 Thanks everyone for coming. If everyone wants to take a seat, we'll get started in just a moment. Good morning everyone. On behalf of OTI, I want you to know how much we appreciate your interest in our work, as well as your willingness to share your own experiences with us. My name is Amy Norell and I am a technologist at OTI. I am here today to represent OTI's applied best practices and coordination team. Our team works across programs to support our staff, core performance management processes, and institutionalize a culture of learning. My primary area of expertise is geographic information systems or mapping, as you may have heard it. But the needs of our staff and grantees have expanded greatly over the years. So I work closely with them to deliver the best technical assistance possible in other areas of information and communication technology. For today's discussion, I rounded up a group of my colleagues who have challenged me to be thoughtful about the application of technology in sensitive environments. I would like to take a moment to have our panelists introduce themselves, starting with Nol. Hi, I'm Nol Dickover. I'm a senior program officer at the Peace Tech Lab at USIP. I had up a project called the Open Situation Room Exchange, which is a data and collaboration platform for peace builders in conflict zones. I'm Ian Shuler. I'm just here to loudly pour water while other people are talking. And in my spare time, I'm at a group called Development Seed. We work on geography, technology, and data, which made us incredibly appropriate for this panel, and have previously worked at State and at NDI on applying technology to political development. Hi, all. I'm Jessica Heinselman. I'm manager of ICT Strategic Initiatives at DAI. I've been working at the cross-section of tech and development since about 2008. And I'm really excited to be here today to talk both about work that we're doing at DAI, as well as possibly dive back into some of my previous life with groups such as CC Niamani in Kenya that had an SMS peace text service, as well as Ushahidi. Good morning. I'm here to drink the water that Ian poured. No. I'm Ivan Sigel. I'm the executive director of Global Voices, and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I've worked for about 15 years on media development, internet projects, conflict zones, transitional societies, natural disasters, and many other contexts, mostly in the former Soviet Union and all over Asia, and now with Global Voices globally as well. Thanks, guys, for being here. So our panel will look at how technology helps our staff to understand countries in transition and support our local partners as those transitions take place. A transition is a time of significant political change. The environment is complex and dynamic. In return, our programs must be flexible and creative. That makes understanding the appropriate use of technology a constant process of discovery and critical reflection. An important part of that process is having forums like we have here today so that we can dig in and talk about what's working and what's not in practice. Today I will provide a brief look at how OTI has used technology over the years. Then I will turn to our panelists to reflect on those lessons and help us look ahead. At the end, we will have time for your questions and to help us get through as many of those as possible, we ask that you write your questions on note cards and hand them to my colleague, Meg Yang, who's sitting up here in the front row. So if you all just wouldn't mind filtering those her way. So if you'll join me, let's take a brief look at how OTI has used technology over the years. In 1998, Tom Stuckel, a senior advisor at OTI, was overlooking riots from his hotel room in Jakarta, but Tom had an entirely another problem. He was tired of sorting through dozens of spreadsheets and documents to manage OTI's small grants. So Tom bid his time in lockdown by teaching himself Microsoft access, and that night the OTI activity database was born. Over the years, the database was customized to the needs of our programs. We have used it to track and evaluate more than 25,000 small grants around the world. Many technical solutions from the early days of OTI are still relevant. Today we support the development of tools such as field papers and First Mile Geo to integrate the use of paper and digital methods for managing information. But back at the turn of the century, OTI also started to use technology just to directly support our grantees. We conducted research on media consumption and helped communities access and share information. Our grantees built internet centers and taught courses in computer literacy. And once they were online, we supported trainees to teach them how to use email and blogs. We also stood up radio towers to bring broadcasts to remote places and help TV managers develop objective quality content. And we funded trainings on digital security for journalists. From these early interventions, we learned that some issues like bridging digital gaps and providing access to real-time information are just too big for us as an office to tackle alone. Now we look to our colleagues inside governments, civil society and the private sector to help us face these issues together. There's still important work to be done in building these strategic partnerships. But to support requests for technical assistance, we have also staffed up in Washington. In 2006, OTI hired technologists to help our programs collect, analyze and visualize data. And there was some initial skepticism, but the unit won the office over, map by map. These maps focused our administration's attention on pressing issues. At the time, there was a situation in Sudan. Now we are looking to Syria and Ukraine. Our products continue to inform policy discussions in Foggy Bottom and program decisions on the ground. Our technologists are dedicated