing list to make sure you are notified when Magpi goes live! (if you’re an EpiSurveyor user, you’re already on the list).

Watch Magpi in Action!

And in the meantime, you can watch this video (made with the help of our friends at TechChange) of DataDyne CEO and co-founder Joel Selanikio demoing both EpiSurveyor and some of the big improvements in Magpi. The Magpi section starts at about the 3:25 minutes mark:

 

Interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our upcoming course with the mHealth Alliance: Mobile Phones for Public Health. Class starts on Nov. 12!

This month we introduced a new online class on Technology, Innovation and SocialEntrepreneurship in partnership with Roshan Paul, cofounder of the Amani Institute and senior staff member at Ashoka. The class has already attracted much interest from 30 students in 10 countries, including speakers from Groupshot.org, Shift.org, Digital Green, and Architects of the Future.

While we offered the class as part of the unprecedented enthusiasm around the ability of private-sector innovators to solve global problems, the last two weeks have made clear how the availability of new tools has been inseparable from the growth of TechChange as an organization. The path from starting our firm two years ago to being a recognized B Corp can be told first through our team members, but also through the technology that we’ve chosen to use to further our institutional goals.

While we usually avoid taking a tech-centric approach to business and education, these tools have solved a variety of management challenges for us, including core learning platforms and content management, community engagement, talent recruitment, relationship management, collaborative document editing, and task management.

1. WordPress (Content Management): Everything we do at TechChange that is website related is based on WordPress. Our main TechChange.org site, and our course site are heavily customized versions of WordPress.  We are big believers in responsive design and WordPress gave us the framework that we needed to build a system that could be managed by non-programmers. Some of our favorite plugins: GravityForms, Advanced Custom Fields, WordPress Database Backup, Disqus, Google Analytics for WordPress, and BuddyPress. But ultimately, whenever we’re asked why we chose to go with WordPress, we have to be honest: We chose the highly engaged WordPress developer community first and then figured out if the tech could meet our needs going forward.

2. Twitter (Community Engagement): Twitter has been absolutely crucial to our success. We got a late start (May 2010) but in two years we’ve grown to 6200 followers with an average of about 300 new followers a month thanks to the incredible direction of social media whiz kids Alex Priest and TJ Thomander. The secret sauce: our following has grown in direct relation to the number of tweets we’ve sent out every day.  We like to aim for tweeting 25-40 times a day and so should you.  Some tools we like: Crowdbooster, BufferApp, TweetDeck and Friendorfollow.

3. Idealist.org (Talent Recruitment): Whenever we hire someone new, we always post on Idealist.org, mostly because we care about attracting people who are passionate about social change in addition to tech nerds. For us, Idealist has been the best place to find them. If you’re hiring for a new position, we’d highly recommend spending the $70 for a job announcement.  Having an open web form application is also a great way to constantly be on the lookout for the right talent. Check out the TechChange application here.

4. Salesforce (Relationship Management): Where would we be without the web standard in customer relations management? Salesforce allows us to easily catalog everyone who applies for our courses as well as clients who hire us for custom courses. There is an incredible diversity of tactics organizations can use to tap into the power of Salesforce. We love what the folks at Vera Solutions are doing in terms of helping other organizations use Salesforce to enhance their M&E work and are excited to have CEO Taylor Downs speaking in our class this week. Salesforce has a number of discounts available for nonprofits and B corps.

5. Google Docs (Collaborative Writing): Google Docs is a our go-to way to share documents and collaborate in real-time. We do so much within this framework from managing cash flow, to sharing spreadsheets of student lists, to editing proposals. You do need a gmail account to use them and some folks may prefer not to be too cloud dependant but we’ve been very happy with this tool over the past two years.

6. Asana (Task Management): We’ve struggled over the past two years to find a good task management tool that everyone on the team actually uses. We tried Basecamp, Open Atrium and a bunch of others with limited success. The beauty of Asana is that it integrates nicely with Gmail. The interface is very intuitive and so far this has been the best one yet.

Other tools and platforms we love: Github, Rackspace, Quickbooks Online, Google Analytics, and Paypal.

What about you? What tools or platforms have been the most valuable for you and why? Feel free to share them below.

This piece has been cross-posted from The Amani Institute. Read the original post.

