Tag: SocEnt

Social Intrapreneurship SocInt online course Ashoka Changemakers TechChangeWe’re excited to partner with Ashoka Changemakers to launch an online course on Social Intrapreneurship this February 25 – March 21, 2014! This four-week online certificate course on “Entrepreneurial Strategies for Social Innovation Within Institutions” aims to empower employees at private, public, and nonprofit institutions across the world with the tools and mindset of a lean startup entrepreneur looking to change the world by implementing socially innovative ideas within their organizations. For employers of these institutions, it discusses ways to foster a culture of innovation and staff engagement that drives social change.

What do you need to become an intrapreneur? How can employees of organizations promote social good?
TC108 will give participants experience with pitching, planning, advancing, and executing innovative and socially conscious programs within large organizations. Activities are geared to assist and inform organizations and individuals that want to cultivate and promote innovative, lean start-up, entrepreneurial approaches within their workforce to promote social good and provide an opportunity to engage with like-minded professionals. The course creates a global network of individuals who can expect an interactive learning experience to share ideas and strategies.

Social Intrapreneurship bootcamp: Changemaker competition and takeaways
Course participants will go through a customized Ashoka Changemakers concept formation and evaluation process and engage with accomplished guest experts who are leading social intrapreneurs at their companies, providing an insider’s view of what makes a good social intrapreneurial project proposal and what it takes for these ideas to stand out. By the end of the course, participants will have a two-page concept note, one page budget and powerpoint pitch for an innovative social change idea to be targeted to a specific organization. The TechChange/Ashoka Changemaker committee will review each concept note and once considered viable under the course principles, the approval will result in a TechChange Intrapreneurship Certification.

Join our learning community of Intrapreneurs
We couldn’t be more excited to be working with Ashoka, who has supported social intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship through programs such as the Ashoka Changemakers, the League of Intrapreneurs, and more for over three decades.

We’re also excited that Joe Agoada will be back to facilitate this course in February. He’s honing his intrapreneurial chops as a featured speaker at the 2013 Intrapreneurship Conference in Barcelona this week. Follow his live tweets from the conference @joeagoada and also from Jennifer Estevez @socialqgroup to follow the latest on Intrapreneurship.

Check out the syllabus and register now for the course to lock in early bird rates. Contact nancy [at] techchange [dot] org if your organization is interested in booking a group discount rate. Any questions on the course itself? Please email Jennifer [at] techchange [dot] org.

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About Ashoka Changemakers:
Changemakers convenes and connects high-potential changemakers, their ideas and resources, through the power of collaborative competitions and partner networks.
Changemakers builds on Ashoka’s three-decade history to engage a global network that embodies the Ashoka vision where “Everyone is a Changemaker”. In order to realize this vision, the world needs people to gain the skills and resources to collaborate on solving complex social problems. Visit changemakers.com to learn more.

About the Facilitator
Joseph Agoada is the Resource Mobilization Coordinator for the UNICEF New York headquarters’ Social and Civic Media Section, and founder of the mobile mapping project, UNICEF-GIS. He also implemented UNICEF’s 2010 World Cup in My Village initiative in Rwanda and Zambia. Joe is a recipient of several awards for his activism including: 2008 International Youth Foundation a Global YouthActionNet Fellow, 2009 Starbucks Shared Planet Grant Honoree, and 2012 Google Personal Democracy Forum Fellow. Joe has spearheaded the Intrapreneurship courses at TechChange, and is a featured speaker at the 2013 Intrapreneurship Conference in Barcelona. He graduated the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

One of the most difficult things as an entrepreneur is transitioning from a single person with an idea to a team of colleagues with a shared creative vision. Such a transition involves trust, time, and a certain degree of terror. But finding these fellow travelers who bring new skills, perspectives, and outlooks to bear on the original idea is without question the key to everything.

Over the past three years at TechChange, I’ve had the privilege working with hundreds of inspiring individuals: staff, advisory board members, and partners. Given the incessant pace of start-up life, it is sometimes easy to neglect the distance already traveled, the road already taken. Today, I’d like to to reflect on that journey and the contributions of one amazing individual: Chris Neu.

I first met Chris in the spring of 2010 while he was still working at the US Institute of Peace (USIP). I got a call from Dominic, my colleague and co-founder, saying “Chris Neu one of the smartest people I’ve ever met – he’s interested in coming over to work with us.” I remember thinking to myself, “One of the smartest people – huh? We’ll see.”