to support specific country programs. They work directly with program staff and grantees to understand the potential of new technologies. Take social media platforms. Our government and our office is built on the idea that everyone around the world deserves a voice in public life. That includes supporting the voices of individuals who often go unheard in closed environments. A vibrant civil society and independent media are key to democracy and governance. Our grantees are looking to new digital tools to help them shape and tell their story. In 2007, our program in Lebanon supported a network of civil society organizations who were interested in using social media. Their goal was to promote civic engagement and social cohesion across long-standing sectarian divides. So we built the capacity of a local partner, Social Media Exchange, to train these organizations how to use digital tools for advocacy. Today, Social Media Exchange is a thriving organization, and they are helping other organizations throughout the Middle East. Over the years, our grantees have learned that effective campaigns blend the use of new digital tools like social media with traditional methods of communication like the arts. In Burma, the Myanmar ICT for Development Organization, or MEDU, is doing just that. They launched a campaign on Facebook where you can find photos and illustrations of people with flowers in their mouths. A powerful image to protest against hate speech. OTI was patient in making the decision to fund MEDU, to protect local ownership and direction of the campaign. OTI has also funded the use of mobile technology in certain contexts. In 2008, we funded researchers at the University of California at Berkeley to train local students how to conduct perception surveys in northern Uganda. They developed a mobile data collection application that's now called Kobo Toolbox. Our program was able to quickly collect information and tailor reconciliation activities to community priorities. OTI has also supported the use of mobile technology to spread targeted messages of peace, to pay grantees using mobile money, to push news to rural areas, and to provide information on how to participate in key transition processes, such as elections. Where low penetration and literacy rates constrain the use of mobile messaging, we are exploring viable alternatives. In Mali, communities can provide feedback and help design small grants by contacting an OTI-funded call center where they can speak to someone in their local language. Today, in 2014, OTI is focusing more on the process behind using technology rather than a suite of tools. Our program in Honduras is using community mapping to understand crime in high-risk neighborhoods. This mapping is part of a broader effort to build confidence and trust between communities and local police. And now we are exploring the use of digital gain as a way to bring youth into this conversation and imagine a better reality, because sometimes all we need are the tools to help us see our problems differently, to help us see each other differently. At OTI, our mission isn't to use a specific technology. Our mission is to support local partners as they define peace and democracy on their own terms. But we also recognize that there's still a lot for us to learn in this area and to share with each other. We're excited about the opportunities that lay ahead, and we're excited to work with you all. So on that note, I'd like to throw a couple of questions to our panelists, and I'll start with you, Jessica. Our grantees are using new technology as a way to bring communities together and engage in peaceful, constructive activities. One of the most significant lessons that we have learned is to approach the use of technology as a conversation rather than a predetermined solution or tool. We support a design process whereby our grantees identify what is right for their community. So I'm wondering, based on your experience at DAI and other spaces, what have you learned in terms of best practices in being able to deliver quality technical assistance to the field? Sure. Yeah, I guess when we talked the other day, I was really excited about that phrasing of approaching technology as a conversation. And the more I thought about it, I was like, well, how do I talk about this? Because it just makes sense. If there's one thing you walk away with from this panel, it's that good technology design and development and the best practices for technology and development are really the best practices for development. And for some reason, technology just throws a wrench into it, and it's like a blocker. It's like going into a situation and saying we should develop an app is the same as going in and saying we should have a community event. And unless you have the context and the objectives behind that idea, it can go poorly and really not get you the impact you need. So I think what I do a lot at DAI and what our team has done is integrate technology through processes that include conversations both with local staff who know the project, know the country, know the context, know what they're trying to achieve, as well as conversations with those that are the end users. And I think it's sometimes really easy to stop short of that. And I'd like to share just one brief example from some work that we've done in Sierra Leone where I was brought in under a DFID project that we run there that is supporting women's access to security and justice. Or the larger project is a security and justice project. But we were charged with the task of reaching 700,000 women and girls with better information about what their rights were and how to access them and to put in rural Sierra Leone. So to put that in perspective, that's 23% of the female population. And I spent the first week, week and a half, just going around Freetown, the capital, talking to NGOs, understanding how they're