You think carefully through the strategy for starting a new educational organization with an online course. You market the course and enroll more about 30 people from over 10 countries, with an exciting line-up of guest speakers. You prepare the content and syllabus for the course, working constantly and well with your partner organization. Everything’s set for the launch.

And then, five minutes into your introductory address, the electricity goes out and you’re disconnected from the web platform, leaving your partner and students wondering what happened to you. #typical #Murphy’s Law

Oddly enough, in the debris of that failed experiment lies an important learning moment about working with technology and working to solve social problems (which is in fact the subject of the course – “Technology, Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship“): no matter how much you plan ahead, there’s so much still outside your control, and just as technology can be a wonderful enabler, it can also be a serious disabler. As so many technologists and tech entrepreneurs love to say, “It’s not about the technology”. The human side is much more important, and we failed by not trying to limit the possibility of such a disabling moment.

We did not repeat our mistake, however. A few hours ago, we conducted a guest lecture in the online course. This time, we found a corporate office building with reliable electricity and internet connectivity. The subject was “Designing Your Tech-Enabled Social Enterprise” and our guest speaker was Adam White of GroupShot. Adam spoke candidly and insightfully about a number of key principles regarding designing tech-based social change initiatives, some common mistakes that people make, and some of the best organizations in this space. But just as pleased as we were with his talk, we were also just simply relieved that it went off without a hitch given that the hosts were based in Washington, D.C., the guest speaker in Boston, and we were moderating from Nairobi, Kenya.

#success #sigh-of-relief

Interested in learning with us? Check out our next course on Technology Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship, starting Oct. 1. Apply now!

 

What does it mean in a country transitioning from a long and bloody civil conflict if almost every citizen owns a mobile phone? Can the ubiquity of mobile communication play a role in breaking-down perception barriers and promoting reconciliation between communities?

I workshopped this question last week with Sri Lanka’s largest youth movement, Sri Lanka Unites, at their 2012 Future Leaders Conference in Jaffna. The conference brought together more than 350 youth from all of Sri Lanka’s ethnic and religious communities for four days of workshops focused on building relationships and empowering students to take action to support reconciliation nationally and within their local communities.

Few countries have higher mobile penetration than Sri Lanka- where 95 percent of the island nation’s population has a sim card and access to a mobile phone according to GSMA’s Mobile and Development Intelligence Unit.

Leveraging that connectivity asset for peacebuilding could be immensely valuable, particularly for country-wide civil society groups such as Sri Lanka Unites which seek to re-build relations between previously warring ethnic and religious communities through youth conferences such as FLC as well as grass-roots development initiatives.

To explore the ways in which mobile and social tools could be deployed in Sri Lanka for peacebuilding and development, I spoke briefly about the evolving deployment of mobile-based tech tools such as FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi by civil society groups to assist in everything from mapping electoral violence in Kenya to supporting earthquake reconstruction in Haiti and coordinating flood relief and fundraising in Pakistan.

 


Myself and Chandika Jayasundara (the co-founder of a fantastic company called Creately) then split the 350 delegates into groups and asked them to workshop the potential role of geo-social tools and crowdsourcing approaches in addressing one of Sri Lanka’s major health crises: the recent upsurge of dengue fever infections throughout the country.

The responses of the delegates to the dengue fever epidemic provides a few key lessons and questions for NGOs and donor agencies looking to leverage mobile and social networks to support reconciliation efforts and development initiatives in countries transitioning from civil conflict.

 

Coalition building and feedback loops are key
Experiences from crowdsourcing operations in Kenya, Haiti and more recently Libya have shown that it’s not enough to simply collect information about the situation on the ground. If technology tools are to enhance development and humanitarian interventions in the slightest, this data needs to be properly analyzed, its meaning widely disseminated through effective public campaigns and resources mobilized by relevant actors to redress the issue or problem.

The need for a firm feedback loop between information collection and change agents, especially in post-conflict settings, was hammered home in the dengue fever workshop. The participants focused not only on collecting and mapping info on the spread of the disease, but also on the need to address much broader challenges of social norms around water maintenance through public campaigns and institutional change.

