ICT4D | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

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 mapping in crisis zones, consider taking our course Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management that runs from September 3rd – September 28th.

Cross-posted from Greg Maly’s blog, Multitracked. He is currently working on a mapping based research project run by the University of Denver in New Delhi, India.

This past May we published a blog piece outlining some of the basic lessons learned from TechWeek at Korbel. One of the main takeaways was that technology solutions, though a potentially powerful set of tools, are only 10% tech and 90% people power.

This includes not only putting people in the drivers seat for the use of these tools over time, but also at the onset of any project when considering the need, or gap, they are intended to fill. A few months later, these lessons have become ever more salient as my team from the University of Denver works on the design of a maternal and child health monitoring system for the community of Jasola – a high risk population that borders the Yamuna river in New Delhi, India, and consequently suffers from high child and maternal mortality rates.

Keeping the importance of local ownership in mind from the onset of our project, and working with our local counterparts in the region – a Gender Resource Center (GRC) staffed by women who both live and work in the community – we began by holding a series of focus group discussions with the primary stakeholders in the region: young mothers and pregnant women, doctors who run small health clinics, and community health workers. In each meeting a number of grievances arose, from a lack of resources and shortage of doctors relative to the size of the population in the region, to the difficulties of maintaining effective communication between doctors and patients. As an example of the effectiveness community driven conversations, through these focus group sessions we learned that knowing the location of pregnant mothers was one of the greatest obstacles to routine checkups. This we could work with relatively quickly.

A simple fix was the breakdown of the community into the separate Mohallas, or neighborhoods, which are already well known to community members, but haven’t made it into any form of visual representation. A few afternoons of community mapping using handheld Garmin GPS units and an OSM update quickly fixed the problem and moved the conversation forward a few steps, allowing new ideas to unfold – many of which came from the GRC staff themselves.

Like many health projects around the world, this one has a long way to go. The problems are greater than any solution of this scale can begin to truly address. However, small wins like these slowly begin to even the playing field as communities become empowered to address problems one a time, and with sustainable solutions that do not require a large number of additional resources. In this case, we’re happy to report that community members are on board, including some young mothers who have joined the conversation. Updated maps are being connected with a system that will aim to track mothers from conception through to birth. And though our DU team is set to return home in just two weeks time, I can already tell that the community members see the benefit of this project, and are ready to push it forward with or without us for the long haul. Who knows – there might even be a tablet involved. Stay tuned.

Cross-posted from the TC104: Global Innovations for Digital Organizing course we ran last May. If you are interested in mobile organization and censorship/privacy in the 21st century, consider enrolling in the next round in January.

Credit: Duncan 2012

Most of you will be familiar with the philosophical thought experiment, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well over recent weeks I’ve been mulling over the much less catchy or succinct question of “If a person tweets/updates their status/sends a text/blogs and no one responds, did they really make a sound?” It probably won’t be making it onto a philosophy syllabus anytime soon, but hear me out…

I recently travelled to Malawi to trial a social accountability approach designed to improve the quality of rural schools. The purpose was to help adolescent girls analyse their problems and provide an opportunity for them to raise these with school management to find collaborative solutions. I found it both sad and hopeful when some of the girls explained that nobody had ever asked for their opinions – they saw this as a chance to finally speak. A voice was incredibly important to these young women and self-expression seemed to have real value in itself. But I wonder if voice is enough. Doesn’t school management also need to value and respond to girls’ opinions? I kept asking: If speaking out doesn’t lead to action, do we just create false expectations and disillusionment?

During TC104 I’ve thought about this a lot. The internet and mobile phones offer so many opportunities for voice and reaching out – to other citizens but also to people in power. But I question what other elements are needed to ensure that voice leads to dialogue, and dialogue leads to responsive actions and tangible development changes.

Credit: Plan

I came to this course wanting to know about the digital tools/approaches that could support young people’s meaningful participation in social accountability initiatives (for an explanation check out pages 10-11 of Plan’s Governance Learning Guide). I was interested in how technology could leverage their voices and strengthen the interaction and responsiveness between them and their state to create better services, like health and education. As such the expert interviews with Barak Hoffman and Darko Brkan were among the most interesting for me. The Maji Matone project in Tanzania and the accountability and transparency work by Dosta! in Bosnia were excellent examples of digital media’s potential use to increase responsiveness of governments to citizens’ voices.

