During humanitarian and disaster response, taking care with people while in the midst of chaos is the name of the game. Core challenges to delivering goods and services are coordination and communication. Instead of market-created scarcity, people have to decide how to send what limited materials have been delivered on a narrow runway out over damaged roads and with limited gas. It’s also about knowing where those limited goods should be going. Many might theorize about how to get what is called “situational awareness” (knowing who needs what and where in a chaotic situation) in order to deliver resources accurately, but being in the chaos is different. Because (thankfully) only a few of us have experienced that chaos and need ourselves, it can be difficult to build appropriate tools and workflows for response. But if we’re going to work on just that while at the Humanitarian Technology Festival, we need to be sure we’re grounded in at least a proximity of reality. A big chunk of our first day will be comprised of playful workshops.
Who needs what, where… and getting it to them
First, let’s talk about coordination. Affected populations and responders have to deal with scarcity. Rather than having the option of picking up what someone needs from a store or website, we must instead find those materials on site from people we already know (or are willing to get to know). It’s fun to think about this like a recipe: finding individual components and interacting with others to combine those components into what you all need to survive. Maybe one person has a generator, and another person has gallons of water, and a third has a backyard farm. People in crisis don’t all actually go rogue (sorry, Mad Max), but tend to join together to help one another out, those in our example would make soup together. Pre-existing networks of trust make this easier, but issues of scarcity and access still arise which require people-interfacing and problem-solving skills. It’s hard to know what these circumstances are like until you’re in them. Or until you pretend you’re in them.
The SciFi Action & Apocalypse Preparedness Queer Club has devised a live-action role playing game for just that – problem solving through the self-imposed limitations of games. They ran one of these games one day in NYC this past year, and we’re thrilled to be working with them on this project and to have access to their gaming framework to help HumTechFest attendees have a safe but proximal experience to a response situation.
Hello? Is anyone there?
Secondly, let’s talk about connectivity. When we are connected, we can communicate about what we need and what we have, and we can coordinate with each other about matching those haves and needs. When the communications infrastructure (the internet and/or cell phone data) we’ve come to rely on so heavily goes down (or was never there to begin with, as in some austere areas), issues of timing (sometimes called “gaps”) emerge—a request for food in one region might be addressed through other means by the time the message reaches its target audience, or perhaps diapers become even more necessary than soup as the soup delivery starts on its path to the point of stated need. If communication infrastructure is up, the delivery person can be called to come back or to reroute to a place that needs their payload more.
If the centralized data pipes go down in these times, what are ways folk work around them?
Some excellent initiatives exist based on addressing the challenge of connectivity without an internet backbone, like Commotion Wireless and Project Byzantium, as well as many proprietary services. But these often rely on either long-term embeddedness with a community (like how the community Commotion Network in Redhook mattered during Superstorm Sandy response [PDF]) or rapid (read: expensive) setup through official channels which is also often proprietary and only for state-sanctioned response groups. We have ongoing political struggles with corporations like Comcast about the ability to set up community mesh networks and local internet service providers, and it’s worth continuing to build better tech and to push on that issue from many angles. (Those include our work on right to access as with our work with the Media Democracy Fund, as a political issue as with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or as an issue of public health and safety in disaster times). However, we arguably have everything we already need right in our pockets. Wind Farm is incredibly useful for this context. Instead of a network being static (you’re not prone to moving your internet modem around the office), it assumes people have tiny storage and sufficient connectivity options in their pockets via their phones, and will be near each other as well as moving between synchronizing points. Based on this, we should be able to propagate communication and therefore coordinate with each other even when the backbone is down. Hirdonelle’s Listening Centers with Bluetooth file transfer is an example of what these networks might look like in practice. And when it comes to updating and using maps, OpenStreetMap’s new Portable OSM might come in handy.
Join us
We’ll be stitching all this together to create a safe but proximal way for HumTechFest participants to base conversations in a shared experience. We will be doing a workshop at HumTechFest to playfully discover how we would communicate and coordinate while facing scarcity and an internet blackout of sorts.
The Humanitarian Technology Festival session list will be co-developed with participants, facilitators, and partners in the time leading up and during the Festival.
The agenda will be designed and facilitated using Aspiration’s unique participatory model, in an environment where powerpoint slides are discouraged and dialog and collaboration drive the learning.
Sessions likely to be on the agenda include…
Data Flows: These interactive sessions will explore existing data flows and gaps in response as it is now:
What data is useful?
Is responsible data in disaster and humanitarian response different from any other circumstance?
Open data standards
Data lifecycles across the disaster cycle
Overwhelming data
Cross-Sector Collaboration: There are many local groups not related to response which already know a region, its people, and its needs — how do they communicate with response-specific organizations?:
Privacy, security and data: These sessions will explore the risks and responsibilities incurred when using technology in disaster and humanitarian response, along with ways to maximize control of information and technology destiny:
When–and When Not–to Trust “The Cloud” with Your Data
Managing Your Universe of Organizational Data
Securing Your Online Accounts
Managing Constituent Data: The Dream vs. The Reality
Social Justice in Response: while the primary focus of the event will be tech and tech strategy, we’ll also take time to learn about and reflect on how we can continue and amplify our social and environmental justice purposes, even while things are urgent
Listening to frontline populations in priority setting
Using response as a way to advocate for other ongoing efforts
Participant-Led Sessions: More than half of the agenda will be built by participants before and during the event, covering topics, tools, themes and issues proposed by those present.
Learning by Making: Hands-on workshops for sharing essential technology skills, with sessions including:
Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Tasker, with participants learning the interface for contributing to maps around humanitarian issues
Mapping the Digital Response Ecosystem, to create a shared view of data and people flows
More, more more! Tell us what other hands-on tech skills you would like to learn, and we’ll try to find facilitators to get you there.
Tell us what should be on the agenda and how we can make this event more relevant and valuable for you!
