Uncategorized | TechChange | The Institute for Technology and Social Change

Sedinam joined the the TechChange team to support service design and tech initiatives. She will be focusing on supporting partner learning objectives on the TechChange platform. In addition to graduating from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Computer Science and Economic Development, Sedinam also co-founded Dislabelled, an organization that works with people with disabilities and seeks to reform the special education system in Ghana. She also founded YenAra backpacks in 2015, a socially responsible for-profit business initiative that provides unique and functional African-inspired backpacks to an international marketplace.

Sedinam is passionate about the intersection of technology, business, education and design. In her summers, she has worked as a Google policy fellow, robotics workshop facilitator and software developer. In her free time, she loves harmonizing to everything under the sun, writing articles and meeting new people! Welcome, Sedi!

Q: Could you share a little bit about your background? What originally interested you in TechChange?

I was raised in Ghana and my family, community and education have contributed significantly to who I am today. In high school and college, I had opportunities to interact with people from a wide range of differences in culture. These experiences deepened my knowledge of cultural differences and I learned to not only respect but also to celebrate diversity. These experiences also fuelled my desire to learn about people and know more about their stories.

I had the opportunity to first meet some members of the TechChange team during a Mapping for International Development Happy Hour two years ago when I was interning in DC. I read about the CEO of TechChange who was a Swarthmore alum (shout out to Swat!), felt connected to TechChange’s mission, and being the inquisitive person I was, I wanted to learn more. After spending hours discussing various topics from the need for accessibility of technologies to why liberal arts colleges are beneficial, I left the event with the sense that TechChange was a community of friendly, supportive and passionate people that I would fit in with.

Coupled with hearing more about experiences working at TechChange from Swarthmore alumni and students, I was drawn to work at TechChange for three main reasons amongst many: the opportunity to learn and apply my skills in a fulfilling, exciting and creative way, the collaborative team culture at TechChange and a company mission that is at the heart of technology and social change, a purpose I identify with and value deeply. Learning that some of these courses benefit African countries was definitely a highlight to me as a Ghanaian. So far, I can say that it’s been a great decision and I’m glad to have found a job straight out of college where I wake up genuinely excited about the work I’m doing and the people I get to see!

Q: How do you see this role with TechChange fitting into your studies and past experience as an entrepreneur?

My role at TechChange is currently at the intersection of instructional design, tech, and client partnerships. I love that I can apply my Computer Science knowledge into fully understanding how our platform works both on the frontend and backend. I also love that I can deepen my knowledge about web development.

I am interested in international development so the opportunity to interact with clients from various international development organizations doing amazing work is one that I value immensely! TechChange fits wonderfully into my past experience as an entrepreneur because I get to try my hands at various activities at this company and it’s so exciting.

With my backpack company, I identified a business opportunity when students on my college campus kept commenting about the colorful patterns in my Ghanaian clothes and backpack. Through market research and talking to various students who were involved in diverse areas of campus life, I studied the backpack wants and needs of students on campus. I recruited some of my friends and family to join my team, including a chief operating officer that determined quality control of the backpacks from the local artisans, a designer that sketched our prototypes and a marketing strategist that helped me think about the website design, flyers and questionnaires. Working with the designer, our team came up with functional and attractive designs based on our market research, built prototypes and solicited feedback from customers in the Philadelphia area.

It was a long-term process of planning, conducting market research, developing pricing strategies, designing posters using Adobe Indesign and learning, learning, learning. I learnt so much about myself during the process and about social enterprises. Similarly, having a job where I’m actually at the intersection of cutting edge work is more than I could have envisioned for myself.

Q: How do you see your role going forward to build on your work with co- founding Dislabelled and founding YenAra Backpacks?