However, the Tanzanian example acted as a cautionary tale of how projects must recognise wider socio-political contexts in which they seek to work. That project seemed to offer a simple technology-enabled way of directly linking citizens’ voices to government action on water points. However, as this blog post explains the target communities were not used to demanding their rights to services and seemed sceptical of the government’s ability or will to respond. In addition, in a tight-knit local community people were scared of being seen as trouble makers and being critical of those in power. As a result they saw little benefit, and indeed some risk, in exercising their voice through the ICT channels that were offered.

Credit: Plan

In contrast Darko’s post explains the approaches used by Dosta! to first strengthen a weak Bosnian civil society. What interests me most, though, are Dosta!’s tactics to encourage responsiveness from the supply side through mixing digital and traditional tools for accountability. They were able to leverage power over politicians through the tangible threat of removal through democratic elections and in 2006 discredited the Prime Minister by exposing his corruption through the media. It was the media which again played a strong role in promoting the fact-checking website Istinomjer with further impact on election discourse. This active media environment and electoral accountability gives additional power to digital information and can help turn transparency into action.

These examples underline that creating opportunities for voice and participation doesn’t automatically lead to accountability and tangible changes. A whole host of reasons may stop citizens raising their voices or governments from answering – a key one being lack of effective digital and traditional feedback loops. The workshops from Dhairya and Rob provided lots of ideas for integrating technology into our social accountability projects and I’m excited to share these with colleagues and get to work. But the Maji Matone example reminds me not to lose sight of the need to analyse existing communication, political and social environments before getting too carried away with the technology.

Jennifer Doherty is a Governance Programme Officer working in the Programme Support and Impact Unit of Plan UK, an international development charity promoting the rights of children.

For those interested in Technology for Peacekeeping consider taking our online certificate course, Technology for Conflict Management and Prevention, starting July 23rd.

There has been a recent surge in literature that is cynical of ICT4D projects. Spurred on by the randomized control trial results of ICT4D projects, such as those of the One Laptop Per Child initiative in Peru, more and more authors are concluding that ICT4D projects’ capacity to end poverty and promote transformative national or community development is often stifled by political hang-ups. Even annual ICT4D Fail Faires have occurred the past three years, where practitioners willingly explain how their project failed and what they learned.

The change from a glorified rhetoric about ICTs’ strengths and utter invincibility to a cynical and even comical view of ICT4D, is reflective of a larger cynicism pervading international development. Contemporary international efforts to alleviate poverty are criticized as short-term goals that do not ultimate end poverty, and in fact further inequality by embracing neoliberalism and capitalist globalization.

Cambridge economist Ha-joon Chang, for example, argues that only one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) actually promotes “transformative development” in the classical sense, meaning industrial production and sustained economic growth. The other goals, he contends, can be boiled down to improving education and healthcare, which without growth leave individuals and nations trapped in place, inmobile. Focusing on poverty reduction via education and healthcare initiatives alone allows the neoliberal regime to continue forward unchallenged, allowing the rich to continue to benefit from the poor via lower tariffs and product subsidies.

In a special issue on the politics of ICT4D, the International Journal of E-Politics’ newest volume includes three articles that are indicative of the change toward cynical views of ICT4D projects. Charlotte Scarf aggressively argues that ICT4D projects that encourage the creation of local content make the unfortunate assumption that ICT content creation alone empowers local people, but Scarf finds that unless content is directed at people with power to cause change, the local people remain poor. Sam Takavarasha Jr. and John Makumbe document the five year legal battle between private IT company Econet and the Government of Zimbabwe. Their study is but one example of how oppressive political regimes restrict the ability of citizens to utilize ICTs for political mobilization or development activities. Finally, Einar Braathen, Heidi Attwood, and Julian May document the different political problems community telecenters operated by NGOs face in South Africa, even in similar environmental contexts. The unpredictability of these political problems limits the possibility of rectifying these issues via policy solutions, and is evidence of the limits of ICT4D projects in promoting sustainable development.

The cynical studies on ICT4D projects suggest no overarching solution to correct projects’ flaws. In fact, the cynical nature of the studies lead one to speculate that ICT4D projects, along with the MDGs, perhaps should be abandoned altogether.

Before jumping ship, however, there is another way of looking at the alleged failure of ICT4D projects to promote development. First of all, while many projects may effectively “fail” in the short term, they may ultimately point recipient communities and nations toward joining the information society, which indirectly could promote transformative development. Second, instead of abandoning ICT4D projects altogether, the projects can be modified to incorporate politics and power relations from the beginning of project conception and design. For example, in the case of the production of local ICT content, only when the content can be directed as a particular organization that can mobilize resources to help the community, and the organization can be anxiously expecting the content, should local ICT content production be utilized as a means of achieving development goals.