Global Voices is “a border-less, largely volunteer community of more than 1400 writers, analysts, online media experts and translators.” They’ve been around since 2005, weaving together locally-produced stories from all over the globe. They also have a translation community called Lingua, fight against censorship and for freedom through Advox, and their Rising Voices section works to empower civic journalists with microgrants, training and network-building. They deliver a huge amount of news in a startling number of languages, and they do so with humor and humility. Because they’re invested in the everyday experience of people, the community is also wide enough that when major news (like the beginnings of the protests in Egypt, Syria, and Turkey) breaks, a community of trust and support is already established around local reporters. This post initially appeared on the GVeX site on March 2nd.
Global Voices Exchange
One of the projects recently launched by Rising Voices is Global Voices Exchange (GVeX). It aims to develop, document, and disseminate methodologies for digital advocacy campaigns in the Global South. In its inaugural phase, GVeX brought together women leaders working in digital advocacy and activism from the Global South to share, document, and refine their practices into a shared methodology—and to explore points of difference that might require a more country- or context-specific approach. The several-month-long project was accented by a workshop held in Marseille, France from February 15th to 20th, and I had the honor of facilitating.
Our event goals were to strengthen the network of advocates in the Global South, to scope and design preliminary content and structure for a strategic campaigning and advocacy guide for leaders moving into online advocacy in the Global South, and to form an action plan to test and review the guide after the workshop. The participants represented eleven countries each with a unique political and economic climate, specific concerns around equality, and a rich history. Each of them has an active hand in some form of training and advocacy within their own countries, either locally or remotely.
A (nonuniversal) guide
Every attendee had at least some experience with many of the amazing guides and manuals out there for building campaigns, for security, and for digital tools. Each of them was able to give at least one example of ways in these—supposedly universal—guides had either not fit their situation or offered information and advice that could put them at genuine risk. Would it be possible, then, to create a simple frame or scaffolding that someone in the Global South could use as a basis for exploring their own circumstances and designing a campaign tailored to their specific needs? The many guides that already exist provide a solid set of modules from which we could select. We explored this (and many other) questions while together.
Global Voices is ideally positioned for projects such as this—while much of design thinking, protocols and standards, and other aspects of technology aim towards one agreed-upon way of interacting, Global Voices takes the alternative view that sometimes the one thing that unites us is that we are all speaking our own unique and specific truths. And this isn’t simply a nice theoretical framing—it’s practice the community has lived for over eleven years, and counting.
Unifying a plurality of voices
Even though Global Voices successfully walks this talk, devising a guide based on that framing is a new and somewhat daunting task. Thankfully, with twelve women leaders and members of the Global Voices network putting our heads together over five days, the beginning skeleton of the guide now exists, as well as pockets of detail and a huge repository of documented knowledge waiting to be deployed wherever it’s needed. We learned, for example, about the ease and relative accountability of fundraising in Pakistan versus the illegality of obtaining resources for nonprofits and civil society in Venezuela. We now understand why people decide to remain anonymous in LGBTQI campaigns in Zimbabwe and walk together in Cambodia. And from our Palestinian participant I learned how to draw a tank, something I’d thankfully not yet needed to know.
Where we are at
We still have a lot of work to do, but you can look forward to seeing a draft of the guide at some point in the future. It includes things like measuring and communicating value. Many activists and advocates have difficulty expressing exactly what changes will happen in the world if they “win.” This section helps users explore their own hopes, what is culturally relevant, and what is possible to measure in order to demonstrate the effects of their campaigns and actions. Risk analysis (and response)—those operating in the Global South face a very, very different set of risks from people in other parts of the world, be it repressive regimes, violence against women, or a lack of connectivity. To design and implement culturally relevant campaigns we need to embrace these specificities. We also developed a module around building trust in worn-out communities. As a result of the same issues mentioned in risk analysis, trust in many of these communities is worn down. People working in these environments have experienced the actions of infiltrators, complete loss of institutional legitimacy through changes in political leadership or legal structures, and violent shutdowns of campaigns and organizations. To rebuild trust under those circumstances demands integrity and persistence—and the exercise we did on this topic produced some of the most charming drawings I’ve seen in a while, from our own Marianne Diaz.
Whether you’re from the Global South or not, tell us in the comments what would you want to see from such a guide. We have a huge amount of experience and intelligence in this beginning set of contributors, but as future users of such a guide, we want to be able to factor in your needs and ideas.
Thanks to the participants and organizers
Major thanks to the Global Voices crew of Eddie, Georgia, and Ivan for conceiving, driving, and most of all trusting this project. Mad props to Abir, to whom I already wrote a bit of a love note over on my blog, and who opened up her city and her heart for us to feel safe and stimulated during our time. Thank you to Tamara for her directness, to Arzu and Tanya for their facilitation, to Marianne and Sarita for being open and honest, to 88.8 for their venue and recording skills. Thanks to Sopheap and Zarah for jumping in with such enthusiasm and joy, to Nighat and Natasha for your leadership, to Mashiat for your hugs and insights, to Indira for your warmth, and to Dalia for always keeping things real and approachable. Thanks to Eric, Paul, and Liat for all your adaptiveness and translation skills, and to Gillo for his deep understandings of security teaching methods. I’m looking forward to seeing what we create together.
At Cascadia.JS in 2014, I picked up a tshirt from the freebie pile. It’s pink. I know — I was also shocked about this, but the quote on the front was so good I had to go for it. “We don’t know what we’re doing either.” On the back is a subtle “&yet” which I learned was an open source consulting company (ish). Neat! — humility, a culture that accepts shirts which are both pink and comfortable, and a nuanced logo. I especially love wearing this shirt in academic and tech-centric situations.
A few months ago, Case asked my consent to be put in touch with someone on the &yet team — they had a conference coming up, and had suggested I speak. Our phone conversation was brief, but it sounded both fun and values-based, so I said yes (a rarer and rarer thing for me these days), and so I spent Wed/Thurs/Fri of last week in Richland, Washington. If interested, here are my drawings of others’ talks, my slide deck, and the paper I referenced.