With these objectives in mind, a two-stage strategy of coalition building and campaigning emerged, each part of which was enhanced by deployment of mobile-based and social mobilisation tools. The first stage would be to accurately determine the extent of dengue fever within Sri Lanka. Some delegates proposed partnering with one of Sri Lanka’s major mobile network operators (eg, Dialog or Mobitel) to conduct a mobile survey using tools such as GeoPoll to determine prevalence of dengue fever and access to treatment centers. Others saw a SMS short-code service such as the 4646 service, which was used after the Haiti earthquake in 2010 to report needs, as the best means of collecting info.

 


Participants generally agreed that regardless of data collection method, the purpose of aggregating this data would ultimately be to visualise it spatially using mapping tools such as Ushahidi. Being able to physically see collected info on where dengue fever is prevalent, determine the specific location of stagnant ponds and identify districts where misconceptions about symptoms and treatment of the tropical disease are common was seen as vital to targeting of SLU efforts.

The second phase would thus be a large-scale and targeted public information and dengue fever eradication campaign, in collaboration with various NGOs, private sector operators and relevant government departments and Ministries, using this mapped, crowdsourced data.

Hugely creative ideas for the awareness-raising phase of the campaign were proposed, with suggestions ranging from YouTube clips and cross-country walks to online courses and mobile games educating users about the causes and preventative measures associated with dengue fever.

Deploying SLUs high-school chapters to run educational workshops in local communities and partner with medical NGOs, the private sector and relevant government departments to eradicate stagnant ponds in their local neighbourhood was also proposed.

Rather than simply creating a shopping list of ‘cool’ technologies and apps that could help SLU outreach, the participants therefore conceived of the avenues of information collection and popular participation offered by mobile technologies in an institutional context in which change agents (eg. civil society actors, the private sector and government agencies) must partner to create feedback loops capable of taking substantive action.

 

Common issues cultivate common identities
Creating new mechanisms of accountability should be central for all social change initiatives or interventions deploying technology tools. But underpinning this integrated thinking in Sri Lanka is a larger observation about the nature of reconciliation in post-conflict societies.

In many ethnically, religiously and linguistically diverse countries recovering from bloody and divisive civil conflict, distrust between communal groups often continues to pervade inter-group relations for years after the end of formal hostilities.

These perceptions and ties can come to permeate and intermediate the social and economic interactions of everyday life, in many cases being manipulated by political candidates in close contests to catalyse voters- often violently- at local, state and national elections. The repeated paroxysms of Hindu-Muslim violence in India are just some disturbing examples.

Electoral and party regulations that incentivise (or require) inclusion of all regional and communal groups into political campaigns and agendas are vital, as is sharing of power through inclusion of minority groups in cabinets and various forms of decentralisation. However, research on civil society and peacebuilding by Ashutosh Varshney has also shown that it is the relationships and trust developed between individuals of ethno-communal groups which are vital to preventing minor scuffles or even false rumours about other ethnic groups from taking on a communal nature and escalating into all-out ethno-religious warfare.

Sri Lanka Unites’ recent ‘S.H.O.W You Care: Stop Harassment Against Women’ campaign is a fantastic example of the kind of local campaign that can help build trust between communities and be enhanced by tech tools. Across the country, more than 300 young men involved in SLUs high-school chapters boarded over 1250 buses in Colombo district to inform women of their avenues of redress and encourage passengers to intervene when they see incidences of violence.

The campaign received widespread media attention. But the merits of ‘S.H.O.W,’ and even the potential dengue fever project developed in our workshop cannot be assessed solely on how they change attitudes and behavior towards gender-based violence or eradicate dengue fever.

Just as important is how large-scale campaigns such as these can foster new relational ties and trust between individuals and organizations of diverse ethnic and religious groups, creating popular consciousness of issues which cut across various individual identities and require action on an equitable basis- regardless of ethnic or religious backgrounds.

 

Put tech in its rightful place
So what role can mobile phones play in reconciliation? TechChange’s own Greg Maly recently observed that 90 percent of the social impact created by technology-enhanced development initiatives are the result of feedback loops created by people (or ‘the crowd’) partnering with various organizations and institutional actors to improve service delivery and solve collective problems through public campaigns or grass-roots action.