already communicating, what understanding the ecosystem and how information was shared. But then I could have stopped there. And I think that's something that we oftentimes do due to time constraints or resource constraints. And we were really lucky in this case because we were able to take an additional two weeks and travel out to the most rural areas of Sierra Leone. And really test our assumptions and test the assumptions of people that were in the capital. And I went as far as one village that was about 10 hours outside of Freetown. And I chose it specifically because my staff said that it had no access to the mobile network and it had no radio coverage. And I said, well, if we can reach, and it was a very conservative Muslim community. And I said, if we can reach these girls, we will be able to reach anybody. And what I actually found was we did focus groups with girls, with women and men separately, which was really important. And we found that in that community, surprisingly, girls had the best access to mobile phones. Because unlike in some of the closer-in villages where they could, you know, their parents could just pick up the phone and make calls, in this village the parents didn't have time to walk five miles to go pick up messages so they would send their children. So what ended up happening is there are a bunch of girls on top of a mountain with complete freedom to call whoever they wanted. Which was really wonderful to see that. What we also found in that village was that a lot of the young men had small boomboxes that they were listening to music on memory cards. And we took away from that this idea that, wow, you know, we want to integrate different types of technology. We knew we were going to do radio. We knew we were going to have some sort of mobile phone. But we could also have information that could stay in that community for when it was desired. And I think we built an integrated project design that allowed people to access different types of information, whether they wanted to pull information or if it was broadcast information. But really people could either access all of them as a really complimentary suite or they could, you know, just get access to what they had. And I think it was a really interesting, I like to share that story because it's important to challenge our assumptions and really understand where people are at and know that they're, you know, oftentimes people that are doing really great work in the capital cities don't have the time or aren't looking for these little details. So I'll leave it there and continue the conversation. Great. If anyone wants to jump in on that conversation, go ahead. Yeah, I spent three years at the State Department and now the last year at USIP, state we developed something called the Tech Camp Project. I don't know how many folks are familiar with this. Very cool. Still ongoing, doing great, but we went, there they've gone to now I think about 30 countries. And what we found is a lot of the innovation you're going to find in developing countries are with the local technologists. And so finding ways to almost bring together local tech with local civil society, not in a panel thing but small group discussion, really engaging on both understanding what's possible in that context but then coming up with innovative solutions. And what we come to the table with, we come from a place where we have ubiquitous power and ubiquitous connectivity for everything we do and that's just not the world these folks live in. But the local technologists know what's possible, how they can work, who's doing what and where. And if you can get them engaged on social good projects, at least in my experience, they love it just as much as people in New York or Paris or anywhere else. They just haven't had that opportunity. So finding ways that we can start sort of cultivating this tech for social good ecosystem which exists in a New York, in a Paris, and really in a Mexico City, in a Bangkok, in some places like that and really connect this better, what you're going to find is the solutions that are coming up with are far more innovative, generally more low cost and are much more of this agile prototyping ways because there's really not money there to do stuff, but they're able to get things done anyways. A good example, we call them peace tech exchanges at USIP. We did a series of three of these in Iraq. In the first one, it was around corruption. We had a journalist there who was really looking to just track violence against journalists. Iraq is, over the last 10 years, I think, number three or four in terms of deaths for journalists and he hooked up with Jorge Luis Sierra who in Panama and then in Mexico had done this great platform an event platform for capturing corruption complaints and actually doing it from a journalist's perspective. He's now at ICFJ and he worked with him first to set up an event platform that he had set up in Mexico, tied it to a blog based setup. The model we have at USIP is we give them small awards afterwards to see if they're able to make something amazing happen and in his case he was, he was able to connect with 30 different journalists and start working a connection with the government office that oversees this and so now we're looking to give them a larger grant to continue. This was his idea that he worked with a technologist not from the United States at the time but moving forward the idea is how do we cultivate local leaders and sort of change the focus from things outsiders want to figure out how to solve to things insiders see as a problem that they think they can address and find ways to empower them and to me connecting to local tech is a terrific way to get that innovation. So there's a thing in ICT for Dev in our little geeky community called FailFair and FailFair is a place where a bunch of people who are doing tech in development get together, get drunk