ICT4D is at its next stage in maturity. Its time that projects are prepared from the outset to meet the political challenges that inevitably appear during project implementation. When these challenges can be overcome then ICT4D projects can be a catalyst for transformative development.

Jeffrey Swindle is a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Michigan and has previous experience as an evaluator of ICT4D projects.

For those interested in Technology for Peacekeeping consider taking our online certificate course, Technology for Conflict Management and Prevention, starting July 23rd.

**Disclaimer: These are Asch’s personal views and do not represent those of his employer.

You’ve heard of the 90/10 rule, right? I hadn’t heard the concept, at least, until recently. The meaning, though, I learned the hard way—an ICT-enabled project should be 90 percent planning and only 10 percent digital tool. Not the other way around.

We initiated the Nigeria Security Tracker, an effort to catalog and map political violence based on a weekly survey of domestic and international press, at least two years ago. We wanted to answer the question “are things getting worse in Nigeria?”

The death of Nigeria’s president in office with upcoming elections, an increasingly divided electorate, and an apparent up tick in violence in the north and the middle of the country raised serious doubts about Nigeria’s stability.

And yet many disagreed. The optimists said things were getting better; the pessimists that Nigeria was becoming a “failed state”; and everyone else that Nigeria would continue to “muddle through,” as it had done since independence in the 1960’s.

Measuring levels of violence seemed like it could give us a more precise answer. While the Nigerian press has many shortcomings—lack of journalist training and professionalization, concentration of ownership and coverage in the south—it is relatively free, and there is a lot of it. Also, the presence of major outlets like Reuters, BBC, AP, AFP, and the Wall Street Journal added another layer of reliability. Indeed, some of the best Nigeria analysis I’ve seen comes from open sources. You just need to learn to read between the lines.

Mapping seemed like a useful and visually engaging way to organize our information. But without funding or any programming experience, our options were limited. We experimented with manually pinning incidents to Google maps and embedding on our blog. We tried to pitch Ushahidi to the web department hoping to get programming support, but without success.

Eventually, we abandoned the project–until Crowdmap was launched. Free, hosted on Ushahidi servers, preprogrammed, and simple to set up and use, it made the security tracker possible.

Our Mistake

We designed our research methodology around Crowdmap capabilities. We could include basic descriptions of events, and simple codings as well as details like causalities, but it was labor intensive.

Not until three months later, when we sat down to review our work, did we realize the shortcomings. Putting incidents on a map is useful if you want to see where violence is happening. But less so when you want to know when incidents occurred, or if you wanted to look at trends or correlations over time. (The automation feature of the map, while fun to watch, is not a terribly useful analytical tool.) We discovered it was impossible to look at, for example, the relationship of violence perpetuated by the security services and causalities.

Fundamentally, the project was supposed to be about the information captured. Not the technology. And we had it backwards.

We also discovered a major lost opportunity. Because we tailored our methodology to what could be included on the Crowdmap, we failed to capture other useful information, such as attacks on religious establishments, which only required marginal extra effort.

The Redesign

Given that our project was supposed to answer a particular question that a map alone couldn’t, we relegated the Crowdmap to a component of the project–no longer the driver. We thought more thoroughly about what kind of information we needed, and what we could glean from press reports of political violence.

Fortunately, we had documented all of our sources. So we could return to our original information and recode, albeit with a significant time commitment.

The Way Forward

Despite better planning the second time around, we continue to find shortcomings. We defined one variable, “sectarian violence,” inadequately, which means coding has been inconsistent throughout the project, making it less useful.

We are also vulnerable to technical problems on Crowdmap’s end. When there is a bug in the system, there is nothing we can do but wait for Ushahidi to fix it. (Recently, the site was down for about a week.)

Finally, we now have a year’s worth of information. It’s a huge dataset. And we still haven’t figured out what to do with it. Yes, we can make defensible, conservative estimates of causalities caused by actors like the police or Boko Haram. We can also show any escalation or decline in violence across the country.

But this only scrapes the surface of what our data can tell us. Admittedly, this is a good problem to have. But given the time and resources we have already committed, and the wealth of date we have accumulated, we are constantly trying to balance benefits of the security tracker with the costs of maintaining it.

Asch Harwood is a specialist on Africa at a New York City-based think tank.