The question of my role going forward in both organizations was one I definitely had to grapple with in deciding my next steps after college. I still have so much learning to do and YenAra backpacks helped me to do so much learning by actually doing. That being said, I decided to put that on hold to focus more on transitioning to a new work environment and giving my entire self to my role at TechChange. It was definitely a beneficial entrepreneurial experience and I can definitely see myself applying the skills I gained from that experience to my job. With Dislabelled, I am still involved and working with amazing team members to coordinate and organize events! Dislabelled has been run since high school and a lot of it has been during holidays and by coordinating activities remotely. Currently, we have successfully undertaken five projects and our team is working on the sixth project. In one of our projects, titled “SustainAbility” our team led the creation and compilation of a white paper that documented changes on government policy that teachers from various special education schools in Ghana voiced. Our current projects involve organizing informative workshops for parents who have children with disabilities in Ghana.. Outside of work, it is the passion initiative that I can focus on and our team is fantastic.

Q: Could you share a bit more about your interest in special education and how that applies to technology?

My interest in special education came about in high school, where we had a speaker who had cerebral palsy come and talk to our Pan-African club at school about her disability. Following that, I worked as a Google Policy Fellow in my sophomore year with the American Association of People with Disabilities as my host organization. That’s where I became even more interested in the intersection of special education and technology. America was celebrating the American Disability Act the year of my fellowship and I had the opportunity to participate in Special Ed Initiatives including the AAPD Technology forum and the Higher Ed Accessibility project. I also worked on a research project concerning people with learning disabilities and the role of assistive technology. The deeper and deeper I dug into my research the more questions I found. Questions I had included: how has technology been used to positively impact special education in various countries? How do people with physical, intellectual and learning disabilities use technology and in what ways does their technology use differ? How can we make technology more accessible especially in developing nations and what are some obstacles that prevent special educators from using technology to enhance teaching in their classrooms? I still have those questions and these questions sustain my interest and technology and special education.

Q: I know it’s only been a week, but what are some of your favorite parts of working at TechChange so far?

The people here are truly amazing. It’s been great to go home and be able to rave to my roommate about how supportive and fun people here are! One of my favorite parts was the potluck where everyone had to bring a meal item. There was an amazing sense of community and it felt like I was not only part of a team but a family of some sort. Another favorite part of my time here so far was meeting TechGirls and teaching them how to build their own courses on the TechChange platform. As someone from Ghana myself, it was really awesome to see TechChange hosting girls from Middle East and Africa and actively showing them the work we do here. I was inspired by how the team was genuinely interested in sharing their work and encouraging the girls and I was reminded for the billionth time about why this place is such a strong fit for my interests, values and passions!

Q: What is one thing that you’d love to learn or do in the next year?

In the next year, I am excited to gain more experience in managing client partnerships effectively. I love interacting with people and I can’t wait to see how I can use this skill in ensuring our TechChange clients remain happy! I also hope to broaden my global network and perspectives. As a member of the tech team, I also can’t wait to deepen my coding skills even further, specifically in JavaScript/CSS, and learn from the various teams at TechChange including the instructional design and business development side of things. I also want to learn more of what it takes to successfully build an online learning community. I deeply value being in a company like TechChange where I can see first hand the many aspects of running a successful company.

Q: Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?

I love love dancing! In college, I taught several dance classes and participated in an Intergenerational Drum and Dance Ensemble. As a student academic mentor, I managed to also weave in several dance wellness study breaks where I led dance workshops to Afrobeats music! I’m actually going to share a couple of links below to some of the songs/beats I’ve been listening/dancing to recently! I need to share the love, haha. Hope you enjoy it and thanks for the opportunity to share a bit of my story!

Beat de chez beat- Coupe Decale

Adomaa- Evolution of GH Music

Chance the Rapper- Blessings

Sonnie Badu- Ese Oluwa

For the fifth year in a row, we’ve had the honor of hosting two brilliant young leaders from the TechGirls State Department program. This year, Passant Abu-el-Gheit and Reem Saado shadowed the various teams hard at work making online courses in the TechChange office, and contributed a few creations of their own!

Before they finished up their program, we asked them to share a few things about themselves and their work.

Q: What projects are you currently working on?

Passant: I am currently working on a project related to STEM fields, which is Rumen fluid incubation, that helps in increasing the efficiency of the biomass incubators.

I definitely enjoyed the course that we designed today at TechChange, as it is related to the TechGirls program follow on project, as they both rely on online courses to spread knowledge and raise awareness. We designed a course that recites and illustrates some of the experience that we had during our 3 weeks stay in the US. We designed it in an interactive way so that the user can learn efficiently. This course was designed by the help of the software tools that the TechChange staff has, and of course, with the help of the staff members, we added animations, designed avatars, and texts. After finishing, we uploaded it. This experience is interesting to me because it will help me in my follow on project!

