Tag: ICCM

The end of the year is now upon us. We just wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts and the top of our DC nerd attic for making 2012 our best one yet. Specifically, thanks to your course feedback, content contributions, happy hour attendance, and tuition dollars, we’ve trained over 1,400 participants in 70 countries in how to better use technology for social change.

New Online Courses:
We have expanded on our original set of courses (Emergency Management, Digital Organizing, and Mobiles for International Development) into exciting new spaces. A few courses we’d like to highlight:

  • (TC309) Mobile Phones and Public Health: Our largest open enrollment course so far, we were joined by over 100 students in 25 countries. Developed in partnership with the UN Foundation’s mHealth Alliance, we also piloted our new in-course tool simulator for D-Tree!
  • USAID Courses on Mobile Money: Through a custom course for 80 USAID mission staff in 7 countries, we’re helping build development capacity in mobile phones. Next up? Turning this course into a self-paced interactive module to scale the program.
  • TOL Journalist Training for “Reporting on Education” in E. Europe: Developed in partnership with Transitions Online (TOL), BBC, and The Guardian, we shared our platform with TOL to train 20 journalists over a 2-week period. This was our first course ever with non-TechChange content and external facilitators!
  • (TC201) Ushahidi: Frameworks for Effective Platform Management: Expanding on our “Emergency Management” course, we developed this course in partnership with Ushahidi to be a scalable complement to the Universities 4 Ushahidi program (U4U).
  • (TC108) Technology, Innovation, and Social Entrepreneurship: Developed in partnership with the Amani Institute, we wanted to not just teach content, but develop more social entrepreneurs to keep pushing the field forward.

Online-Enabled Public Events:
One of our initiatives this year has been to assist our partners in reaching a larger online audience and to start thinking of all public events as online-first. Events include:

  • International Conference of Crisis Mappers at the World Bank: We worked together with Crisis Mappers to produce the first livestreaming of ICCM, which led to an additional 950 unique viewers from all over the world!
  • Connecting Grassroots to Government at the Wilson Center: Building on our work for empowering Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs), we took live questions from the online audience during this event. This was one of multiple events at the Wilson Center, which is leading the way in online-enabled events.
  • Expert Interviews at the mHealth Summit: Since the webcast was already provided, we focused on capturing expert knowledge from the attendees and partners for the mHealth Alliance. Most fun part? Getting pictures of attendees holding their cell phones to show their personal connection with the device.

Site Upgrades and Added Features:
In addition to a few other handy features, we’ve made a few big technical upgrades to our site in the hopes of improving user experience.

  • Launched a new, responsive TechChange.org! We much of 2011 promoting mobile-first design, so it was a relief to build a fully responsive site in 2012. Try re-sizing it in your browser!
  • Animating our content voiceovers. We’ve always been big fans of RSA Animate and iheed who produce educational video content, so we tried giving it a go ourselves. What do you think? We’re hoping to do plenty more in 2013.
  • Video-for-everyone course design. We switched from Ustream to OpenTok in 2012 to try to not just talk at our classes, but have discussions with you. It’s been a bumpy ride, but we’re working at optimizing for every browser and bandwidth.

Field Training and Workshops:
Tech training cannot be done by Internet alone. Here’s a few cases where we rolled up our sleeves and got to teaching the old fashioned way.

Finally, a particular highlight of the past year was the nice story run about us in The Economist. Read the article: Geeks for Good.

We hope to see you online, in person, or in class next year!

Warm regards,

The TechChange Team

Best practices conferences are critical to the growth of any community. The sharing of ideas and capturing of collective lessons-learned allows for those both in attendance, and those reading any after-action report, to proceed with their respective related projects having gained new insight, or having made new partnerships with other like-minded individuals and organizations. However, just as websites are now building responsive design as “mobile first” and desktop second, it’s time to start thinking about these events differently. No longer should we think only about planning offline events that “we webcast,” but rather about global conversations facilitated by online engagement that have an in-person conversation or presentation at its core.