Thanks to TechChange resident conflict analysis and data guru Charles Martin-Shields for cross-posting this from his site Espresso Politics. We’re really excited for this to be presented at Tech4Dev!
Hey everybody, I’m pretty excited to have had a paper accepted to the Tech4Dev conference hosted by the UNESCO Chair at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. I’ll be focusing on the impact that distance learning technology can have on knowledge co-creation across geographic boundaries, with a particular focus on technology applications for development and peacebuilding. If you’re curious, I’ve got a draft of the paper stored here. As usual, feedback is welcome, and I have to give a big shout out to my co-author Jordan Hosmer-Henner (@jordanhh) who is the resident open-source tool guru at TechChange and soon-to-be master of arts at the Elliott School of International Affairs. If anyone has knowledge of fun things to do in Lausanne, leave a comment with your recommendation!

This post is cross posted from Charles Martin-Shields’, TechChange’s Director of Conflict Management and Peacebuilding Programs, blog Espresso Politics.

Just got back from ICTD 2012 down at Georgia Tech, and am excited about the state of the field. This conference is a gathering for academics and practitioners working in the international development and technology spaces. We got to see talks about everything from mapping to public health, mobile phone applications and new open source software. The keynote speaker, the Honorable Omobola Johnson, the Minister of Communication Technology in Nigeria, provided participants with an insightful and inspiring look at Nigerian ICT policy. Nigeria’s efforts to integrate ICT’s into cross-sectoral governance were highlighted and it’s clear that their strategy is robust as technology continues to play an expanding role in governance and peace.

A few highlights:

Ramine Tinati‘s model for tracking and studying interactions and group development in the Twitterverse. What his model does is show us who the important actors between groups are; while someone might have thousands of followers, what he is finding is that the people who are actually propagating ideas are often unknown users who have shared interests and are retweeting information between the users with large followings. From a conflict analysis perspective, this could be valuable research because it can help practitioners and policy makers identify the actors who can link two thought leaders and spur new ideas or action.
Thomas Smyth and Michael Best’s Aggie software, developed at Georgia Tech, which can analyze social media streams and has been used to track information during elections. The software allowed a user to filter information, tag valuable data and track patterns in the social networking space.
IREX’s Paul-Andre Baran came over from Romania to attend and pointed me to a mapping project in Romania called BursaSpagilor, which is an open source map where users can upload information about where they paid bribes and how much they spent. He explained that bribery was an accepted part of life in Romania (even if it’s illegal), so the idea was to create a market place where consumers of services could see what the competing rates were for different services in different locations. While this could be collected and used for prosecution, what was even cooler about it was that the program itself might eliminate the need for legal action. If services providers know that they are competing for customers and that their bribe is being undercut by a competitor, they will bribe less to keep their customers. This creates a downward spiral, drastically reducing or possibly eliminating bribery.

These were only three of the many cool papers and products presented at the conference. The fail faire was also fantastic, and a great deal of learning was done as we all discussed our mistakes and lessons learned working in the ICTD field. I’d strongly encourage anyone working in this space or interested in what is happening with technology and social change to attend the conference next year. It’s going to be in Cape Town during the Southern Hemisphere summer, so if nothing else it’s going to be a fantastic location!

If you’re interested in what is happening with technology for governance, transparency, conflict prevention and peacebuilding, mobiles for development check out our upcoming courses: “Mobiles for International Development”, “Global Innovations for Digital Organizing”, and “Technology for Conflict Management and Prevention”

This article is re-posted from TechChange team member Charles Martin-Shields’s website “Espresso Politics”. We thank him for being awesome and sharing his stories from paradise with us. You can follow him at @cmartinshields.

TechChange has a course coming up that breaks a little bit from the standard “ICT4D” content. It’s titled “New Technologies for Educational Practice” and I was trying to think of how someone would put this knowledge to use. It all seemed abstract, so wracked my brain for cases when I used technology in my own educational work, which included two years in Apia, Samoa as a Peace Corps volunteer doing English curriculum development.

While there is content related to video games, web technology and social media, in the TechChange course, I wanted to try to think of a practical example of using technology to enhance learning.

As I thought back to those wistful days in Polynesian tropical paradise, I remembered that a few teachers and I came up with a fun, elegant (IMHO), solution to the problem of Samoan secondary students texting in class.

To put it in context, this was January 2007, and Samoa had just taken their digital mobile phone system online. Suddenly everyone had a GSM mobile phone and everyone was texting. Mobile telephony went from 0 – 60 in Samoa almost instantaneously. Naturally every student in grades 9-12 was texting during class, as rebellious youths are known to do.

The teachers tried the usual methods of corporal punishment, phone confiscation, and detention, but none of this seemed to deter the students from texting. So I sat down with a few of the teachers over beers and we decided, if you can’t beat them, join them.