It is now easily one of my favorite large social experiences. Music, art, and story were woven throughout the conference, all evoking self-reflection on our role in the path the world takes. It was already populated by some of my favorite people in this space (the aforementioned case, plus ben, jden, kawandeep, etc), and the textcapade starting weeks in advance, recieving letters from another character in the story by mail, all playing through these struggles, had me jazzed up long before the event.
The talks were a beautiful mix of art demonstrations, hopeful distribution structures, empathy arcs, and design philosophies. Inclusion was constantly present, and never for its own sake, but rather from a deep understanding that these are the voices that make up the world. The care &yet took of attendees (and encouraged us to take for each other) opened space for some rather heart-wrenching moments. Please, check out the talks when they go up.
While all of this is amazing, I want to talk about the trust and responsibility that &yet placed in the attendees. The storyline was a surprisingly nuanced version of one of my own ongoing internal battles — burn it all down, or patch to save what we can. (The mixed-mode system work is my attempt at making these transitions graceful, by the by). At no point was a clear value judgement imposed upon the story, or implied to the players. The textcapade transitioned into a sort of backchannel for actors in the parts of those sending the messages at points during the conference, and this archetypical internal battle continued to be played out there as well as by stage actors between talks. Continue reading →
NECSI’s action-based 4th Wednesday Salon focused on First Day. This is an event which provides the resources, framing, and impetus to take personal responsibility for community health. It is not a fix-all, but is it an important, missing piece in the US health care debate, and a fulcrum for connected shifts to a healthier society.
On Wednesday, March 11th, we will hear talks from Deb Roy from the MIT Media Lab, Devin Belkind from OccupySandy, and Sam Klein from Wikimedia on Distributed Organizations. Register here.
First Day is about taking personal responsibility for your own wellbeing at personal and global level. Inspired from the idea of regeneration and new year resolutions, First Day wants to create a community level engagement at a personal level and community level.
Deck created by Catalina Butnaru
We assumed those attending would be both in a position to, and have a desire to, act. The Wednesday before had provided space for folk to ramp up to this state, including review of readings about a similar Wal-Mart initative. We were additionally inspired by Boston’s own First Night and City Awake.
After very short reminders of what we were there to accomplish for the day, each person introduced themselves and what they were interested in specific to First Day. From these, we pulled out a few break-out sessions tasked with creating an actionable list or guidelines for organizers to work with. The overarching points we ended with were an appreciation of the need of safe space for people to ask questions which might otherwise be taboo (especially around health), comfort in complex problems having interventions (especially with a light hearted attitude!), an appreciation for existing cultural events (Days of the Dead as well as Chinese, Tibetian, and Indian celebrations of new cycles and health), and holistic approaches to mental and physical health.
Slightly curated notes follow:
Refining the Message
learn + care + act: as leitmotif for everyone there. First Day for partners, participants, sponsors: to learn, care, and act
about yourself, your family, about your network or patients, about particular communities or conditions
make this informal and welcoming. not a sale, no marketing. focused on topics, not on selling a solution
Existing networks focused on outreach and some of the above:
health service initiatives (startups, tools)
charities, publicity campaigns (often by condition)
Topics for the Fair: areas of most uncertainty, people need reassurance
old age : alzheimer’s, self care, company
insurance: finding doctors
getting regular care: what is available; insurers: in position to ensure people go to the doctor
intervention: what is possible, appropriate [mental health, &c]
maternity: starting a family, childbirth,
chronic pain: exercise, rehabilitation
Stakeholders, defining motivation for each community
Business
Academic
Public
Something the community wants to give, or to solve. A reason to meet together, around what subject. Totally open, or guided topic. If you have a different parts of the community get together and decide on the community level about commitments.
A topic that you care about is more attractive than a generic health fair; which is more attractive than a topic you don’t care about. A celebration is more attractive than an informational event.
So — Invite people to ‘come find your health problem’ at a gathering? Have something like this founded in games and science and discovery?
We focused on ‘Health’ rather than personal resolutions and commitments (compare WalMart’s annual event). What if this broadened to personal improvement?
How to make the event actionable in the moment
Optimize for games and Aha! moments. Fun, Groups, Feedback. How we provide value to the community: value as an outcome, fun as a driver.
Creating a network — Learn and Connect. Make friends.
example of phones off in class — bigger reward when the group acts in a certain way (Minority Problem).
community or neighborhood paired to itself. Not just an aggregation of individuals, but something you participate in together. Collective.
Make it Fun
Gamifying the event + identification with a group + finding incentives to do more given group identification It’s empowering to make it feel comforting, so we can break the barriers of shame, taboo, to actually address serious problems in a comforting way FUN is the reason to bring them together, and the outcome is learning, value and community building
Working through one Topic
This group discussed if we’d like to focus down on one topic. Topics that impact people’s lives, but action can be taken from prevention to treatment at community level based on how far along a condition is. Possibilities included chronic inflammation, lack of sleep, water, allergies/intolerance, addiction.
Implementation
Distributed component in addition to central fair?
Checklists for different levels of society
for cities: checklist for things to do on First Day: walk in clinics, talk about collective obligations, &c
for community leaders: checklist for your flock, events and outreach
for individuals: checklist for self, talk to your close family (and friends)
for organizations: send people to learn, reflect on what you can improve
for sponsors: ways to reflect, amplify this community process (compare WalMart day of health & resolution)
Things to worry about
How to vet organizational participants. Choosing a date that makes sense. First day makes sense;
Deck created by Catalina Butnaru
also considered existing health related holiday things that we might plug into. Boston: marathon! Chinese / Tibetan New Year. (Tie in with each community)
Avoiding duplication, can we build, augment, etc? Or is redundancy ok? Preventing across co-option. Trademark transmission
Closing Comments
Thanks to everyone who came out and made the event amazing. We look forward to building First Day with you!
