Month: January 2013

Are you interested in learning with TechChange? Check out our next class: Digital Organizing and Open Government. Class starts April 8, 2013. Apply Now.

How can USAID use mobile technologies to more effectively collect, analyze and share data?  These are the central questions we will be addressing as part of a new course TechChange has developed in partnership with the Mobile Solutions team at USAID and QED.

USAID, together with its partners, has the opportunity to increase efficiency, improve the quality of the information its uses, and better meet USAID goals related to its Forward Reforms, Evaluation Policy, and Open Data Initiative by utilizing mobile technologies to collect and disseminate data about people, projects, and programs. This course will help USAID Missions and implementing partners understand how to do just that.

Building off of the success of our 8-week online certificate course this fall on Accelerating Mobile Money, TC311 Mobile Data Solutions will be a four week online course (February 1-March 1, 2013) designed to build the necessary technical capacity to deploy mobile data collection strategies by bringing together Mission staff and implementing partners. The four weeks are structured as follows to provide a comprehensive overview of mobile devices in data collection.

Week 1: Introduction to mobile data solutions

  • What is mobile data? What are the benefits and challenges associated with collecting data wirelessly?

Week 2: Project design

  • Designing projects and preparing concept notes, scopes of work, other documents to include mobile technologies.

Week 3: Implementation

  • Study design and programming, training, field operations, data management

Week 4: Analysis, visualization and sharing

  • Utilizing data for decision-making, sharing with partners

The course will go beyond explaining the benefits of this approach. Participants will learn the questions to ask in order to assess projects (Are mobile technologies appropriate?); design them to achieve the maximum benefits possible (How should interventions be designed to take advantage of these technologies?), implement them (What device should we use? How do we train staff? What resources do we need in the field? At the Mission?), and report and share the data (How do we create visuals that can inform decision making? How do we share the results with beneficiaries and partners in-country?).

Featured tools, organizations and projects include: Episurveyor/Magpi, Formhub, Souktel, EMIT, uReport, TexttoChange, RapidSMS, GeoPoll, iFormbuilder, PoiMapper, Catholic Relief Services, DAI, NASA, OpenDataKit at UW, SweetLab, JSI, ICF International, Tangerine at RTI, Futures Group. The course will be delivered on TechChange‘s custom learning platform and will include a mixture of presentations by experts, tool demonstrations, selected readings, and activities including designing and analysing a survey using mobile software.

This closed course is intended specifically for USAID and its implementing partners. But if are you interested in learning with TechChange and the topic of mobile data, Check out our upcoming course on Mobile Phones for International Development. Class starts on March 4, 2013. Apply now!

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.

Time and accuracy are absolutely critical components of successful emergency management. While new technologies open the door for improved analysis and communication, they also introduce new challenges for managers coordinating response from disparate organizations both officially sanctioned and ad-hoc. Increased access and use of social media and mobile devices have resulted in an overwhelming deluge of data that must be processed and converted into actionable intelligence for responders. This coming Monday, January 21, we will begin our latest class in Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management to provide a survey of everything a technologist or emergency manager needs to know about integrating technology in an emergency.

One of the core differences between this course and some in the past is that we will be examining Hurricane Sandy as case study and example in self-organization and mobilization of volunteer networks using applicable technology. Representatives from two separate organizations involved in relief efforts will provide further insight into their experience bringing new tools to bear in this response:

Team Rubicon is an organization of veterans committed to disaster response. We’ve written previously about how they are adapting technology by Palantir from tracking IEDs to mapping disaster-affected areas.

We’ll also be joined by representatives from Occupy Sandy an affiliation of individuals who stepped up to provide relief materials to some of the hardest hit communities affected by the storm.

Here are just a few thing that we’re really looking forward to in this upcoming course:

  • Tech tools including: ArcGIS, FrontLineSMS, Ushahidi and OpenStreetMap
  • Case studies: Hurricane Sandy, the 2012 Philippines flood
  • Live events with experts such as: Keera Pullman of Esri, Andrew Stevens of Team Rubicon, and Kei Gowda and Robert Pluma of Occupy Sandy
  • A full simulation of a disaster in Samoa.

This is a guest post by TechChange alumna Julia Nagel.