Reem: I’m working on the follow on a project that should be done when we go back to our countries. Basically, I am planning to teach the basics of coding to the girls in my school in order to motivate them to major in the STEM fields. In addition to that, I am planning to make a workshop that includes leadership skills. Also, we did some projects today at TechChange; one of them is making our own online courses to inform girls about TechGirls program and the beautiful experience we had.

Q: What was your favorite part of the job shadow day at TechChange?

Passant: I’d say it was the very first part when we designed our pug, it was really fun and educational because it was my first time drawing on an electronic tablet, and we ended up having a beautiful design. The process was really efficient, as it transferred the design from the very basic lines to a 3D avatar.

Reem: My favorite part was building our own online courses. We designed it in line with the schedule that we had across our TechGirls summer program. We wanted to spread the amazing experience through pictures and videos.

Snapshot of the sample course Passant and Reem made describing their favorite parts of the TechGirls experience.

Above: Snapshot of the sample course Passant and Reem made detailing their favorite parts of the TechGirls experience.

Q: Any company would be lucky to land driven, talented individuals like yourselves. What kind of work do you dream about doing in the future?

Passant: I have several interests in more than one STEM field, and fortunately, I found a field that combines most of them, which is biomedical engineering. I am planning to be a medical machine developer (a person who design medical machines for special conditions).

Reem: The kind of work that I dream of doing in the future is programming. I am planning to be a software engineer and work in Microsoft company.

: John from the Creative Team gives TechGirls a chance to try their hand at illustrating.

: Austin the Instructional Designer shows TechGirls how she creates interactive elements for courses.

We feel so lucky to have spent the day with Passant and Reem and look forward to the impact they’ll have in the future!

Several months following the completion of the program, we sat down with Royce Escolar, Monitoring & Evaluation and Communications Officer and M&E Diploma Track graduate, to hear about how the program affected his professional development, ambitions, and projects.

Q: How did you find out about TechChange, and how did you become interested in taking courses?

I found out about TechChange by googling courses on Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E). I knew that I had to constantly learn new tools and approaches to enhance my skills in M&E given the fast-paced changes in the sector. The use of technology to enhance M&E and how to best present and visualize M&E data were what attracted me most when I decided to take up TechChange’s diploma track.

I previously had a chance to coordinate work with USAID when I was with AusAID. It was good to know that USAID had and still continues to use TechChange to train their officers. It was an indicator for me that the courses offered by TechChange are of high quality and value to a key player in the international development sector.

Q: Have you taken online courses before?

I surely did. I took my Masters in Evaluation from University of Melbourne via distance learning from 2012 to 2013. This was a two-year part-time curriculum which allowed me to work full-time during the day and study after work hours.

Q: How would you compare the TechChange experience to other online course experiences?

TechChange provided a much more fun and practical learning experience by creatively incorporating multi-media in the courses. I really enjoyed how the topics and courses were presented using easy to understand language. TechChange also gave us lots of opportunities to practice and use the M&E tools and software, including insights on the context where the tools would be most relevant. I also valued the sharing of experiences from guest resource persons via video and the sharing from other course participants.

Q: How have you been able to use what you learned at TechChange in your work?

Yes, I have used Canva.com a couple of times in creating infographics to better present the outcomes from capacity development initiatives funded by our program. A copy of one infographic I made is available in our program website at: http://aanzfta.asean.org/program-highlights/

I have also used what I learned on data visualization in developing a communication package to be presented to Economic Ministers from 12 countries party to a regional free trade agreement. This package will be finalized and uploaded to the website (http://aanzfta.asean.org/) by end-September 2017.

By Dec 2017, I will revive my own blog on M&E (http://royceescolar.wixsite.com/evaluation) which has been inactive since early 2016 when I took a full-time job. I plan to post some of these data visualization products in my blog and write articles reflecting on my experiences and the process in developing these data visualization products.

Q: Would you recommend the Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation Diploma to a friend?

