TechGirls Sara and Sarra with Samita and TechChange souveniers
Last Friday, TechGirls returned to the TechChange headquarters. For the last few years, TechChange has had the privilege of hosting TechGirls at our headquarters for their Job Shadow Day.
TechGirls is a selective exchange program that encourages and supports the desire of Middle Eastern and North African teenage girls to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). During the 3 week long exchange program, the girls (ranging from ages 15 – 17) travel around the U.S. getting a taste of the various careers one can have in STEM. One of the ways they experience a STEM career in the U.S. is by spending a day at a tech company during Job Shadow Day.
This year, Sara Chikhi from Algeria, and Sarra Bouchkati from Tunisia arrived at TechChange to learn how a day looks like at an edtech social enterprise. Sara and Sarra aspire to have a career in astrophysics and aerospace respectively.
After an introduction to TechChange, we dove right in to give the TechGirls hands-on experience with each of our team. The girls were very curious about TechChange’s work and were very excited to learn more.
Sara tries her hand on creating an asset and animating it.
Check out what the gif they animated!
Then the TechGirls transitioned on to hear what our Tech Fellows were working on this summer.
NIthya, You Jin, and Ellie shared the various projects they were working on with the TechGirls.
The TechChange experience is incomplete without a team lunch at our nearby Ethiopian restaurant, so we all went to get some Ethiopian food for lunch!
After lunch, Delanie and Emily showed the TechGirls the various TechChange projects from the past and showed them how they create a course on articulate. The girls then created a short course about themselves! Check it out!
To sum up her experience, Sarra from Tunisia said:
“Be confident , always be eager to learn and search, and team work: these are one of the most valuable lessons that I have learned today at TechChange aside to learning about animation process, graphic design, and meeting with the tech, marketing and content teams. The collaboration between the teams portrays the company’s philosophy of learning from one another and giving each employee the chance to shine and sharpen their skills.”
Always a pleasure to have you here TechGirls, thanks for joining us!
By Michael Baldassaro, Innovation Director at Democracy International
On Sunday October 26, 2014, more than three million Tunisian voters cast ballots in parliamentary elections, marking an historic milestone in the country’s remarkable transition from authoritarian rule to democracy. To support the election process, international and Tunisian civil society organizations deployed thousands of observers on Election Day.
One of the Tunisian observation groups, I Watch, recruited, trained, and deployed hundreds of observers nationwide on Election Day. While recruiting, training and deploying observers is a necessary – and human and financial resource intensive – practice in an election observation exercise, I Watch decided to take a bit of a different approach. In their own words:
“Election observation has become a costly, top-down and exclusive exercise that largely ignores citizen input and participation for legitimising the process. I Watch aims to counter this through an inclusive and technologically innovative approach which could revolutionise election observation worldwide.”
I Watch promotion for e-observation
With support from Democracy International and Ona, I Watch conducted a “hybrid pilot [that] combines domestic observation with crowdsourcing tools to provide a new way of engaging citizens in the electoral process.” As a youth-led organization with a mission to increase citizen participation in public life, I Watch set out to provide all Tunisian citizens interested in safeguarding their own elections with the opportunity and the skills to do so.
Six weeks prior to Election Day, I Watch held a press conference to launch its e-observation platform where citizens could create profiles and register to be observers. Within a week of the launch, more than 600 citizens signed up to be eligible as I Watch observers. By Election Day, 1,318 citizens from all 24 Tunisian governorates registered through the E-Observation platform, of which 1,215 were ultimately accredited as I Watch observers.
Unlike a typical election observation project, in which observers are trained face-to-face through a national day of training or series of training workshops throughout the country, I Watch produced a series of videos to educate citizen observers on the goals of election observation, the roles and responsibilities of an election observer, the opening, voting, closing and counting processes on Election Day, and instructions for transmitting observer findings.
E-Observation Training Video: What is Election Observation?
Applying an e-learning model greatly reduced the amount of human and financial resources typically associated with training observers: depending upon the size of an election observation mission, or the size of the country in which it takes place, costs for training observers can be prohibitively expensive – sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. It also enabled observers to learn at their convenience while preserving a measure of quality control that can be lost when a training-of-trainers or step-down training approach is used.
After observers watched all the videos, they were required to take a quiz to test their
aptitude and ensure that they had understood all the necessary steps to be effective observers. If an observer passed the quiz, s/he was then accredited as an I Watch observer. If an observer didn’t failed the quiz, s/he could re-watch the videos and take
the quiz again.
To collect and analyze observer findings, I Watch used two completely free and open-source information and communications technology (ICT) applications: Ona and SMSsync. Observers submitted their findings directly from polling stations via SMS to a customized I Watch Ona platform. I Watch established a “central data center” to analyze findings collected in real-time and proactively contact observers to collect additional information
as necessary.