and talk about the awful things, the horrible ideas that they've had over the years and I've done a few, I think Jessica you've done at least one, right? I've actually won some, I've been the biggest loser, the biggest failure in a number of these events and I would love to tell you that you go to FailFair and you see all of these really interesting failures because people are at the very edge of applying technology to development and they're asking the questions that have never been asked before and coming up with the interesting new solutions and that's not the case at all. Basically 80% of them fail because somebody here had an idea that this was going to be really cool and of course everybody there was going to need it and want it and like it and then that didn't actually work out to be the case. And so just basic market research and basically going out and being part of the sort of stuff that Jessica talks about is so important and like there's a lot of excuses we could go or reasons and excuses we could give for why this doesn't happen. The funders and the funding model will be easy to blame and that's partly true. How we're structures and organizations as an industry will be easy to blame and that's partly true. All of this contributes to that. We need to find a way to get past that and I think that's something that I'm excited to discuss with you guys. So thanks for raising those important considerations and I'd actually like to build off of some of your points in terms of the design process. So an important decision is balancing the desire to support open data initiatives as an office against the need to respect grantee privacy. So Ian, I was wondering if you might just start us off by discussing how we should approach that topic. Yeah, I mean and I think, look, dealing with open data is something that you need to deal with responsibly. I hesitate to post it as opposite sides. Like you can care about privacy and individual security and also care about openness and transparency at the same time. There are certainly policy issues that you need to figure out for OTI and very specifically how do you be as open as possible, show taxpayers you're making good use of their money, give them some ability to have some insight into why you're making decisions but also not do things that are going to be counterproductive to exactly what you're trying to do for taxpayers, not put out information on grantee names or beneficiary names where that would risk the program itself. But also, so that's one side of it and then the other side of it is we as development practitioners need to be more thoughtful about the data of individuals that we're working with, the data of beneficiaries and we often don't have this conversation. We are for very good and noble reasons collecting a lot of data to give to our donors to show that we're actually doing things and making an impact and that's all powered by well intentioned goals but at the same time that's a lot of data that we're not necessarily telling the beneficiaries what we're collecting, what's going to happen to that, that it's going to a U.S. government entity and there are certainly real concerns about that as well. So finding ways to get the benefits of doing good evaluation of tracking that things are happening and what the impacts are, well anonymizing that data and pulling and taking out some of that personally identifiable information is just something that is possible to do. It's done more and certainly in the medical field than in others and something that we could be better at. We just need to be thoughtful about it. The other aspect that maybe we want to talk about also is the larger industry side. I feel like most of that stuff is solvable. There's also sort of a, we are participating in an industry that likes to collect a lot of information. If you're doing a political campaign, you want to get as much info as possible. How do we, hey, we're back live. So to catch the chase, there is this larger question about data in the industry and not just the individual program that we're doing, but when all of this comes out, when we're supporting satellite projects and we're supporting the cool app, what happens to all this data and how are we contributing to this overall? What's referred to as the mosaic effect, the ability to pull a lot of this data that exists in different places and find a lot of personal information about individuals. How do we make sure that we're handling that responsibly? Within technology, as a technologist engineer, there's a gray area between really, really awesome things you can do with data and really, really creepy things you can do with data and how do we set the right standards so that we know we're doing as much awesome as possible with as little creepy as possible? I just wanted to add to that, which I also, there's a role for OTI and other implementers in thinking through these things, but I think it's also important to decentralize the decision-making about risk, but doing so in a way where we're really making sure that people are informed in making decisions based on knowledge. I think the activists that are out there working, particularly with OTI projects and grantees, have been making decisions about how much they're willing to risk for decades, and technology doesn't change that. Before they were just making a decision about which coffee shop that they wanted to have that conversation in or who's home, and now they have to make a decision about what technology they're going to communicate through and how to protect themselves. I think it's also one of the things, Amy, I was glad to hear in the recap of the things that OTI has been doing, and definitely something that we do at DAI, is make sure that we are providing education on security so that people really have the knowledge of where these new risks lie as they adopt these new technologies, and can choose for