Patrick Meier, co-founder of CrisisMappers, Digital Humanitarians & Standby Task Force speaking at the ICCM

In no community of practice is this more true than with Volunteer Technical Communities (VTC’s) like crisis mapping, which depend on the goodwill, real-time information, and online cohesiveness that can be properly augmented by online engagement. And keeping in line with both the principles of crowdfeeding and the fostering of global online learning communities, this past week’s International Conference of Crisis Mappers exemplified the benefits of online integration, as mappers and technologist from around the globe gathered both online and in Washington, DC for four days of conversation. By providing the global VTC with the ability to engage via a live webcast and an interactive chat forum, the information shared in the halls of the World Bank shifted from being mostly for the benefit of conference attendees, to truly engaging with the global community of crisis mappers.

By livestreaming the event, the ICCM’s webcast enabled the inclusion of over 950 additional attendees – almost doubling their audience!

 

Looking ahead, it isn’t just the Crisismappers team that would be best served to continue focusing on this level of digital engagement. In many ways they are thought leaders in this field through their engagement with online learning communities. However, other international organizations that focus on issues such as open governance and transparency often fail to lead by example on these issues, holding conferences that are limited to small audiences, and comprised only of individuals who can afford the time and airfare necessary to be in attendance. As distance learning practitioners, we feel strongly that effectively used learning tools can act as a driving force for social change. And in the case of live events – by bringing more voices to the table in low-cost way, simple information sharing mechanisms such as this can enable otherwise disparate communities and engaged individuals to be both teachers and students, sharing in the collective learning experience.

Linton Wells from National Defense University speaking at the ICCM

Today, the barriers to entry with this kind of online engagement are so low, that all takes is a bit of planning and a small amount of technical know-how to get up and running. I would even wager that the cost of breakfast at your event is significantly more than that of ensuring web connectivity and online involvement. And while communities of practice used to be local because business and organizations were local; today, globally minded organizations must ensure global engagement, as technology has reached a point at which there’s almost no excuse for allowing only those within a close geographic proximity access to your event. As we said – leave the bagels, keep the connectivity.*

 

*TechChange would still be delighted to eat breakfast at your local Washington, DC event, including bagels if that’s what is on the menu.

The past weekend was busy for the crisis mapping community, with a very full four days of events at the International Conference on Crisis Mapping.  While the ignite talks and self-organized sessions were fantastic what capped off the weekend for about 30 of us was the day-long activation simulation of the Digital Humanitarian Network (DHNetwork).  This effort was made possible by the support of the ICT4Peace Foundation who provided funding for logistics and for TechChange to design and carry out the simulation. UN-OCHA provided travel support to DHNetwork members who needed assistance in order to ensure that all entities could participate.  As well, key observers such as UN-SPIDER, USAID, the State Department, Department of Defense, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI), and the Woodrow Wilson Center were invited to be present and give direct feedback throughout the day.

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Go to the live webcast (starts Friday, Oct. 12 at 2:00pm)

Good news, everyone! TechChange has been asked to livestream the second day of the 2012 International Conference of Crisis Mappers on Friday, October 12! If you’re not already following the livetweets on hashtag #ICCM and from @CrisisMappers, please do tune in!

 

ICCM Livestream Schedule for Oct. 12, 2012

Note: This is a shorter schedule than the one listed on the full agenda.

  • 2:00pm-2:10pm Welcome remarks by Dr. Jen Ziemke, co-founder of CrisisMappers
  • 2:10pm-2:20pm Intro remarks by Dr. Patrick Meier, co-founder of CrisisMappers
  • 2:20pm-3:30pm Ignite Session 1: Talks 1-16 [Preston Auditorium]
  • 4:00pm-5:15pm Remarks: Neils Holms-Nielsen [World Bank], Christiaan Adams [Google], Dan Palmer [JCU], Tara Cordyack [GeoEye], Camille Cassidy [DigitalGlobe] Special Remarks: Salem Avan, Chief, Knowledge Management Service / United Nations, Office of Information & Communications Technology Keynote Address: Robert Kirkpatrick, Director of UN Global Pulse
  • 6:00pm-7:00pm Ignite Session 2: Talks 17-31 [Preston Auditorium]

In his recent article on MobileActive.org, Paul Currion posed the question, “If all You Have is a Hammer, How Useful is Humanitarian Crowdsourcing”. Currion argued that those working in disaster response “…don’t need more information, they need better information.” He argued that Ushahidi’s Haiti deployment was an example of the failure of crowdsourcing to add value to disaster response efforts and ongoing humanitarian work. This pointed critique of Ushahidi and the use of social media in a humanitarian context resulted in an enthusiastic, and sometimes heated, debate in the article’s comments section.

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