The workshops on dengue fever in Sri Lanka demonstrated how true that observation is in divided societies transitioning from conflict. Ultimately, even when campaigns such as SHOW or the proposed dengue fever eradication campaign prove only partly effective in achieving their immediate objectives, it’s vital to remember the importance of large-scale, public-interest campaigns and other regular avenues of cross-communal collaboration in reframing notions of identity and slowly re-building trust between deeply divided communities.

Mobile and social tools provide new avenues for information collection, political participation and communication that can assist in establishing ties and building trust. But their utility for reconciliation is dependent in the end on the values and expertise of coalition partners and the technology-enhanced feedback loops of institutional change they help to form.

This past week I had the privilege of meeting and working with fifteen fellows from across the African continent who came to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a two-week training organized by the UPEACE Africa Program with a supporting grant from IDRC Canada.

The training covered a variety of areas related to strengthening research capacity for governance and security in Sub-Saharan Africa and was designed to provide these fellows with critical support for carrying out their PhD work at various institutions of higher education across the continent.

Dissertation topics included:
– The Life of exiled Zimbabwean Soldiers in South Africa: Coping with the Repressed Memories of War and Political Violence
– The North & South Sudan Conflict on Abyei since 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement: Challenges & Prospects
– ‘Go back to your Ancestral Land’ Autochthony, Citizenship and the Quest for Return Among Internally Displaced Persons in the Rift Valley Province, Kenya

 

Session Overview: Mobiles, Maps, and Presentations

My sessions provided the fellows with a practical reflection on the role of technology in governance, peace and security as well as hands-on exposure to a variety tools and platforms that are being used to collect, visualize and analyze data.

On the first day, we explored FrontlineSMS, EpiSurveyor, GeoPoll, and OpenDataKit and their applications for supporting research via mobile data gathering. Activities from our online course TC105 Mobile Phones for International Development were used as a basis for this session.

On the second day, we looked at ArcGIS Online, Ushahidi and MapBox – all mapping platforms for data visualization and analysis. As part of this session, fellows had to create their own maps, analyze advantages and disadvantages of using different platforms, and reflect on applications for their own research.

We also spent time each day working with Prezi, the web-based zooming presentation tool. Prezi was probably the most popular platform of all the ones we explored, given what seemed to be a formidable and far-reaching frustration with PowerPoint. It sounds like almost all the fellows will be transitioning to Prezi for their classroom teaching and presentations in the near future.

 

Technology Capacity Building: Regional Implications

In the fields of international development and peacebuilding, attention is often focused on solutions and programs that meet basic needs and deliver urgent care (disaster response, food, water, shelter, health etc). For those efforts to have effective and sustainable impacts over time, countries must also have their own robust higher education and research sectors that provide critical analysis, develop comprehensive strategies, and train future generations of leaders. That is why programs like the UPEACE Africa Program that are focused strengthening the capacity of universities to carry out this work are so important. Special thanks to Tony, Jean-Bosco, Tsion and Tewodros and all the fellows for making this a memorable experience.

While the primary focus of TechChange has been and always will be online learning,
we believe it’s important to be connected to the communities like this and support this type of in-person learning. As an organization, we look forward to participating in similar projects, trainings, and initiatives in the near future.

As we prepare to launch the next iteration of online course Mobile Phones for International Development on September 24, we wanted to talk about what some speakers have done in the past to make the class a success. If you haven’t taken a TechChange course before, guest expert speakers play an important role in bringing the content in our four-week online courses to life as well as engaging the students in direct conversation during a one-hour speaking slot. While it seems like these would be pretty standardized (webcast or screen share plus Q&A), we’re frequently impressed by how our speakers have found innovative ways to engage, so we wanted to share some of our favorites.

Props are key: Isaac Holeman of Medic Mobile

One of our best received presentation was about as analog as they get: Isaac Holeman of Medic Mobile holding a flip phone up to a webcam to demonstrate SIM Apps. It was also perfectly appropriate for the message that Isaac was trying to get across about using SIM Apps instead of focusing on smart phones or other newer technology: don’t worry about doing something fancy and new, but try to leverage what you have as best as you can to affect real-world change. According to their website, SIM card apps allow Medic Mobile to run on any carrier’s SIM card on virtually any standard GSM phone to run programs relating to mHealth.

Isaac took the class on a guided tour of their latest tool and then turned it over virtually to the students who made requests (“Can I see the menu again?”) that Isaac executed remotely. Very simple, very cool.