I would definitely recommend TechChange and the Diploma track on technology for M&E!!!

Above graphic by Royce for the AANZFTA-ASEAN program website
Featured image: ASEC – Community Relations Division

After a successful fall 2016 as Communications Fellow, Arianna returned this year as a Course Facilitator in Technology for Knowledge Management. Arianna is not only an online educator, but also a rising junior-and-a-half at Davidson College. We sat down to ask her a few questions.

Q: What first interested you in working with the TechChange team in 2016?

It was a late night as a nerdy high schooler, conducting topic analysis on the Lincoln Douglas debate resolution, “Resolved: In a democracy, voting ought to be compulsory”, when I first discovered the magic of online learning. After hours of skimming dense law briefs and literature reviews with little luck, I finally encountered a MOOC on Democracy and Governance which turned my world upside down.

Ever since, I’ve been both intrigued by the way that online learning can make education on niche topics (or education from fresh perspectives) accessible and eager to find ways to contribute to the edtech space. TechChange was the perfect fit.

Q: What’s it like engaging the TechChange community on a daily basis?

I couldn’t imagine a more amazing experience if you asked me to. I’ve learned so much from the participants’ discussions, from the questions folks ask, from the network of guest experts TechChange brings into their courses. I have always felt most comfortable in discussion-based, three-way learning models, and every day in the TechChange community I come home chewing on something new.

Q: In January 2017, you wrote a blog post on A People’s Education on the World Wide Web. How has your background in educational development in social movements influenced your work?

Aside from the wisdom from my big, bizarre family, grassroots organizers have taught me everything I know. I’ve learned that it’s always appropriate to take a second, stop, and ask yourself, “who am I doing this for?”. If you can’t easily explain to yourself how what you’re doing tangibly helps the people you’re supposedly serving, it’s probably time to change course. You’d be surprised how often that simple check in makes a difference.

Q: What would your TED talk be about?

Without question, group dynamics. I am invested in the processes of rapport, empathy, and community building, and the ways this study can help us make the spaces that we host more accessible and interactive for all types of people. The talk would probably draw heavily on the discipline of Knowledge Management, specifically how KM makes explicit the informal practices of networking and learning that can hinder transparency in organizations. Naming where key information is siloed is one of the first steps to creating a unified team.

Q: What’s next for you after this summer at TechChange?

Finishing my degree. I started working at TechChange during a gap year from college. Needless to say, I’m a big believer in gap years, gap semesters, gap however-long-you-need. In my experience, the four year higher education model assumes a dichotomy between life experience and courses. A lifelong, experiential learner recognizes the fallacy and finds the time for courses whenever it fits best in their journey.

Picture this: You’ve just finished the latest Technology for Knowledge Management online course. After four engaging weeks, the guest experts, forums, and content already have you excited to demonstrate your new skills to colleagues and employers. But, how do you get credit for being on the cutting edge of online learning? Fortunately, LinkedIn is evolving into something far beyond the mere online resume holder it once was known to be. In fact, LinkedIn is ahead of the curve on acknowledging that the capacity of an employee is not necessarily tied to traditional educational experience alone. Among other features, the employment-oriented social networking platform now includes an interactive section for core competencies, recommendations, and- you guessed it- certificates.

A badge on LinkedIn is no replacement for a university diploma (well, not yet anyway), but certificates can demonstrate mastery of a particular skillset, like the ability to build an SMS campaign in TextIt or to create compelling visualizations in Tableau. In the remainder of this post, you will find instructions on how to add your TechChange certificates to your LinkedIn profile. If you haven’t yet taken advantage of our other social media opportunities for alumni, be sure to join our Facebook and LinkedIn groups!

Step 1: Add an “Accomplishments” section to your profile. It can be found on the right side of your profile page. If you already have any certifications listed on your profile, you may instead need to hit the “+” sign next to the “Accomplishments” tab to find this pop up window.

Step 2: Once you’ve selected the option to add a certificate, a pop up window will appear asking you to enter information about your certificate.

The rest of the process is relatively straightforward. You can enter the name of the course you completed for “Certification name”. Under “Certification authority”, a drop down menu will appear once you’ve started typing, where you will be able to find TechChange.