Three years later, I can confirm that Dominic was right.

Chris Neu is a firestorm of creativity, intelligence, and hard work. He is hardwired for start-up culture and possesses a rare unbridled energy for everything he does. He is the chief operations officer, the chief of staff, the photographer, the bookkeeper, the proposal writer, the facilitator, the blogger, the project manager, and so much more.  He wears a TechChange t-shirt to every event and can be found enthusiastically sharing our story and message late into the night. And while he’s a frequent contributor to the many hilarious conversations that emerge in our tiny 3rd floor loft, he’s not afraid to take the hard line or unpopular stance in the interest of keeping the organization on track. He’s also the one hassling to me write more blog posts, so here you go, Chris!

Every leadership team is different but I believe the successful ones have people with complementary skill sets and fundamentally different personalities at the helm. To those sitting on great idea, I can confidently say: find someone who challenges you and disagrees with you, someone who pushes you to work harder and do more. Chris Neu is that person for me.

While in some sense the journey for TechChange is still just beginning, so much of our current success is a direct consequence of Chris’s tireless efforts over the past three years.

So today please join me in saying: Happy Birthday Mr. Neu and thank you for all you do for TechChange!

(Stay tuned as a I profile other staff members in weeks to come. Next up: Will Chester)

Last week, I was fortunate enough to present at PopTech 2013 and participate in the Poptech Social Innovation Fellowship program along with nine other super inspiring social entrepreneurs. What an amazing experience!

I had the great fortune of getting fantastic training/advice/wisdom from the Poptech faculty on the content of my talk as well as other challenges that we’re facing as an organization. Many thanks to Ken Banks, Michael Duarte, Erik Hersman, Cheryl Heller, Peter Durand, Jim Koch, Chloe Holderness, Kevin Starr, Heather Fleming, Grant Tudor, Lisa Witter, Priti Radhakrishnan, Susan Phillips, and the amazing staff at PopTech: Becky, Andrew, Ollie and Leetha. This group was truly an all-star cast of individuals at the forefront of social innovation. Read about them here.

Our Prezi as it appeared for PopTech. Click through and check it out!

After the presentation on Friday, a number of folks asked me about the presentation format. so I decided to share some details about how we made it and the design decisions that went into the process.

1. Unify your presentation with your organizational identity

In telling our story, we didn’t just want to read off bullet-point slides. We wanted to bring the audience into our office and show them what we see. We also wanted to take the most literal skeuomorphic approach to our presentation: a map should be represented by a map, a note by a sticky note, a website by a web page, etc. This was partly on the principle that we had the freedom to create our elements and not use pre-existing photos, but also that it reflects much of the design sense we have used in our online learning products. That unity of experience between our learning design and presentation intent was important to us — what you see is what you get. However, using that framework meant that we had to create depth in two-dimensional infinite canvas while still having believable rectangular frames to zoom into — an effect that we created through a fisheye illustration.

2.  Bring your Prezi to Life

Since we had dedicated creative time to this project that is passionate about representing our brand well, we wanted to do a good job, but we didn’t want to overdo it either. We looked around for inspiration and we found a few neat ideas around the internet, which used subtle animated gifs to bring an environment to life. Of course, Prezi required that we used SWF instead of animated gifs, but we could achieve pretty much the same looping effect after we inserted the animations into our Prezi.

3.  Get feedback and back up everything

The most valuable part of this project wasn’t just the creative team, but the feedback from other PopTech fellows and faculty about distilling information and pacing it. At the end of the day, Prezi is based on Flash. The same problems that led to us treating it as unreliable three years ago exist today. Naturally, the night before our presentation we were unable to download the presentation. Fortunately, we were able to work offline to rebuild our changes and export them for the presentation. The one saving grace of this experience with Prezi is that their online customer support was right on the ball when their product started having trouble. That’s one thing that we consider vital as we approach 10k followers — not just maintaining a product, but building a community.

I’d like to give a special shout-out to my fellow fellows: Esther, Nicole, Donnel, Emily, Alex, Anushka, Nathaniel, Jessica, and Julia – you all are an inspiration! Grateful for this experience and hope to join for PopTech 2014!

