Author: Nick Martin

Nick Martin is an educator, technologist, and social entrepreneur with over ten years of international development and peacebuilding experience. He is the founder and CEO of TechChange, a Washington DC-based social enterprise that provides tech training for social change. The TechChange model for technology training has been featured in the New York Times, Forbes, Economist, Fast Company, PBS NewsHour and more. Nick is a PopTech Social Innovation Fellow (2013), an Ariane de Rothschild Fellow (2014), and an International Youth Foundation Global Fellow (2009). He was also the runner-up for the Society for International Development’s prestigious Rice Award which honors an outstanding young innovator in the field international development under the age of 32 (2014). Nick is an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown and George Washington Universities where he teaches graduate courses on Technology for Social Change, Technology for Crisis Response, and Mobile Phones for International Development. Nick received his BA with honors from Swarthmore College and holds an MA in Peace Education from the United Nations mandated University for Peace (UPEACE).

Participation Map for USIP EventWe’re excited to announce that we’re partnering with the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) for this Friday’s event (9/16) on Sifting Fact from Fiction: The Role of Social Media in Conflict. Held in Washington, DC, this event will examine the power of social media for change by bringing together experts, activists, and policy-makers to look at cutting-edge tech for conflict management and peacebuilding.

Events of global importance should include a global audience. To complement the event’s live webcast, we’re spending this week aggregating questions from you, the online audience, in Tweets, anonymous emails, and YouTube videos. We’re also collecting questions from the 46 students from 26 countries in our online class Tech Tools for Emergency Management, and we want to hear from you! Once we get your input, we’ll put it on our live Participation Map, which will be featured during the event.

Ask NPR’s Andy Carvin about tweeting revolutions in the Middle East, the State Department’s Alec Ross about the new front on US Digital Diplomacy, the EFF’s Jillian York how Egyptian and Tunisian youth hacked the Arab Spring. That’s right, we’re crowdsourcing questions for Clay Shirky of Here Comes Everybody, while keeping it short enough for Brian Eoff of Bit.Ly. John Kelly of Morningside Analytics will map out the online discussion, and social media experts Marc Lynch (@abuaardvark) and Sultan al-Qassemi (@SultanAlQassemi) will reality check it.

What are you waiting for? There are four easy ways to participate:

  • Email your question and location to chris@techchange.org with “Question” as the subject. Please note if you want your question to be anonymous.
  • Tweet your question and location with #USIPBlogs and we’ll post it right away. (Sample: Question from #location for @panelist. #USIPBlogs)
  • Post it in the comments section below
  • Film a video question and upload it to YouTube. Send us the link via either of the two methods listed above.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

– The TechChange Team

 

We’re excited to start our online course on TC103: Tech Tools and Skills for Emergency Management. We have an incredible group of participants enrolled in the course: 46 people working in 26 countries from organizations like Mercy Corps, UNDP, Voice of America, Concern.net, German International Cooperation, Inter-American Development Bank, African Union Commission, World Pulse Media, SpanAfrica, World Vision, Plan International and more. From professors to practitioners, policy makers to first responders, you all represent an amazing cross-section of people on the front lines of emergency management. We will also have 6 small group moderators and three guest experts supporting our learning for the course including Patrick Meier of Ushahdi and Laura Hudson Walker of FrontlineSMS.

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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This past weekend Dr. Michael Gibbons and I taught a 20-hour graduate skills institute at American University’s School of International Service entitled Applications of Technology for Peacebuilding. Students came from a variety of AU programs, including the International Peace and Conflict Program (IPCR) in the School of International Service, the AU Business School, and the AU Law School.

We at TechChange were especially excited about this course, as it allowed us an opportunity to incorporate a variety of new tech-based tools in the curriculum, both those created by TechChange and others. The inclusion of these tools was designed to foster collaboration, allow for course materials to be accessed in innovative, non-linear ways, and to give students an opportunity to participate in hands-on simulations using some of the same tools (e.g. Ushahidi) currently being used by practitioners in the field.

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This holiday season we’re taking a break at TechChange from bringing you the latest developments in technology, education and social change to focus on something a little more fun.

Over the years I’ve been fortunate to travel a fair amount by plane and in that time I’ve developed a strong love for the SkyMall catalog. Lets be honest, who doesn’t enjoy reading about the latest innovations in dog castles, personal massage devices, and Big Foot statues?  On a recent flight I came across a number of new technologies designed to make our lives easier.  I figured why not write a blog post to document these revolutionary breakthroughs and provide some gift ideas for this holiday season?
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Yesterday, Jumo released its beta platform to the world, but the launch was far from seamless.  Founded by Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes, Jumo bills itself as a “social network for the social sector.” At TechChange, we spent a few hours on the new site and here are some of our first impressions.

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I just got back from the International Conference on Crisis Mapping (ICCM 2010) held at Tufts and Harvard Universities. The conference brought together key members of the NGO community, United Nations Agencies, private sector players like Google and Microsoft, and academics from various institutions. A number of TechChange friends were also in attendance: USIP, FrontlineSMS: Medic, Development Seed, Ushahidi,  ICT4Peace Foundation, and UN Global Pulse. Also met some new friends including the folks at Digital Democracy, the Konpa Group and more.​

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Earlier this month I sat down with Dr. Craig Zelizer, Associate Director of the Conflict Resolution MA Program at Georgetown University and TechChange Advisor, to talk about the online professional network that he created in 2008 called the Peace and Collaborative Development Network (PCDN). PCDN has grown to over 16,000 members, 250,000 hits a month and is one of the most well respected and utilized sites in the field of peace and conflict studies. The aim of the site is “to foster dialogue and sharing of resources in international development, conflict resolution, gender mainstreaming, human rights, social entrepreneurship and related fields.” I was eager to learn about the network’s origins, successes, challenges and future plans. Highlights from our conversation are featured below.

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Last month I taught the first ever course on “Technology and Peace” at the UN-mandated University for Peace (UPEACE) in Costa Rica. The course drew 16 participants from 11 countries, representing a number of distinguished organizations including Ashoka, the Council on Foreign Relations and George Mason University’s Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution (ICAR).

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