We will explore themes of reduced access that have developed out of tensions in property-holding, leases, and contracts; forms of control exerted or facilitated by the state, by law, and by other institutions; and exclusions of class, race, and gender. We believe that history has lessons to offer about how change is introduced to society. In taking this long perspective, the conference invites proposals that look backwards in order to look forwards. Academics will have an opportunity to be inspired by the practical questions of activists acting in the present, as activists talk about their work, their present projects, questions, and concerns. Activists, in turn, will have the opportunity to articulate large structural conceptions such as capitalism, empire, or debt in relation to access to land and water.
I’m here because the organizer, Jo Guldi, has been a dear friend and on-again off-again roommate of mine since my move to Cambridge in 2013. Through her, I have begun to see the underlying fabric of many social justice causes of who has access to what, and how important a long-term view is.
Opening Remarks
The opening did a beautiful job of framing the conference overlap of activists and academics, with author John M Barry speaking about seeing himself as an academic who speaks the truth, and is therefore seen as an activist/environmentalist. As the beginning of what would be ongoing themes of access to information and accountability, he also pointed out that while both legislation and media are pointing at the levees in Louisana being the culprits of land loss, locals know it’s because of the oil industry dredging canals in order to place equipment. The permits for dredging explicitly indicate that backfill must happen within 90 days of the dredging, and yet years later it still hasn’t happened. He states that the oil industry should be paying for fixing the part of the damage which they have caused — no more, and no less.
The Technology and Infrastructure panel focused on the interlinking and continuum between these, with a hopeful view of new opportunities, and a historical grounding in past efforts. We heard from:
Dorn Cox, of FarmHack, on open-source engineering and the economic support of small holders
Mark Healey, University of Connecticut, on dams, territory, and utopian schemes for water governance in Argentina
Don Blair, of Public Lab, on the new cheap age of water quality monitoring, solar, and everything else
Timothy Gorman, Cornell University, on the politics of water management infrastructure and salinity control in the Mekong River Delta
David Kinkela, State University of New York, on the history of plastic waste
I like that this conversation didn’t look for One Silver Bullet to Rule Them All, but rather looked at the systemic issues of externalizing costs and accountability. Represented were both extremes of citizen science in Louisiana holding governments and corporations accountable (or at least proving damage, even if no further steps were taken), as well as communities in Vietnam tearing down government-sanctioned levees so they could continue raising salt water shrimp for higher income than they might get from farming rice. We asked who gets to ask the questions, and to what purpose (a story, a court case, a profit, etc). Another theme was that of externalization of cost, with recycling becoming the responsibility of the consumer, rather than industry needing to produce degradable items. All returned to the topic of the conference – a long term perspective, and who both pays and benefits from which choices.
During our breakout session, we talked about failure as both not talked about enough, being the only framing for continued financing of municipalities, and how great the idea of “releases” in software is as a way to establish the mindset of iteration. We also discussed how closed off most data is, and how imperitive it is to share in order to establish a baseline and scientific rigor.
Utopian Solutions
This panel focused on what utopian ideals have to do with how we approach land and water access issues. We heard from:
Christopher England, Georgetown University, on Henry George and why the rent is so damn high.
Paul Graham Raven, University of Sheffield, UK, on how meta systemic infrastructure reifies the post-Enlightenment dichotomy between society and nature, and the potential for more sustainable infrastructures.
Thomas Summerhill, Michigan State University, on the historical successes and failures of democratic rural movements in New York and what they can tell us about the age of fracking.
Tess Brown-Lavoie, of Young Farmer Network and Sidewalk Ends Farms, on the future of farming.
Jim Hafner of Land for Good on the role of land tenure, reform and forms of “management” as environmental/land enclosure.
This conversation focused on the disconnect between those who work the land, and those who have equity in the land. Tess focuses on working the land (and organizing others who do the same), Jim on how to ensure farmers have ongoing access to their land, Thomas on historical manifestations of these tensions, Christopher on why land use is so tied to rent levels, and Paul on the overall idea of utopia. We walked away understanding that democracy isn’t enough to combat corporatism, and that we need to organize ACROSS borders in order to combat (inter)national corporations/capitalism
So far as the ideals of utopias, rather than blueprints to “just deliver on,” can we try out different “solutions” in a way which still celebrates free will? Utopia is a horizon, but we should expect (or even wish) to reach.
Closing
Laura Gottesdiener on Water, Housing, and Land: The Battle for American Cities
A complex systems science perspective on the education system can help guide improvement efforts. The New England Complex Systems Institute is conducting discussions to nucleate innovative efforts in action based upon this perspective. One example is the education system.
The education system performs a highly complex task. Many individuals are educated but their capabilities and other qualities are diverse and they will eventually do many different things in society. Despite this diversity, the current way of coping with the large number of students has been to evaluate success of the individual and the system through standardized testing. Many educators and parents are not happy with this approach. Standardized testing can be considered to be like asking different kinds of animals to compete in the same task, like climbing a tree. The commonly used alternative is portfolio assessment that does not give objective or comparative indications of capabilities or of the effectiveness of teaching. The biological analogy to animals, however, provides a different alternative, niche selection. Niche selection is the idea that each type of animal competes in a different set of tasks, but they do compete. In education this would correspond to having multiple tests that evaluate different types of capabilities, while still enabling competition that provides measures of success and guidance about where an individual can best contribute in society. Cohorts associated with a particular set of skills can move through the system challenged by their interaction with peers. This is one of the important ideas that are motivated by complex systems science others are discussed here.