themselves. I'd just like to jump in on that. I think one of the assumptions that we make about conversation going back to your original point is that a conversation exists on a neutral platform in which everybody who is on the platform has ownership or equal say, and being extremely careful and aware that projects that are designed by implementers and by with donor resources are already creating a presumption of ownership in which we, you, as implementers with the resources and the ones collecting the data have a larger stake or a larger position on the success and also on what kind of voices are occurring on those platforms. So in the work that I do, we don't presume and we don't design projects on the basis of external agency or external focus, but on the basis of local agendas, and what that means on a real basis is actually starting with the resources. So I think there's also a larger kind of strategic conversation to be had around how technology works, not just at the technical implementation level, but also on how that affects very political development processes themselves. And I'll stop there for the moment. Just to follow up on Jessica's point with the education and training, it's a really scary thing if you're working in a harsh environment, authoritarian government, whatever. If you're not a technologist to figure out what should you be using to organize and to communicate and to actually conduct your actions. And the real problem is the list of risks change on a regular basis and you're not aware of it. So let's say you get some terrific security training today. Six months from now, you're not quite sure, you know, like when Skype changed to be Microsoft-owned and they went to sort of a hub and spoke model, what was the implication if the host government or wherever you're at was able to penetrate that? And how would you know if it was still safe to work Skype? Fact is you don't, unless you've got, you know, a pipeline to EFF or, you know, somebody like that who knows this stuff. And I almost think there's a need for a similar field to see what Symantec does with their antivirus center or something like that. Something for technology that if there's some group that could say, hey, here's the risks that are coming about from, you know, mobile platforms, from IP, from these collaborations, things, and somebody that can actually almost keep pace with these, you know, this co-evolution of how do you have secure technologies with people trying to penetrate it at the same time. If there was somewhere you could go to basically get the update on the stuff that you're using. I mean, I know that corollary breaks down at some level, but if there's ever a need for a center of expertise, especially for activists working in these environments that can just tell them, here's our best guess globally. And oh, by the way, within, you know, Egypt, here's the stuff you need to worry about. That would be terrific. And it's really needed and is not there right now. And if you think that's a good idea, there are a number of other people who have tried and started to do this. So before you come up with your own version of this to pitch, go talk to some of those people and either collaborate or learn from them. Yeah, people have been working on this for at least 10 years, actually. And there's a huge amount of, especially local resources and local capacity. Because activists have their own concerns at heart, obviously, and so they're taking this very seriously. And I also want to say that in that context, it's, I think it's really important to double distress again the idea that individuals determine their own level of risk. And are often the best place to understand what that risk is. And we should, with all of our projects, should be operating on a do no harm principle. And especially that comes to things like data collection, data sharing, and some of the implications around that. Really not instrumentalizing technology is a crucial idea here in the context of what we do. And on that note, I'd like to pick up on a thread that I heard, which I think Ian raised, which was the mosaic effect of combining different data sets and pose a question to you, Noel, which is at OTI, we use data to help us challenge assumptions and make educated decisions about our programs. We sometimes really struggle, though, with digging through data from disparate sources and really packaging it in a way that's actionable, putting all the caveats on how it was sourced. So we know that this is not a struggle that's unique to OTI. So I wanted to turn to you and some of the work that's being done at the Peace Tech Lab to ask you, what are the breakthroughs that you think are coming down the pike to help us? Well, we have an idea. So we're trying this, and it's sort of like if you look at sort of the realm of data systems that are out there, there's so many of what we refer to as these data for Superman systems, right? If I just get this really important person, everything they need, at the moment they need, at the time they need, they're going to make some magical decision and the problems of Northern Nigeria will just dissipate, right? And there's a lot of these systems. But if what we believe is it's really the local population and their expectations for the future and are they going to start moving towards nonviolent ways to mediate their disagreements? If that's what we see is what's going to change Northern Nigeria in places like that, in our terms, it's really the local peace builders who should be having this fancy situation room that all the data comes and is really geared towards their needs. And of course, there's a number of challenges with that. People in D.C. like to be data-driven. I think it's fair to say we struggle with that and some are, and many aren't. That's even harder in a conflict zone. But if you don't own your own data profile, right, and so often we see