If you’re interested in learning with TechChange, check out our next course on Mobile Phones for Public Health. Class starts June 3. Apply now! 

In December 2012, I traveled with the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) to Zambia and Malawi to shoot videos on women’s health. Armed with three cameras – a Panasonic HMC, a Canon Rebel T3i, and a Canon 5d Mark II – we sought to capture the voices of African women on issues that affect their lives and the lives of countless women in their country: maternal mortality, cervical cancer, and family planning. Why three cameras you might ask? My fellow videographer and I both agreed that while the Panasonic HMC is a highly versatile camera, its look does not compare to that of a nice DSLR.

With the DSLR cameras, colors are more saturated, images are more vivid, and you get a nice crisp focus on your subject (if you’re able to manage how sensitive that camera’s focus ring is) that nicely blurs the background. The DSLR does have two major downfalls though. One, it does not operate well in low light (a major problem during Malawi’s rainy season). Two, there’s no good way to capture audio. Thus, the
Panasonic was used for every shoot alongside the DSLRs.

 

In this video, Joyce Banda – the first female President of Malawi – talks about the importance of women’s health and empowerment, particularly in Africa and in her country. The interview was both inspiring to shoot and to edit. The two cameras we used in this video are the Panasonic HMC for the wide shot, and the Cannon 5d Mark II for the tight shot. The video was edited in Final Cut Pro and the cameras were matched in Final Cut using an incredibly helpful program called Plural Eyes. To read
more about the interview, please visit: www.SmartGlobalHealth.org/JoyceBanda. Also, stay tuned to www.SmartGlobalHealth.org for the additional videos that will be released from our trip, due out in February.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about how technology can support peacebuilding and conflict management programming, check out TC109: Technology for Conflict Management and Peacebuilding, being taught by TechChange’s Director of Conflict Management and Peacebuilding Programs, Charles Martin-Shields!

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Social technology has captured the interest of emergency responders, peacebuilders, and policy makers due to the positive role it has played in disaster response in Haiti, peace promotion in Kenya, social revolution across the Middle East.  In ways that differ from disaster response, though, the politics and narratives of violent conflict demand a more nuanced, risk-averse approach to bringing high-volume communication technologies to the peace making space, especially in kinetic environments.

Emergent technologies such as mobile phones, social media and open-source mapping have had dramatic positive effects on emergency response since Ushahidi was first launched as part of the response to the Haiti earthquake in 2010.  While the emergency response community has embraced these technologies (more or less), the peacebuilding and conflict management communities have been more circumspect.  While there are good reasons for this, at some point a healthy skepticism of these technologies must give way to well thought out integration.  So how do peacemakers in both large organizations and small NGOs do this, given all the political and socio-economic pitfalls waiting in the conflict and post-conflict space?  What’s a lower risk way that small NGOs and individuals can be instrumental in gathering information that can be useful to large organizations like the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations?

To answer this question we can look to the way that narratives and information evolve in multidimensional peacebuilding contexts.  The days of peacekeepers demarcating an agreed upon line between two parties are over – peace is being built in the middle of ongoing warfare, which means providing humanitarian aid, supporting economic development, and building political structures the can (ostensibly) represent citizens.  The information we need to do this can’t just come from satellites, closed-source intelligence and surveillance systems.  Virginia Page Fortna notes the importance of what the ‘peacekept’ need and want, and we have to reach out to them using channels they have access to.  Even in the hardest conflict zone, people have mobile phones to send SMS messages, they tweet, and they build live digital maps to track events.  This isn’t a replacement for classic closed source technology, it’s a supplement to make sure peacekeepers know what is on their host community’s mind, what people need, and their sentiments about the social and political space.

What communication technology and social media does is provide more individuals with the ability to tell a story.  These stories may be the same as the official account, or may deviate jarringly and in ways that make understanding the motivations of those involved in the fighting (or civilians trying to survive) harder to decipher.  In this space we see a key different between social media and communication technology in a disaster versus a conflict zone, and making the most of the technology requires recognizing this difference: in a disaster we use technology to respond to the situation, in a conflict we have to use it to understand the situation.  While the volume of stories can seem overwhelming if we can learn to listen more efficiently to the information from those we wish to help their stories can start to inform and increase the effectiveness of our peacebuilding efforts.