On May 27th, NECSI welcomed a set of educators to discuss their viewpoints on the educational system: one focused on intrinsic motivation in learning from the perspective of an individual’s role in community (Olin College), one on interaction with difficult challenges in a way which helps the individual see their impact on larger society (Facing History), one on large-scale scaffolding for curriculum propagation (OpenEdX), and one on using the new abilities of technology to support outliers in learning (CMSAS). Each of these groups also distributed different components of their endeavors, and centralized other parts. Facing History centralized through slow training of instructors. Olin centralized through slow training of institutions. Both struggle with how to scale — because of the strong individual touch involved, it’s difficult to instill these approaches beyond the speed of individual instructors. OpenEdX centralizes the knowledge repository structure — anyone can spin up an instance, anyone can put material on it. They don’t do quality control for the hosted material, and struggle with how to reach marginalized populations. CMSAS has a model of small online classes which combine many of the above things. Want to offer up their model for anyone else to use as turn-key solutions for education.
Facing History And Ourselves is a human-centered program operating for 40 years. He tells us that “we teach teachers how to teach.” Facing History creates humanities curriculum for teaching about moral and ethical issues. They help teachers one by one, and treat them as professionals, just as we train doctors.
He asks us what can be systematized or at least tailored. We make complex choices about material, but in a structured model. What are all the factors that shape decisions, not just for education, but also in how we shape our worlds? What about how groups impacted by historical issues choices/made choices? How have those ideas changed over time? How did democracy unfold? How have democracies dissolved into dictatorships? Not just teaching the impact of the small results, but thinking in complicated ways about responsibility, and then look at their own roles in society. Facing History helps students and teachers look at the story, and to see how they can make a more positive impact in their communities. This takes serious intellectual rigor, ethical reflection, emotional engagement. All of these are facilitated by the teacher, who must always be reading the class. A teacher makes about a thousand choices in a classroom a day.
Adam points at the 3 things Facing History provides:
professional development
engaging resources
educator community
Their program is deployed teacher, by teacher, by teacher. One staff member becomes their lifetime coach. That’s a lot of work. But Facing History supports about 90k teachers, who then reach a half million students.
Beliefs:
Teachers are adult learners
Working with, not around, teachers
Adolescents are budding moral philosophers
Universal insights come through studying the particular/Details matter
Part of being a good teacher is customizing curriculum
We have a pedagogical model that works
So, how do we scale this model?
Centralized is what Facing History has been doing
A next step would be being more decentralized — what can we start to give away to other groups to use?
What would it look like to become distributed?
Some questions to consider:
What does technology enable us to do?
How do digital technologies meet the realities that teachers face?
What is the role of a teacher? What needs to happen in the classroom? Build student confidence.
What kinds of education content can be systematized?
How can we support learning goals outside of traditional learning environments? The change we measure is in 46 week incriments. What happens if you don’t have that? Can you support larger learnings?
Q&A
Teacher’s unions, and pushback or no
if it’s mandated by the district, that’s when unions have *sometimes* been an issue. But when it’s teachers coming to it on their own that it’s WAY more time than they would otherwise. The more it becomes systematized, the more you become a piece of a machine.
How much have you seen teachers taking the distributed technologies into their classrooms?
that’s super interesting. maybe a lot, but we don’t know. we had a digital initiative documenting, but couldn’t sustain it financially. What I am seeing is teachers doing professional development for other teachers. Can’t follow it.
Outside the classroom?
Scott O at MIT is talking about games environments. Should games be inside the classroom. Keeping the larger ideas in the curriculum. Play it outside the classroom, which reinforce the values, but aren’t the content. Then you teach the teacher every one inc awhile, tso they can make the connection. Reinforce.
Molly DeBlanc works with OpenEdX, the open curriculum platform started by MIT and Harvard. It hosts courses on the site, and has started offering low-risk credits (you only pay if you pass). There are all sorts of great partnerships listed on their site, and are worth checking out. Molly is focused on the code component behind the platform.
She tells us about the code as a bunch of files on github, which are used to supply courses. This code supports video and audio files, and questions and interactions between students and faculty. While the classes are not in real time, the basics are pulled from real time conversations. EdEx is in use all over the world in very different ways — they don’t know all the courses or organizations.
Many universities are using it — take courses and get it further out there. Some companies and organizations use it internally for their training material. Beyond that, there are some people are *only* taking classes online, who have strange schedules, or who are far from the offering institution. Even in more traditional educational setups, students are doing lectures at home, with classroom time doing more interactions and workshopping together, more problem sets. One class ditched the textbook and just had lectures online, to great ends. Nonprofit in DC using the platform for low income nutrition and financial education. Russian method of teaching mathematics, tailored it to an American audience.
Things to think about
How far can this be pushed? This is mostly universities pushing classes to audiences. What ELSE can we do? What about how teachers interact with each other?
Who needs to be using the Open edX platform? Most of the people using this are white, male, upper class. What about access to resources, what about language, etc?
What tools and features are needed? Not just about folding proteins, also maybe how to connect students doing well in one area connecting with students doing less well.
Policy, outreach, impact
Not just digital accessibility, but access to the resources needed to use it.
Q&A
How do you help nonprofits understand the value of edx?
Talk with a bunch of different groups about what it might look like.
Talking with groups with work with a bunch of nonprofits
Signup versus completion?
Signing up is 2 buttons. 5% from signup to one course. First exam completed to doing more is 30%.
People are starting to make shorter courses. 8 hours a week from Harvard?! 16 weeks from Stanford?! No!
Smaller bites of information is basically you can watch your videos wherever you want.
Completion for self-paced?
All are arguably self-paced, material stays up.
Certificate for completion vs certificate for credit.
Third world use?
platform and courses, yes.
Use of vocational training.
Teacher training but also student training.
Lab simulations for use in rural Ghana.
Care about?
Platform, we’re delighted when we see people using it. There are some companies which say “if you complete this course within this time, you qualify for hiring” which is not “be a student at a fancy school”
Olin has recontextualized what engineering education is done. They have guiding principles, and work with institutions around the world about how they work with their students. The most basic is intrinsic motivations, which is not whether someone is motivated or not as a quality of who they are. People tell Debbie, “your students are motivated and super smart,” but the reality based in research (Why We Do What We Do by Deci and Ryan) is that… We do lots of things we chose to do voluntarily, and many we do because we have to. Someone puts a gun to your head and tells you to do it. But that’s a terrible reason! If you tell people to do something because of the gun, it’s not actually going to stick, nor be fulfilling. There’s a somewhat similar thing called external regulation, which is when you chose to do something because you know it’s the right thing to do (like going to the gym). Intrinsic motivation is a bit different, and it’s when you teach yourself to do something. When you play guitar, you’re deciding when and how to do it. Often a link to community. You can tell you’re getting better at it.