we engage this great group of stakeholders locally, we do an assessment, then what do we do? We leave and do the analysis. And then we show back up with the answer, right? I mean, it's the classic, let me give you a fish. And so what we're trying to do is we're in prototyping stages, but osrx.org, yeah, osrx, open situation room exchange.org, or osrx.org. We're looking to build a platform that's really geared more, not as the inside-out perspective, but an outside-in perspective, meaning finding ways to ask them what is the information they care about, about the world around them, and actually helping them think through how they could find, collect, analyze, visualize, and publish conflict data. In long term, the hope is that we can get what we call a conflict zone fellow, which is a really great technologist that are interested in social good, bring them back to our lab for six months, learn about conflict analysis, mediation and facilitation skills, along with data analysis and visualization, have them go back to a physical place that they could put maps on the wall, bring folks in so over a period of time they start thinking through what are the questions they want answered. And they're probably not going to be getting a nice little 3D visualization, data cube kind of thing. It's more a set of alerts to their cell phones. This is going to be a long term effort, but the hope is if we can find ways to give them their own situation room that they can ask the questions, that their strategy and tactics will reflect that. And hopefully, if you improve their performance, our thought is that's going to be the best chance to really address places like your northern Nigerias and things like that. This is a really challenging issue, and the silver bullets, as we know, they don't exist. One of the things that we find, I think again and again with the development of very specific narrow affordance technologies is that they tend not to be used very well because they're built in such a way as to be so targeted for a very specific population that they require a huge amount of training, and in the meanwhile, the world progresses. So I've seen a lot of applicants to build things like mesh networking for conflict or specific mobile-based applications for reporting that require a huge amount of learning on the part of the individual, but then something else outside of that specific application is going to come along and overwhelm the specific effort to build that one thing. So I'd caution against trying to build projects that focus so narrowly on a particular problem that they are designed to fix that one thing because they tend not to actually work over time. Kind of drawing from both with Noel and what Ivan was saying. As far as approach goes, I couldn't agree more that if we really think in development, some of the best work that we do is to provide data and provide information to allow individuals in those environments to be making their own decisions, whether it's decisions about risk or decisions about policies, what have you. I think the way to do this that probably doesn't work is to have a, as Ivan's saying, come in, build a data center for X and have this be the hub of blah, blah, blah. I think what is more useful is investing in data infrastructure overall and see it the same as you're investing in a road network and a human capacity network. You're investing in a data network or a data infrastructure that other people can use, can repurpose, can plug into and when situations change use that data in different ways, combine it with different information and that's what generates economic activity, that's data that generates transparency, accountability. OTI has great data. You guys have really good data and you have really great ways of turning that data into useful products. I've had a chance to see some of the stuff that you've done and my frustration with it is, man, it'd be really great if this was more available. I know that you guys do more than most to make it available to your implementing partners and others, but some of this data would just be tremendously beneficial if there are ways that you could find to make it open. I know that there's a lot of... It's not an easy ask, but I think that thinking in terms of, hey, we're not just here to provide money resources, providing data is just as valuable of a resource that we can provide and actually more appropriate in certain situations than throwing money at problems. I'd like to add one more thing, which is I think now that there's so much activity online and we have Facebook and we have text messages and there's all this big data, I think sometimes we're drawn to that as the answer and losing sight of the fact that there's still a lot of small, little data. There's small data. I'm not sure that there actually is much big data. I think we just don't have access to it. I think it's there. But even that said, it doesn't mean that it's the best. There are all these crowdsourcing initiatives and there are a lot of them that should be presenting or have presented at the fail fares just because you have all this data about what are you going to do with it. I know in my grad school internship, I managed one of the early elections monitoring projects for Ushahidi and what we got back was 40% of reports were saying, go peace, yeah, Kenya, they were all very positive, but really it looked like these huge issues on the map and it was really just like bubbles of happy people. It was like silly and people were like, oh my gosh, what's going on in the Rift Valley and it's like peace, peace is going on. I think that we need to really look still at these local networks and invest in creating our own more relevant data networks and then attaching them to technology and not thinking, okay, well it's either crowdsourcing or key informants. I think one of the organizations that I've worked with that I mentioned