After entering the month and year in which you received your certificate, check the box for “This certification does not expire”. This will make the “To” date disappear. Finally, you’re given the option to publicly link to a PDF version of the certificate. Oftentimes, this isn’t necessary, but if you’re interested, skip to the end of this post for instructions.

Especially if you’re a TechChange veteran, it might be worth adding as a new section to your resume entirely! Employers love seeing qualified job candidates, and these certificates could be that one thing that bumps your resume to the top of the stack.

(Optional) How to add a link to your certificate on your profile:

You’ll need to make sure you have your certificate(s) handy. Make sure you know where it exists on your computer’s file system so you can quickly upload and access it. If you can’t find yours, reach out to us at info@techchange.org and we’ll get you another copy.
Once you have your certificate, you’re going to need to host your file in a publicly available place online. The easiest ways to do that are through Dropbox or Google Drive.
Double check to make sure that you’ve set the viewing privileges to “anyone with the link”!
Copy the link to the “Certification URL” box on LinkedIn. You’re done!

Have any other questions about your TechChange experience? Want to see a tutorial on some other topic related to your course? Haven’t taken a course yet but looking to?

Shoot us an email at info@techchange.org.

A veteran Instructional Designer with the TechChange team, Shannon Fineran recently shared some of her experiences over the last year with TechChange.

Q: Could you share a bit about your background? What originally interested you about joining TechChange?
I’ve always had a great interest international affairs and relations, and after spending a year in the classroom I came to really appreciate education and effective teaching methods. I was intrigued by TechChange’s model and mission to make education accessible and engaging. Their work aligned really well with my interests and background and I thought it would be a perfect place for me to work.
Q: What are some of the projects that you’ve worked on? Has there been anything particular that you’ve enjoyed or found interesting?
This year I’ve worked on a number of great topics, about everything from gender and finance to international peacebuilding. One of my favorite projects has definitely been the one we just wrapped up on gender and sexual diversity. Not only was the material incredibly interesting, but the course itself was literally changing people’s as they became empowered and educated.
Q: I understand you did some travelling this year for a project. What was that like? How did it affect your approach as an Instructional Designer?
Another great project I’ve been working on is about climate change adaptation. As a part of it, two of my colleagues and I traveled to Mozambique to gain some greater context for the course and to conduct a series of interviews with key stakeholders. The trip was intense, but very rewarding. Mozambique is an incredible place that I never thought I’d visit, so I was grateful for the chance to explore. And more importantly, our trip gave me a better understanding of the course material and importance and I think it definitely shows in the final product.
Q: The number and quality of courses being created by the instructional design team is amazing. What does this look like on the project level?
We spend a lot of time and effort to work closely with the client to make sure we can envision what they need. From there, we’ll look to projects past or to each other for ideas on interesting interactions. While usually are individually assigned projects, but often we’ll work collaboratively to take them to the finish line.
Q: What’s the team like? What are your favorite parts about working at TechChange?
Our team is small and close, and more like a family than anything else. We each have different strengths that make I’m constantly impressed and inspired by my colleagues. They push me to improve my own skills and think outside the box to build the best courses possible. On a similar note, one of the best parts of working at TechChange is the people. I can’t believe I get to work with such brilliant, fun, and innovative individuals!
Q: What is one thing that you’d love to learn or do in the next year?
I really love photography and videography and I’d like see how I can improve those skills and use them as an instructional designer.
Q: Lastly, what’s something that not a lot of people know about you?
When I was in 8th grade, a local radio station read a poem I wrote aloud.

Nick Martin, the founder and CEO of TechChange and Swarthmore alumnus recently had the exciting opportunity to MC the 2017 SwatTank competition at Swarthmore College! SwatTank is a business competition much like the popular show Shark Tank in which groups of students compete for startup funding from a group of seasoned business leaders as judges. Nick was in charge of keeping the energy of the room up, taking breaks to talk to the person next to you about the presentations, engaging in counting improv games, and asking the contestants about the most difficult parts of their design process while the judges left the room to deliberate.