 

We’re excited, honored, and humbled to be featured in Fast Company as one of the “best learning resources for aspiring social entrepreneurs”, with recognition for the “hybrid” online/offline learning category!

Here are some highlights from the article:

  • “Their open courses draw an international audience of participants, interested in social media and social change. They also create custom courses in partnership with organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, USAID, UNICEF, Red Cross, US State Department, training student leaders in Pakistan, civil society leaders in Sudan, or international aid workers.”
  • “Nick Martin, one of the founders of Techchange, saw a growing need in his field for continuing professional education. “We took dozens of online courses from all kinds of providers and found that most of them were pretty awful. So we set out to build a model that was more social, interactive, scalable, and suited to the needs of the social change community.”

See the full article on Fast Company here.Fast company logo_blog post

We’re excited that TechChange’s founder and president, Nick Martin, has been selected as one of the 2013 PopTech Social Innovation Fellows. The PopTech Social Innovation Fellowship program supports up-and-coming social entrepreneurs in scaling their solutions to some of the world’s toughest problems including human rights and healthcare.

Nick will be joining 10 other Social Innovation Fellows along with the Science Fellows this October at the ”Sparks of Brilliance” PopTech 2013 event in Camden, Maine. During this event, Nick will be receiving intensive training and mentorship from experts and peers that will ultimately help him make a greater impact in the online learning social enterprise arena.

Congratulations, Nick! You can follow him on Twitter @ncmart.

 

TechChange takes fun seriouslyWe’re excited to join the Tech Cocktail DC Startup Showcase tomorrow evening at the headquarters of 1776. If you’re attending this Tech Cocktail DC event, you’ll hear from TechChange Founder & CEO, Nick Martin, who has just returned from his travels in Amsterdam and Nairobi.

Nick will speak briefly on what makes TechChange unique among other startups and social enterprises in the DC area. You’ll also be able to check out some of TechChange’s latest online professional courses that are training leading organizations in international development including the World Bank, the U.S. Department of State, and USAID.

Hope to see you there! If you can’t make it, we’ll be live-tweeting the event @TechChange.

Also, don’t forget to vote TechChange for DC’s Hottest Showcasing Startup in the Tech Cocktail DC poll here.

It’s back to school time for many students including incoming Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) freshman, Michael Holachek, who just spent his summer with the TechChange team in Washington, DC. As he starts off his university career in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he reflects on his time as a Junior Programmer Intern a.k.a. “Code Ninja” at TechChange.

How did you hear about TechChange? Earlier this year I was searching the web for summer tech internships in the DC area. That’s when TechChange came into the picture.

Why did you choose TechChange to spend your summer before beginning college? I wanted to work at TechChange for several reasons. First, the job posting for Junior Programmer Intern really appealed to me because it offered a chance to learn cutting-edge web development and system administration skills. I wanted to expand my programming experience in PHP, Javascript, bash, and other languages as well as apply it to real world projects.

But the posted job responsibilities were just part of the story; I also wanted to work at an organization that was rooted in helping people. TechChange’s personal expectations spoke to me: “[interns should exude] a passion for technology, a commitment to education, and a desire to help create social change.” Not only would I be gaining useful skills building software with the latest technologies, but I’d be contributing to a startup dedicated to the global community as well.

What are your interests? I’m interested in programming and web development, as well as Mandarin Chinese. I’m also intrigued by the hardware side of technology. I think I’ll major in electrical engineering and computer science in college. For fun I like playing the alto saxophone, biking, and kayaking.

How did you use your TechChange internship to explore your interests? Over the summer, I set up TechChange’s new server infrastructure, the system that hosts the TechChange website and course platform. I worked closely with TechChange developers to design a system that was both fast and secure, as well as scalable and reliable. The challenge of creating such a system from scratch let me explore everything from the low level hardware to the TechChange user experience. I used this freedom to explore many types of programming and software development, both directly for the current task and more experimental for the future. The practical experience helped me immediately apply my new skills as soon as I learned them. I’ve always been interested in learning more about Linux, networks and servers, and system administration.

I also would occasionally bring in a hobby electronics project I had been working on and explain it to our team. Many people in the office also spoke Mandarin, so it was fun to occasionally brush up on my conversational Chinese.