Our solution was to make text messaging part of the English learning process. Students had the opportunity to text each other in class, read the texts (which were teacher approved), and were graded on the accuracy of their spelling and syntax. The practice sentences of 140 characters or less were easier to handle for speakers of English as a second language, compared with the higher density books, and students could practice from home.

This exercise wasn’t a replacement for the more formal learning that took place in the form of longer texts and written exams, but it provided a space for students to practice using English that was accessible and fun. While it might not have been a grand strategic shift in pedagogy, mobile technology provided a free tool to enhance the learning experience in a sustainable, enjoyable way. Of course, I’d love to see comments about all of your experiences with technology, learning and development, since we’re always learning from each other in this space!

If you’re interested in learning more about education and technology, have a look at “The New Technologies for Educational Practice” as well as our other training programs on the TechChange site.

This past Fall, I was fortunate enough to participate in an online course offered by TechChange; Mobiles for International Development – TC105. If you’re unfamiliar with TechChange, their mission is as follows: “TechChange trains leaders to leverage relevant technologies for social change.” There are several resources I look to through my contacts, social media, and research in the field of Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D), and TechChange is one on which I strongly rely.

How important is formal education in this rapidly changing and growing field of tech for social change? Due to the fluid nature of technology and the necessity to apply sustainable tech solutions, where they also make sense. It’s important to have educational “institutions” where academics, but more importantly practitioners, can learn, interact and communicate on relevant topics. This serves not just as an educational forum, but a way of sharing best practices, use cases, project successes and failures. We as human beings, learn from these multifaceted approaches, both academic and experiential. Traditional education institutions have been rather slow to integrate the ICT4D discipline into formal graduate level degree programs, with a couple of exceptions at the University of Manchester and the University of Colorado – Boulder. So TechChange and their curriculum is serving to bridge the gap in education with their certificate courses. Other offerings in the TechChange catalog are listed here.

So this brings me to the title of this post, Planting Seeds. Through the TechChange blended learning environment, Twitter chats, Skype calls, etc…I was able to meet “like minded souls” already working in the social change space in Haiti. Once I found I’d be traveling to Haiti to conduct some work and assessments for our Notre Dame Haiti Program and two additional TechChange TC105 students were already working in the country, we discussed getting together for an informal lunch meeting to discuss mobile tech and more specifically, the application of FrontlineSMS in our respective programs. The seeds were planted!

Our TC105 moderator for Team Deserts, Flo Scialom (Community Manager extraordinaire of FrontlineSMS in the UK), offered her expertise in community building to help pull us, and others together. Each day, as we criss-crossed Port-au-Prince and Leogane with meetings at various ISP’s and Mobile Network Operators, I’d get an email from Flo, “Tom, do you have room for one more?”, “Do you have space for another?”…etc…The seeds were watered and nurtured!

So what started with three or four for an informal lunch, turned into 17 individuals, representing five continents and eight countries – and a full blown FrontlineSMS meet-up luncheon at the Babako Restaurant in Port-au-Prince. The organizations at the table represented many sectors in the aid and development community: microfinance, sexual violence, IDP camp resettlements, human rights abuses, education, and public health. It really was inspiring to look around that table and realize how many Haitians were benefiting from the dedication of these individuals and their organizations. A true force multiplier! The seeds sprout!

The talk revolved around FrontlineSMS setup, configuration and use cases, as well as other mobile and open-source tools in the social change arena, such as RapidSMS, Ushahidi, OpenMRS, openrosa, and more. So this group was not so much about a single software application, but more about affecting change with any technology – fostering a community of practice around ICT4D/M4D, and educating ourselves about opportunities for change using technology. The flower blooms!

The big win was looking around the table, as diverse as our needs and applications are; we all shared a common purpose, enthusiasm and a collective knowledge, to affect positive change with technology. It’s my hope this group will continue to grow – to blossom to include others and be self sustaining, which will amplify the positive impact for our Notre Dame Haiti Program, the other organizations at the meet-up and ultimately the Haitian people.

How can digital activists harness new technologies, tools, and platforms to be as effective as possible in their work?

Digital organizing has arguably been at the heart of the recent protests in the Arab world. In the case of Egypt, a successful campaign run by online activists contributed to bringing hundreds of thousands of people to protest and force the resignation of President Mubarak. Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, wrote: “We are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. More people can communicate more things to more people than has ever been possible in the past, and the size and speed of this increase… makes the change unprecedented.” We can expect that any issue worth demonstrating about in the future will be organized online and its success will weigh heavily on how well the Internet and other technological tools are leveraged.

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