This year, there were four groups competing for the $3,000 First Place prize: New Dae Farms, Collab, Switchboard, and Zing. Each group of 2-3 students had to pitch their idea in 4 minutes or less, take questions from the judges and the audience about their idea, create a business plan, and provide an informational poster. Each group is assigned an alumni mentor who works in the field each new business is trying to break into, to fill knowledge gaps and provide insight. Both this year and last year, Nick mentored a team.

The winner of SwatTank, with a high-impact proposal and an impressive amount of preparation, was Switchboard. Switchboard is a project which co-founders Michael Piazza and Eric Wang have been working on for two years, though the project has gone through multiple iterations. The app was originally a text messaging service, where users could text the Switchboard number and they would be paired with another anonymous user using a series of ‘tags’ to enter a ‘room.’ For example, if you were interested in finding somebody else in your linguistics class to help you out with your homework, you could add #ling001 to the end of your text message to Switchboard.

Their next iteration of Switchboard was a mobile app. Surprisingly, this tactic was not as successful for them because as it turns out, the average smartphone owner downloads 0 apps a month on average, and they had trouble getting users to download their app. For comparison, users sent 6,000 messages in the iOS app over the course of 2 months compared to 17,000 messages sent in one week during the first iteration when the platform was SMS-based. So in this round, they returned to the texting model and over the 6 days since their most recent launch, they have had 65 users who have sent over 1,600 messages.

The judges also asked about a potential business model: how were they going to make Switchboard profitable? They decided to go with a freemium model, in which the vast majority of users were able to use the service for free, whereas members who paid $5 would get access to exclusive features and content. Ultimately, they said they were not concerned with making this a super profitable business; their strategy was to keep the service as inexpensive as possible until they could get a larger company to buy them up.

Currently, their product is only available to current Swarthmore students, where graduating seniors would need to get kicked off the platform as soon as the Swarthmore emails that they used to register for Switchboard expired. Down the road, they plan to allow Swarthmore alumni to sign up for an account but those kinds of add-ons are still far in the future.

The second place winner, New Dae Farms, had one of the more zany ideas of the bunch: cricket farming. They proposed using shipping crates to grow and harvest over 3.5 million crickets on Swarthmore and Haverford college campuses, selling them to local restaurants and using them in the dining halls. Though there are other cricket farms, their value proposition was to use these crickets for R&D, since it is difficult for most farms to do controlled experiments, whereas college campuses typically have well-resourced biology labs suited for controlled testing.

The third place winner, Collab, came up with an idea to try to bring more women with children into the workforce: partner with coworking spaces like WeWork to provide daycare services at all of the WeWork locations. Modelled after spaces like CoHatchery in NYC, some of the main challenges were finding competent childcare professionals to keep up with the demand for childcare, as well as coordinating with pre-existing coworking organizations.

In fourth place came Zing, an all-freshman team with the idea to bring solar-powered cell phone charging stations to campuses.They chose to lease these charging stations to colleges to mitigate the upfront cost of the charging stations, with a lease-to-own plan for colleges who chose to buy the charging stations in the future.

SwatTank has been part of a larger effort at Swarthmore to promote opportunities for student entrepreneurship. Hosted by the Center for Innovation and Leadership, there have been more efforts to go on trips to Silicon Valley, as well as business and entreprenurial workshops called Innovation Incubators.

Just last year, Swarthmore Visiting Professor Denise Crossan began offering a new social entrepreneurship class through the Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility called Social Entrepreneurship in Principle and Practice. Not every student who participated in this year’s SwatTank took the class, but many who did felt as if the class gave them a leg up in thinking entrepreneurially.

TechChange looks forward to supporting Swarthmore’s rising entrepreneurs in the future and helping merge the ideas of the liberal arts and social entrepreneurship by thinking intentionally about how to innovate in new markets and solve problems creatively. Understanding how to merge passion and profit from a liberal arts perspective is only going to become more and more important in our increasingly technological world where new challenges crop up every day.

To read more about Switchboard, you can do so here. You can also read more about SwatTank here.

Photos courtesy of Laurence Kesterson.