What did you learn during your time at TechChange? What specific skills have you gained? Every day at TechChange was filled with critical thinking, new programming skills, and business inspiration. I learned that being a sysadmin is difficult! But I also learned a lot about how a startup works.

Specific skills:

  • How to automate servers with Salt Stack

  • Writing quality documentation

  • How to configure nginx web server

  • How to set up WordPress Multiuser on nginx

  • WordPress plugin development

  • Google Pagespeed caching

  • Working in a small development team, ensuring strict adherence to version control standards and diligent task management

  • Time management

Did your TechChange experience end up going as you expected? Well, some might say that! The startup life was much more exciting than I expected—it certainly didn’t just involve programming. S’mores-making Fridays and the occasional “Tim Tam Slam” really kept it interesting.

Was there any aspect about TechChange that surprised you?

While at first I thought the TechChange office (fondly known as the “nerd attic”) was a bit small, I quickly learned that a cozy work area can actually a benefit. There was no communication barrier to asking questions or discussing something. Constantly being exposed to everyone else’s work was also really exciting because I got a preview of all the pieces of TechChange and how they fit together.

Would you come back to work at TechChange one day? Definitely. TechChange has a certain energy that makes me excited about why I’m interested in tech. The combination of a technically-minded but socially conscious group of animators, artists, entrepreneurs, programmers, and writers made my experience at TechChange unique.

What advice would you give to future TechChange interns?

  • Explore everything. TechChange gives you a lot of flexibility both in terms of how you work and what you work on, so make sure to appreciate it and reach out to explore your interests.

  • Bike to work. Although it might sound boring especially if you live far away, biking to work in good weather can be a meditative way to start the day.

Is it possible to be an entrepreneur AND work for a large organization? Intrapreneurship, defined as entrepreneurial behavior within an established bureaucratic organization, is offering new graduates, young professionals and those working in the international development field a new way to drive innovation and increase social returns on investment in their work. The importance of the “start-up” mentality for aide since the recent global financial uncertainty has ignited a rapid growth in social entrepreneurship. Now large institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank and academia are hiring former entrepreneurs or those suited to become intrapreneurs.

I became an intrapreneur in early 2010. After taking a public bus ride from Kampala Uganda to Cape Town, South Africa I attempted to launch a network that would screen live World Cup games on inflatable screens and deliver educational content before, between and after matches. The process of starting up the program and getting the brand visible was incredibly difficult. Even when someone liked the concept, they questioned if we had the capacity to carry out the logistics and security of bringing hundreds of people together in rural villages without electricity.

Fatefully, I connected with a team within UNICEF New York Headquarters called the Youth Section. The Youth Section (now the Social and Civic Media Section) was filled with creative and innovative risk takers who were pushing the envelope in social media and digital engagement within the organization. The Youth Section picked up the World Cup idea and with their support and vision a version of the concept called World Cup in My Village was able to reach thousands of young people in Rwanda and Zambia

Without the UNICEF network of offices providing financial resources, security, and technical support, the project would have never been realized. Since the completion of the project, I’ve been working with the UNICEF Social and Civic Media section team to form innovative technical partnerships and helped start-up a growing youth led digital mapping initiative.

Intrapreneurship is a perfect option for international development professionals  and those aspiring to work in the field who feel the need to unleash their creative talents and satisfy their urge to create something new, but without risking everything as an entrepreneur. Intrapreneurship is also becoming more and more valuable for companies who are looking for people that take initiative to drive innovation and add to the company’s competitive edge. Accordingly, intrapreneurs are now some of the most valuable and sought after employees to an international development organization.

New and emerging technology is giving millennials, social entrepreneurs and bureaucrats the opportunity to become invaluable intrapreneurs and generate new and sustaining value for their companies. The intrapreneurs borrow from the principles of entrepreneurship and adapt these principles to fit within their organization. A limited group will have the opportunity to be a part of the first ever Tech Change Summer Mini Course which will teach the essentials for intrapreneurship and discuss about the latest strategies for becoming and working with intrapreneurs . Guest speakers will range from academic experts to practicing intrapreneurs from UNICEF and the World Bank.

To learn more about the power of intrapreneurship and to unlock your intrapreneurial potential, apply now to our Social Intrapreneurship: Innovation Within Institutions online course with Ashoka Changemakers. The course runs February 24 – March 21, 2014.

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

 

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.