earlier, Cicini Amani, what we actually did was go in and identify local peace activists, work with them to identify issues in their community and then we brought in experts to run focus groups on message development so that when an issue arose they could go to this framework and create a message that was actually going to mitigate or disrupt violence and then they would send it in and would go through a quality control process and then get blasted out, targeted to the people that were signed up for the subscription for the peace messages in that area and we had about 65,000 people across Kenya signed up that would get these messages and I think that kind of data and still looking at kind of what we can do at a small level but tying it and amplifying its impact through technology is really important to not think that we have to go either one way to the extreme or the other way to the extreme. Thanks everyone. So we're about to step into our final question for the panelists before going into Q&A. So on that note, if you have questions encourage you to write those on your note cards and funnel them up to a med curious in the front road. So if you mind just passing those here where that would be great. So in closing I'd like to step back and recognize that we really are in a notable point in terms of the application of information and communication technologies to development. The pace of research and development is accelerating while on the other hand we run against constraints when it comes to really integrating technology into the plumbing of how we design and provide assistance. Technology innovation is outpacing process innovation. So on that note I'd maybe like to throw a question to you Ivan at the end. Moving forward how can we help our industry tackle this challenge? Well man. Ian can I have some more water? Just shake it loudly. Exactly. So a couple of points on this I think that maybe can help us shape the conversation. Innovation is not a value in itself. I think it's really really important. I mean we have a tendency and I think this town has a tendency to latch on to a word and a concept and pick up and then imbue it with a lot of value that maybe is overstating the case. Innovation is about is a tactic for understanding change but without a direction it really doesn't mean very much. So I really urge us to not use innovation as a measure or a lens for the way we think about technology application. Let's start instead with and just one very simple example of what that means. A lot of times technology conversations will think about the sharpest or most interesting or most innovative moment of technology change in a way that ignores I guess what I would say is simple applications of technology that are appropriate to environments and communities based on their current practices. And so often times technology use is not going to be based on whether or not we're going to have the best smart phone or Apple makes a new product that somehow overwhelms our practices but based on a small and incremental change based on the particular location and access a particular community has at a given moment. And if we start from that mindset and think about things like resiliency of networks and the strength of the infrastructure underlying the systems that we have I think it's a more useful place to help us understand what is and is not possible and you can just apply your own experience to this. When I buy a new phone or when I think about accessing a new network I'm learning incrementally what that thing is and I'm not expecting that there's going to be a technology change that's going to overwhelm necessarily what my process might be. So there's certainly conversations that we can have about technologies that will come in and we have seen that have a revolutionary disrupting effect but that isn't necessarily where most of the work is going to be happening I think. Just a different part entirely of this I think it's a large enough question we could probably hit on five completely separate areas and what I want to touch on is really the whole funding model for development. I think most of the places that we're working we all agree that long-term behavior change is what we're looking for ways to galvanize and generally that doesn't get done in one year increments. So you have these projects that get started and there's nobody locally that thinks they're going to be long-term there's maybe people in DC aren't really sure and really until we start thinking about different revenue streams it's going to be hard to have long-term projects. Case in point what we're thinking about with this OSRX site I was talking about one of the things if we get a local presence there if we could start developing crowd-seeded networks very similar to what Sissy Neimani did which is a terrific project to be able to start getting real-time data on a number of variables that can help us understand what's happening in the conflict both from an economic security perspective you know you think about those that same network is going to be really valuable for instance to potentially insurance companies looking to gauge political risk if somebody wants to put an energy plant there right there's a number of ways that we can find that people outside the peace-building space might find value in that data not as a conflicting thing but something that actually potentially enables jobs how can you have all these wonderful engineers who can't find jobs in these places how can we you know connect them to people looking for expertise externally so it could be that the data networks we're trying to build this you know cultivation of you know this tech for social good ecosystem in these conflict zones may have some real beneficial revenue streams that we can use to fund the peace-building activities this is just merely one idea here look at what Nat Geo has done right that is just amazing