To be intrinsically motivated, you need:
autonomy (setting it yourself)
purpose (often community)
competency development (know when you’re getting better)
Traditional education is REALLY good at scaffolding learning, but NOTHING else. People who are good students are not motivated, they’re motivated BY THIS SYSTEM. So Olin works on creating systems which create those three factors to foster studentsto be intrinsically motivated.
Debbie contrasts this model with MOOCs, which are focused on those who are already well served by the traditional educational system. Those who are instrincly motivated have much better learning outcomes over time. These are individuals who can’t tell you what was on a test, but can tell you about a report they wrote, for which they decided the topic.
Project based learning at Olin is about autonomy and purpose. Then our job as educators is to provide the scaffolding. The student makes a project which makes them the expert. The educator is here to provide scaffolding.
Q&A
What is engineering specific?
very little of this is engineering-based. Adam spoke about it in another format.
How are you finding the continuity ? You had a vision, you’ve reshaped things, new people, etc.
I’ve been there from the beginning. The students are new every year.
Continuity is a virtue and a vice. We thought we’d restart every 5 years. Now we think about how to evolve parts. You don’t do a gut reno every year, you do a wing and then systematically renovate the entire house.
How do you handle evaluation without tests?
We had a huge fight at the beginning about grades. Good arguments for both. Grades as an API for the rest of the world — allows our students to get jobs and go to grad school. So we still use grades, but along different rubrics. Design and education (not about right or wrong)
Even if you have a math exam with right and wrong answers, and you are still making judgment calls about what you value. If a student misplaces a positive or a negative sign in an equation, do you mark the whole thing as wrong (because the final answer is wrong), or do students get partial credit (because the process is sound)?
That said, we’re accredited. We show that people learn and change things in a way the acredation body is interested in. We demonstrate that at an institutional level.
The collective purpose of engineering in society? Individual purpose and collective purpose.
individual purpose is often related to community. So often it’s thinking about what that community is. EdX has learning communities in different spaces. Curriculum is user-oriented design. People not like you. Humanities team.
Want our students to graduate as globally aware citizens.
Students can take classes as-is, top to bottom, OR they can modify that, and demonstrate the mastery in another way. CMASAS students are from all over the world, learning differently, and some travel a lot.
As an example, a surfing student demonstrating physics learning by working on a surf board, otherwise top-down. That student later demonstrated business skills by starting a business around those surf boards.
Whether examining the CMASAS setup by grades, or student feelings, or college acceptance, they’re noticed by 3rd party ranking systems. Now that they’ve done this and are growing, how do they get this model out there more? Start other schools using our turn-key system? Partner? Learning centers? Training? Assist in untraining and retraining of teachers, administrators, parents. Take it to the next level!
Q&A
Socioeconomic makeup of your students?
we’re tuition based, so higher-ish class, but about half the tuition of many places. (5k per year, 7k for unlimited credits)
the model does work in lower income places
want to get it into more public schools
Like the mastery model. How do you work with things that are a softer skill, not performance assessed? (classic model etc, studying a model)
have some explicit instruction in whatever parts they were going to study. talk with teacher about those aspects. What do they want to pay attention to? Reading comprehension, what did the character do versus interpretive. Take the students where they’re at, move them forward from that. The students have a lot of way in what literature they’re looking at.
Not going to fit on a SCANTRON. We’re doing more than that — we ask a lot of our teachers (and we pay them well). It’s scalable, but we have a smaller number of students per teacher to make it work. Want the student to be meta-cognitive.
Panel Discussion
Re-estabilsh trust in education?
“X is broken” — why are you saying that? What is the motivation? We have a factory model now. We think people have to have the same levels of skills, people as widgets, need quality control on our widgets. Education as a for-profit system, we want an ROI. Instead of an investment for its own sake. The other model is a garden model. You have a bunch of plants in your garden, they all grow into different plants. But we’ve decided that public education is a thing we don’t spend money on. We have to decide it’s something that matters to us. Not “do what we tell you.” — students AS WELL AS teachers.
Accountability goes from student to teacher to superintendent. What you’re doing as a good teacher is violating rules. I work at a nonprofit of people who broke the rules.
People not seeking a diploma, they’re seeking a different way. Needs to be possible and meaningful. Why do we need to know this stuff?
Focus on an individual student — what about groups?
At Harvard, of the 50k signed up to a Harvard edX class, the highest rates of completion were around students who were getting together themselves.
Encouraging networks, connecting people into the networks. When we talk about individualized education, we’re serving a learner for their needs… but those needs aren’t an independent thing. How do you let the networks emerge. Those clumps were an emergent property of the system.
Creating new habits. Hard to get people to listen to each other in a room. Hard when you’re in an online discussion space… Institute for the Future does a thoughtful space. But many people post without reading what’s gone before.
Synchronous vs Asynchronous?
Facing History: 50/50
Olin: synchronous. If you know students work better in a group, why wouldn’t you design for that? The community aspect of edX… it’s hard to have community online. Clear that people who have met before work better together. Being geolocated, having a learning community, having a study group has a huge impact.
Do you think that’s face to face or a certain style of interaction?
As a community manager, you have a different accountability to people after you’ve met them. You know “I have met PERSON, I know them, tey are nice.” I feel responsible to them now.
There are functional online communities. SciFi space where hundreds of comments on a post, all thoughtful.
People have met each other online, then met in person. There are caveats, of course.
Multiplicity of ways people interact, so we need to add to that.