Democracy International used a similar data collection toolkit called Formhub to collect and analyze data during its January 2014 election observation mission in Egypt. Through the application of key elements of election observation methodology, crowdsourcing techniques, and the use of free and open source ICTs, I Watch was able to increase citizen participation, reduce costs, and make a positive contribution to the electoral process. Given its success during the parliamentary elections, I Watch is planning to move forward with an even better exercise for the presidential elections due to take place in November 2014.
About Michael Baldassaro
Michael Baldassaro is the Innovation Director at Democracy International. Mr. Baldassaro has a decade of experience designing, managing, and implementing democracy and governance projects in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. He previously served as DI’s Tunis-based Project Director for the Middle East and North Africa, where he designed projects that use open data, new media, smartphone applications, and crowdsourcing techniques to improve the quality of elections. Before joining DI in 2012, Mr. Baldassaro worked with the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Carter Center (TCC) to assist civil society groups in applying statistical principles to election observation using state-of-the-art information and communications technologies, such as mobile data collection technologies, data visualization tools, and social media platforms. Mr. Baldassaro holds an M.A. in International Conflict Analysis from the University of Kent at Canterbury and the Brussels School of International Studies. He is proficient in conversational French.
Tech entrepreneurs of the world unite! Last Friday, TechChange was proud to present on a short panel for The Tunisia Community College Scholarship Program (TCCSP) at the 4-H Youth Conference Center in Chevy Chase, MD. The Thomas Jefferson Scholarship Program, TCCSP “builds the workforce capacity of a diverse group of Tunisian students in technical fields through US-based training and practical experience in their professional fields through academic study, community engagement activities, and internships.”
TechChange has participated in similar student programs with TechGirls for #JobShadow day and IREX’s Global UGRAD-Pakistan program, but we found this topic particularly urgent given the continuing youth unemployment crisis in Tunisia. However, while the specific panel topic was “Journeys to Global Citizenship and Professional Success,” but the best part of the event was listening to the students pitch their ideas and professional goals during a poster session on “My Professional Self-Portrait.”
While walking around and chatting with the students, three lessons stood out:
1) Combine tech, design, and entrepreneurship
There was one moment while walking around where I saw three “Professional Self-Portraits” next to each other. The first was for graphic design, the second for network engineers, and the third was for starting a small business for IT solutions.
2) Pitch your ideas, but listen more
Turns out the idea of starting a business wasn’t unique! During the panel, I asked the audience to raise their hand if they intended to start a business someday. About half of the hands went up. But more impressive than those starting a business were those who took time in the event to connect.
3) Networking is key
A funny thing happened when I started talking to the three students mentioned earlier — they started to listen and talk to one another. Given that successful startups often require two or three founders with synergistic–not overlapping–skill sets, this gives me hope that the relationships will continue after the students leave DC.
If some of these lessons seem familiar, well, they’re pretty much spot-on for what the industry professionals came up during #EdTech for the last Tech@State. Thanks again to IREX for hosting us last week — we’re proud to take part and excited to see where this program goes next!
Photo credit: Images taken and provided by IREX.
On September 17, 2011, a handful of people gathered in Liberty Square in Manhattan’s Financial District and sparked a movement that brought wide scale attention to income inequality and the growing gap between rich and poor.
Rewind to December 18, 2010. A man fed up with the ill-treatment in Tunisia, tragically immolated himself to protest the government, unleashing a wave of protests that has changed the political shape of an entire region. Both Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring leveraged the power of social media to exchange ideas, mobilize support, and spark a movement.
But, okay, we’re not all going to be able to spark a movement as big as those. But that doesn’t mean we can’t use social media to make an impact. In fact, I’d argue that going deeper to reach the right audience is more important than trying to go broader.
Take Molly Katchpole. She was 22, working two jobs, and struggling to make ends meet. When Bank of America announced a new $5/month banking fee, she thought it was unfair and decided to do something about it. She used Change.org to start a petition, shared the effort with her friends, and got 300,000 petition signatures, which pressured Bank of America to scrap plans to institute the fee.
Or take Sal Khan. When his young cousin was struggling with algebra, he created a few YouTube videos to help her with her studies. Soon, strangers stumbled onto the video and began requesting more. Sal realized he was onto something and began creating new videos on a variety of topics. Now, Khan Academy features more than 4,200 free lessons, has millions of students, and is changing the way come schools are thinking about education.
So, the point I’m trying to make is, social media has fundamentally changed the way that governments, nonprofits, companies, universities, and individuals interact with each other and with their communities.
But with so many platforms, channels, networks, and tactics to consider, successfully leveraging these channels and integrating them into our work can be a huge challenge.
That’s what Social Media for Social Change is all about. Using real world examples shared by a experts who manage social media at nonprofits, universities, government agencies, and NGO’s, participants will gain insights into what makes social work, how to build a community around an issue, and how to create change.
It’ll be a hands-on, exciting course with input from experts in the field and practical demonstrations and exercises to showcase the potential of social media. I hope you can join us. And, of course, don’t forget to spread the word about the class using #TC110.