Launch a new product: Amy Demos FSMS 2.0

Amy O’Donnell of FrontlineSMS didn’t just demo an existing project, but rather used the class as an opportunity to walk the students through the brand new Frontline SMS Version 2. While we already love this product, it gave us a chance to do something new for our students, many of whom were already using FSMS is come capacity for their work: We put them online with a member of the FSMS team to not only learn about how the changes could affect their work, but also so they could chat directly with Amy about their questions and needs. This type of two-way conversation fit perfectly, and we’re hoping to see some of the ideas from our students in the next version!

 

Have a conversation: Joel Selanikio of DataDyne

Sometimes your best moments aren’t scripted and sometimes polished is worse than rough. When we first started our online videos, we did most of our live interviews using webcams with remote speakers. Once we had proven the model, we used some of our extra budget to invest in a production studio, green screen, and a more studio-style interview format. Guess what? Engagement went down, not up, as students started treating our presentations as scripted TV shows, not spontaneous opportunities for engaging with experts.

Some of our best expert moments have come not by carefully calibrated moments, but rather surprise interactions. One of my personal favorite interviews was by Joel Selanikio of DataDyne. After realizing that he wasn’t going to get home in time for a scheduled speaking slot, Joel hopped off his train and went to a nearby cafe with wifi and did his presentation from there. Once the students (and we, the facilitators) got over the sounds of breakfast being consumed in the background, we had one of the most genuine and riveting interactions of our Mobiles class.

It doesn’t hurt that Joel is an incredible speaker, but an event that could have or should have been a technical disaster ended up being one of our more powerful learning experiences.

Beyond Powerpoint: Bill Siemering

Even when you get everything right, be ready to be frustrated. Not because your speakers aren’t delivering, but because inevitably you’ll have students without sufficient bandwidth to participate in the event. That’s why you need to think of your content not just in terms of putting on a good TV show, but rather how it will sound over the audio podcast as well. A 1-hour session based entirely on visual cues is going to flop if half your students don’t have a visual to go with it. Fortunately, this is becoming less of an issue for our students, but it’s alway something we need to account for.

Have real-world connection: James Eberhard of GeoPoll

Although each of these was fun, in my mind the best speakers are those who tie their presentation to a real-world event. And GeoPoll did just that by asking hundreds of real survey responders in DRC and Tunisia questions generated in our courses by students in our Digital Organizing and Mobiles for International Development courses. Once students realized that they weren’t passive watchers of a presentation, but an integral part of a group project that would design questions asked to hundreds of people, they couldn’t help but be engaged.

So there you have it! If you’re interested in joining our next Mobiles class, we’d love to have you. We’re holding the early-bird price until the course starts and you can apply here to join.

Are you already enrolled in our Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship course and interested in mobile phone applications for the developing world? Do you want to deeply examine organizations and social entrepreneurs that have disrupted the mobile phones for good sector?

We are offering our TC105: Mobiles for International Development course that starts Monday for $195.00 (more than 60% off) to all our enrolled participants and their colleagues in TC108: Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship. We believe having social entrepreneurial-minded participants can make TC105 even better and add a new perspective to class discussions. We have an incredible group of guest experts lined up that have had a renowned social impact in the tech space like Joel Selanikio of Datadyne, Jacob Korenblum of Souktel, and Lynn Eisenhart of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

If you are interested in this offer then email us at info[at]techchange[dot]org and we will add you to the course. If you aren’t enrolled in TC108 yet and would like to take advantage then send in an application here and we’ll get you set up. This is the biggest course discount we have had yet, so this is a great opportunity to take two courses with a large deduction. Act quick because there’s just a few days left until course start!

Nick Martin is President and CEO of TechChange and is the Lead Facilitator for the upcoming course: Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts Sept. 24. Apply Now!

In the last month, I’ve witnessed an exciting shift in how development in Africa has been treated in the media, especially with regards to mobile phones (Including this excellent post by Ken Banks in BBC). For the first time, we’re seeing the perspective shift from how the US needs to intervene to assist the helpless and needy, to a new frame of what lessons the US and the rest of the world can learn from the many innovations in high tech and mobile technology taking place across the African continent.