Accumen has their own courses, you can take it at your own pace, but has to be with people.
How could you treat ethics without other people? It’s the meeting of different people together which builds tolerance.
Online homeroom for CMASAS, have meetups in different locations. Clubs to meet people from all over the world. Graduation ceremonies for those who can make it, help offered for those who can’t afford it. bonding had definitely happened for these students who had known each other for a long time.
How do you get people to be autonomous?
Autonomy isn’t binary. It’s not an all-or-nothing thing. We scaffold autonomy just like anything else. Start with more, end up with way less. By graduation, they should be self-driven. First year is pass/no credit.
All the schools scored <25% on language. No shared history from which topics to emerge from. The kids demanded to be challenged, wanted ideas to challenge. What do you give up? Challenge the kids, otherwise they’ll spin in their own circles.
Technical communities. People get involved to have power, skill, ability. You point them at things they can handle themselves, and give them the tools to do it. Give them more responsibility over time. So when someone completes a project, you give them something else to look over. Add in more steps for responsibility.
What is the situation, who is the learner, where are they at? All the skills, anything they gain is still a gain. Sugatra Mitra talks about getting out of kids’ ways. We have an intro course to become self-aware and -directed.
No magical bullet. There are certainly ways to approach it, focusing on students and scaffolding etc. But the ways to implement are context-dependent.
Dichotomy of Individual or Societal Benefit
One of the things we have to do from a complex science perspective, fostering individual development becomes synergistic instead of oppositional.
For a long time, it wasn’t possible to include everyone’s voice in planning or decision-making without impossibly large amounts of time. There was no way to listen, at scale. So aggregation and centralization became common, especially in times of urgency, even with the troubles these tend to cause.
But now, with the technologies we have, we can *listen*, in high resolution and in high fidelity. But technology isn’t a silver bullet. We also need the political will and the personal values to make that happen. With Aspiration’s new Digital Humanitarian Response program, we get to support some of the rad people willing and able to make these movements happen. In May, we hosted the Humanitarian Technology Festival at MIT. The Digital Response Wiki provides resources and notes, and here are some top-level highlights from the event:
Disaster and humanitarian issues don’t happen in a vacuum
Groups like Public Lab help lay the groundwork (both socially and technically) for fast-cycle disasters, via their ongoing interaction with communities around environmental justice. This also provides scaffolding for handing off responsibilities after an extreme event. Kathmandu Living Labs, a group committed to mapping the infrastructure of their geography, is an excellent case study in this. When the Nepal earthquake hit, they were able to jump into action quickly due to pre-existing Open Street Map communities, workflows, data infrastructure, and (most importantly) social ties. Kathmandu was then capable of making use of (and maintaining) the updated data after the fact. Simply by being (and being allowed to be) active in affected communities on a day-to-day basis, organizations can support communities in becoming more resilient to disasters.
That said, preparing for extreme events before they happen can help mitigate the severity of impact on people lives. We explored the idea of games to make what might be considered dull more fun. No need to start from scratch (though that can be stimulating as well!). Climate Centre makes such games, and publishes them openly over on their website.
We already have much of what we need
One of our spectrogram statements was, “We already have all of the technology we need.” While we were divided in our responses, we acknowledged that the ability of groups of people to make do with what they have in disaster is astounding. And our preferences apply here technically as well as ethically. Distributed, federated systems both for technology and for communities/governance are more resilient than centralized systems (as well as addressing human rights in general). There are a few of these rad systems being built, NYC Prepared being one of my favorites.
Data and consent are deeply linked
Data use with populations that are vulnerable (based on their history, their current circumstances, or both) is still a big question, but not one we need to face on our own. OpenGov, Missing Persons, and other transparency-related initiatives have figured an awful lot of that out, and we should take note. Additionally, while consent is different in high-stress situations than in long-term advocacy campaigns, it should still be a strong consideration in any plan or intervention.
We looked at the Framework for Consent Policies which came out of a Responsible Data Forum in Budapest, and suggested advocating for a “notify this set of people in case of emergency” embedded into social platforms, similar to Networked Mortality or ICE contacts in some phones. This way, people would be consenting and determining who would be their contacting associates in case of disaster (unlike what Facebook recently did). Consent is a component of accountability, both of which highlight how frontline communities might be the architects of their own rescue.
Accountability is just as important in precarious situations as it is in everyday life, if not more so
Accountability is sorely lacking in humanitarian aid and disaster response. Fantastic organizations exist to track where spending is going, but money is often considered misspent. Frameworks exist for deploying aid in ways which alleviate, rather than exacerbate, conflict and tensions. However, these frameworks and mechanisms are still sometimes insufficient, as even well intended groups remain in regions for decades while populations become reliant on them, rather than becoming self sufficient.
Rather than come up with an external group to hold response groups accountable, we figured the frontline community could state whether or not initiatives are working, and those reports could be sent directly to the response organizations, their donors, and relevant constituents. This factors in strongly to the Dialling Up Resilience initiative grant of which Aspiration is a part (Yes, it’s spelled with 2 L’s. They’re Brits). More on that soon.
You can find more thorough notes from Humanitarian Technology Festival on (you guessed it) our wiki. Reach out to us if you have any questions about this ongoing work. Contact us here: humtechfest@aspirationtech.org / @willlowbl00
Weaponized Social is an emerging program that seeks to support a healthier online ecosystem. Since our last gathering in New York, we’ve been to Nairobi on May 2nd, hosted WeapSoc SF in our office home in San Francisco, and facilitated a highly relevant event, the International Workshop on Misogyny and the Internet in MY home base of Cambridge, MA. We’ve continued to build out the Weaponized Social Wiki with notes from conversations, projects, and possibilities.