Listen below to learn more about how Technology for Monitoring and Evaluation shaped Ethel’s life and career!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxUb-BeGYtM&feature=youtu.be

Drones are one of the most controversial technologies in disaster response operations. To find out what exactly humanitarian aid workers think about the use of these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), the Swiss Foundation for Mine Action (FSD) with funding from EU Humanitarian Aid has now published a survey. In total, close to 200 disaster responders working in 61 different countries took part in what is the first comprehensive survey of how humanitarian professional view drones.

The survey shows that a substantial majority of respondents (60%) believe that drones can have a positive impact in disaster response operations, while only less than a quarter (22%) see their use negatively – at least when used following natural disasters. The opinions shift significantly, when asking about use of drones in conflict zones. Here, humanitarian workers are sharply split: while 40% stated that drones should never be used by humanitarian organisations in conflict settings, 41% said they would consider using drones even during armed conflicts.

Interestingly, a majority (57%) said that they believe that the local populations feel threatened by drones – even in non-conflict environments. However, this perception is not backed up with the experience that FSD has gathered as part of the EU Humanitarian Aid funded initiative “Fostering the Appropriate Use of Air-Borne Systems in Humanitarian Crisis” so far. As part of that initiative, FSD, in partnership with the Zoi Environment Network and CartONG, is currently collecting 16 case studies ranging from mapping, to de-mining to transporting medical samples. Nine of these case studies have already been published and can be found here.

Most survey respondents saw a very real potential for drones to assist in humanitarian response operations, particularly in situations where drones can be used to create maps, monitor activities, support search and rescue operations or deliver cargo. However, humanitarian workers also stressed that drones need to be able to provide a real added value compared to existing technologies.

The survey also showed that much more needs to be done within the humanitarian sector to build knowledge about the advantages, disadvantages, capabilities and limitations of drones. The vast majority (87%) of respondents said that they did not have first-hand knowledge of using drones. Many of them explained that they were looking for guidance and needed experience to make the best use of the technology.

As drones become more affordable and widespread, there is no question that UAVs will become more and more common in disaster zones. The results of this survey show that more needs to be done to better understand the added value of drones and to provide humanitarian organisations with practical guidance on how and where drones should be used.

Key figures of the survey are summarised in the infographic below. The complete survey can be downloaded here.

This piece originally appears on the FSD Blog. All images courtesy of FSD.

What stories would you tell with data from your daily life?

In September 2014, two award-winning information designers living on different sides of Atlantic, Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, collaborated on a year-long project to collect, visualize, and share information about their daily lives. Each week they would hand-draw representations of their activities and thoughts as part of a process to use data to become more humane and connected on a deeper level. The end result is Dear Data: an award-winning project to make data artistic, personal, and open to everyone.

(Watch starting at 6:45)

In Spring 2016, we asked online students in our Tech for Monitoring and Evaluation Online Diploma Program to try their hand at a similar month-long project and send postcards to one another. As we have 110 students in 35 countries, many of whom had only just met in the preceding weeks, this provided an excellent opportunity to recreate some of what made Giorgia and Stefanie’s project so special. And it gives me great pleasure to share some examples of their work.

For one project, two of our students (Madison and Ann, who both work with Health Policy Plus), sent one another postcards every week on the following four topics:

Daily activities
Social media
Food
Emotions

These postcards are presented without commentary below, so that you can see the postcards as they did.

When asked for their reflections as part of the exercise, both Madison and Ann claimed that the process made them mindful of issues and habits that they had previously ignored, and that they were able to discern larger patterns when looking at their week as a whole. Though neither were professional information designers, their work improved over multiple iterations, as well as became a fun, inclusive process.

“Our different styles quickly became apparent and added to the reflective learning. Apparently Madison is calm and cool, and Ann is, well, a bit excitable,” said Madison.

“The involvement of friends and family was an unplanned bonus. Visualization and art attracts attention…they got drawn in (especially Ann’s 10 year-old son Harry) and got a kick out of seeing what arrived in the mail,” said Ann.

And both agreed: “Overall it was a fun challenge—we highly recommend it. Many thanks and acknowledgement to Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec, the Dear Data creators”

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can better collect, visualize, and make decisions based on data, check out our 16-week Tech for Monitoring and Evaluation Online Diploma Program and enroll today. First course in the track starts September 12th.

Week 1: Days in My Work Week

Week 2: Social Media

Week 3: Food