Just Saturday afternoon, I found myself checking CNN to see the latest headlines and events from around the world. The top story of the hour, “Seven Ways Mobile Phones have Changed Lives in Africa,” could have been written specifically for our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development by referencing case studies such as M-PESA, the popular mobile money transfer program in Kenya and a case study that we look at extensively in a number of our online courses. I was also pleased to see other projects and organizations mentioned like m-Farm, Ushahidi, Mxit and more– all of whom are already pushing boundaries globally.

There were also references to mHealth initiatives directly relevant to our upcoming course with the mHealth alliance on Mobile Phones for Public Health.One of the organizations specifically mentioned is m-Pedigree, which is the result of Bright Simmons (disclosure: a colleague and International Youth Foundation global fellow) and the work he is doing in Ghana to prevent counterfeit pharmaceuticals with mobile phones.

It’s certainly exciting to see our field getting mainstream attention like this. I’m heading to Ethiopia this week with UPEACE to conduct a workshop, but mainly what I’m looking forward to is an opportunity to meet some of these innovators and see what’s happening first-hand. In Africa and elsewhere, it’s exciting to see the frame shift from “What can we teach?” to “What can we learn from each other?” Stay tuned for a post from the field!

If you’re interested in mobile applications for disaster response, consider taking our course Mobiles for International Development, starting September 24th.

In the last five to ten years there has been a surge in disaster management innovation. As new technology is being developed, what are the challenges and benefits that the federal government must consider before taking advantage of them? Can a crowd of relatively inexperienced citizens report incidents more effectively than a group of experts?  Despite the many obstacles in working with these technologies, many institutions have been successful in quickly generating quality data to understand emergency situations and mitigate damage. This Thursday and Friday (9/13-14), The Wilson Center will be hosting a policy roundtable entitled, Connecting Grassroots to Government for Disaster Management to discuss these issues and propose solutions to help practitioners and governments create a broader community of interest.

We are thrilled to host the webcast of the two keynote discussions and direct the social media engagement of the event.  The keynote sessions are:

We will be taking questions from the online audience via the Twitter discussion on #DG2G, the comments area of the webcast pages, and by email at DG2G [at] techchange [dot] org. In addition to the Keynote sessions described above, the Wilson Center will be making the rest of the panel discussions available over the web. Click on the links below to watch them live and to download copies of the agenda and background materials.

ICT4D practitioners, crisismappers, digital volunteers, and policy makers and researchers are invited to participate to help recognize best practices and expand them to resolve the most pressing issues in the field. We look forward to seeing you online!

If you’re interested in learning more about this class, please check out the course page for more details on speakers and course topics or apply now to reserve your seat.

This coming Monday, September 3, class will begin for TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management, which aspires to give a comprehensive introduction of everything a helpful techie needs to know in an emergency: designing a cross-institutional response plan, crowdmapping who needs help, coordinating boots on the ground to save lives, and protecting those who are most vulnerable from any additional harm, let alone yourself from legal liability. Here are just a few thing that we’re really looking forward to in this upcoming course:

As much of the Caribbean braces for the possible effects of Hurricane Isaac, Neil Laslett of the American Red Cross will discuss some of the technical challenges in anticipating and responding to emergencies. From the use of Hurricane App, to easy-to-use SMS donations (provided by mGive), disaster relief worldwide is transforming and being transformed by technology. Looking at how mapping tools can also be used in these types of situations, Robert Soden of the World Bank will talk about GIS issues for disaster response based on years of experience as both a developer and an analyst. Finally, we’ll hear from Vincenzo Bollettino from the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. Through his work with the Satellite Sentinel Project, he’ll speak to the nexus between technology and human rights.

But the tools are only part of the story, now that disaster responders can tap into networked communities of interest that can help process massive quantities of data in a timely manner. The most obvious example of this is Ushahidi, which rose to the forefront due to its Haiti earthquake response. Ushahidi Trusted Developer John Etherton will talk about how technologists can design and adapt technology to empower crowds to make a difference. But crowdmappers need help and protection too — legal liability expert Ed Robson will talk about how networks like Crisis Mappers and Standby Task Force can protect themselves from legal liability in this developing space.

We at TechChange are truly excited about the current lineup for TC103. The best part of our job is being able to work with a diverse group of students from all around the world, and being able to sharing in the collective learning experience. See you in class!