In Nairobi at AkiraChix, we further refined the checklist for making safe space and started two projects: FaceOff and Trolling the Trolls. FaceOff provides space for highly visible people to interact in a nuanced way, posting back to short-form spaces, so as to ask their constituents to be better balanced. This is a response to the very real occurrences of politicians calling their online followers to take action (sometimes violent) in offline space. Trolling the Trolls seeks to use language patterns from sock puppet accounts to find those accounts sooner, and respond to them before they have a negative impact on the speech of marginalized individuals online. Yvonne, who suggested this, also introduced me to ZeroTrollerance which was then represented by Peng! Collective.
San Francisco’s attendees on May 16th and 17th at the SF Nonprofit Tech Center were highly influenced by the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, which explores the two systems we have for thinking: one which is based on intuition (and assumption) and on which we most often depend, and one which is based in logic and analysis which comes with a cost to use.
Often, when in difficult exchanges online, we default into the intuitive to protect ourselves. This prevents us from reaching any different understanding of an encounter than what we came to it with. To cope with this, we devised the Introspection Bot, to help you break from whatever mental rut you’re in and consider the wider picture. We also developed the idea of redirecting dog piles of outrage into actual long-term efforts to address systemic problems. We performed some heavy lifting around dissecting what aspects of sociality go into platforms, including privacy control and friend count, which we offered to the Center for Civic Media’s Uncomfortable Networks.
One major difference in perspective between these two events was that freedom of expression is so enthusiastically valued in both the American and internet freedom circles I run in, but in Kenya, just as in other places, concern over hate speech inciting violence is very real. This tension is difficult to navigate both in everyday life and in the microcosm of a session. This is one reason why I was so thrilled when Aspiration was asked to facilitate the Berkman Center’s International Workshop on Internet and Society (IWoMI). Here, there was an international crowd committed to understanding and preventing misogyny (a bit more specific than Weaponized Social events, but focus can be a good thing!) online and off.
We made explicit space for, though still struggled to ingrain, non-Western perspectives in our conversations, including with one conversation about reporting abuse on platforms. A number of memorable things took place:
I continue to be honored and thrilled at the vast amount of brain power and heart the powerhouses of human beings involved in this movement are extending to solve these problems. To have such an international, intergenerational, and human-rights-supportive group set on making the internet a healthy place gives me hope we might even make it happen.
I came on with Aspiration back in January as the Community Leadership Strategist, to merge the work I’ve been doing in the humanitarian and disaster response space with Aspiration’s practices and team. It’s been a *blast* so far, and continues to be.
Most of the work I’ve done in the last 5 years has been about what social justice looks like when we’re doing response, with a focus on technology (as that opens up paths to conversations we otherwise quit having). With Geeks Without Bounds, we did hackathons all over the world, including Random Hacks of Kindness and SpaceApps Challenge. I’ve been a coordinator for the Digital Humanitarian Network, keynoted the IEEE Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, was invited to the White House to talk about Sandy response, facilitated the first hackathon IN (not just for) Haiti, etc etc etc. I’ve also had a huge organizational crush on Aspiration since my first DevSummit in 2013, attending as many Aspiration-connected events as possible. When I was able to join Team Aspiration, I was overjoyed — even while much of the work I’ve continued to do on response had already existed, it’s been a slow shift to get those previously-defined objects to be a bit more Aspiraiton-shaped.
The Humanitarian Technology Festival in Cambridge May 9+10 is the first event that is both committed to response and framed on Aspiration ethos. I am SO EXCITED about this it hurts. Let me explain why.
The very way we deliver aid perpetuates the need for more aid, both for fast- and slow-onset disasters (or “extreme events” or “humanitarian issues” or “earthquake” or “famines” or whatever you’d like to say). When people need lodging after a hurricane, they’re either told to evacuate and/or they’re put into temporary homes, away from neighbors and family. There is little impetus to return and rebuild both social and tangible structures. People are uprooted, and must start from scratch. When, instead, we see that people don’t just need lodging but in fact need social fabric, responders (and the technologies used for response) can focus on how to maintain family and neighborhood ties. People are then less stressed as well as being more likely to take their own actions to return and rebuild.
For humanitarian aid, this is even more paternalistic and stratifying… while not actually “fixing” any of the things it aims to. Aid is primarily about making the giver feel better. But like Tom’s Shoes picking up on the “buy one, give one” idea that OLPC actually handled with cultural grace and systems thinking, instead Tom’s put some people out of work while trying to provide something THEY thought others needed. Even if it had been delivered in a less-jerky way, aid often ends up with locations dependant on that aid, rather than internally strengthened. This is one way we keep extracting resources out of other places without actually contributing to those locations. See also this bit of the paper I’m still working on. This allows the worst parts of globalization (erasure of cultures, consolodation of wealth, etc) to continue.
Some might say “fine, let them fend for themselves,” but that’s not ok either. When we don’t have to look at our neighbors (when we build walled housing complexes, or segregated schools), we can ignore how bad things are for them. And that’s also not an acceptable answer.
What we need are ways to listen to what people can offer, and what they need, under the assumptions that we are equals. This is why I’m so excited to see how the participatory methods I associate so strongly with Aspiration come to bear on this space. Just do a search-and-replace for “Nonprofits” to “Affected Communities” on our Manifesto and Participant Guidelines. People in these fragile situations are NOT a population to playtest new tools. Not only do failures have a larger impact in these spaces, but to think of another location and its people as “demo” space is undignified and unjust. We need better ways (not just better tools) for life EVERYWHERE, and to assume that we WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic)-o’s have all the answers is downright arrogant. By instead, as we do at Aspiration events, speaking to each other in easy-to-understand language, under the assumption that everyone is bringing something meaningful to the table, and that together we’ll figure it out; we can shift not only how we do response, but the after-effects of that response.
I’m especially excited to speak to people about distributed response, and how the tools we build for ourselves can be welcoming to others using as well. Check out NYCprepared and Taarifa to see what this can look like.
It is now easily one of my favorite large social experiences. Music, art, and story were woven throughout the conference, all evoking self-reflection on our role in the path the world takes. It was already populated by some of my favorite people in this space (the aforementioned case, plus 