programming that they're able to use in a number of ways can we do that with some of our conflict-sensitive media programs it's really just it's a beginning thought but figuring out how you can actually monetize some of the things you're doing so you're not relying on grants and donors and you know federal money that's going to get cut off at some point because otherwise the folks locally don't see this as a long-term effort either they see it as a short-term gain that maybe you're helping them and they're helping you but it's not necessarily something that they can rely on long-term I think I've seen a lot of technologists or engineers want to go help NGOs and the lend their services and that almost never works for a variety of reasons but largely is because as an industry we're not really set up well to do tech well in a lot of ways there's some things we're pretty good at and I think that actually some of what what you described is what I would argue we're better at we're better at sort of applying technology in incremental ways to improve the stuff that we already understand we're not really good at understanding how to organize differently to retool differently or coping with the fact that that things are shifting that economies are shifting that industries are shifting that the way people expect to get information from their elected representatives is all shifting we're not really good at that we're not good at designing technology interventions that can accommodate the sort of risk that can go into it saying we think these things are important but we're not exactly sure what the outcome is going to be I mean you would never get funding for that but that's exactly the sort of stuff that's required to do technology well so we're not necessarily structured as an industry to be able to determine some of these aspects well but it is something that I do think we need to get better at and we need to figure out ways to address I've seen a number of disaster response environments where people are still sharing information through PDFs of Esri maps that then are impossible to actually do anything with once you get them and that's irresponsible we can't be we have to be better than that we have to be better than that today these are things we need to figure out I really want to just mention something about OTI in particular since we're celebrating this anniversary but I think that when my team goes to work with an OTI project I get excited because I actually do think that the funding model that you have that's a bit more agile is better suited to try new things and to innovate in all the right ways not the jargony way but the ability to you know really the emphasis on the field the knowledge coming from local populations the ability to give small grants I think one of the things in the larger industry that doesn't work is you're given a one to two year grant with a delivery item with a deliverable at the end but there's so much that can happen to learn in between that and that iterative approach really is important to make sure you get to the right end and there's a lot that we I think there's just a lot more opportunity on OTI projects where you have a little bit more flexibility and you know you can have smaller funding and be able to do that on an incremental scale thanks now we'll shift over to some questions from the audience our first question is we struggle with measuring and understanding changes in abstract complex topics like stability what technologies does the panel see to help us understand change in these topics I'll take a stab on it because this is a problem we have to get our arms around right I mean there's a real need to have solid metrics for what we do but you know especially in the peace building field trying to prove a negative isn't always your best option but to me it's getting back to real-time data indicators that can give you senses of like so for instance everybody right now is looking at Ebola as a health crisis in West Africa which it clearly is and that's the main thing but just as clearly there's an economic security impact for stability and I've seen nobody collecting a lot on that if there is I would love to see it there's a number of pieces like that so you know somebody referenced First Mile Geo I think earlier I think one of the neat things Matt McNabb did with Syria which was pretty cool and early on is looking at that conflict he got people to go in there and excuse me just go to bakeries and find out the price of bread in both the rubble areas and in the Assad control areas and it was as a daily feed and at the beginning the Assad areas it was a lot higher in the rubble areas it was lower until Assad cut off their supply routes and then there's a dramatic shift which gave you indications of what was occurring you know both from food security but also stability and things like that so to the extent that we can start getting real-time indicators of what's happening I think that gives you one sense of stability I think there's some of the longer-term trends that hit there as well but I don't think we're ever going to bring this down to you know a number because so much of this gets onto these you know whatever you call these leverage inflection points where things just sort of shift and at least from what we've seen from the data perspective it's really hard to predict from you know the Soviet Union breaking up on down I mean these things are not easy to ah that's happening next month you just can't do that so this is a difficult problem I wish I had a great answer but I think the thing we have to hold against is not putting forward what we all know to be fake metrics and try to get judged on that but to actually do the hard work of finding ones that are real and make a difference just to add to that especially with large complex topics like that we're sort of forecasting our own values and you choose a metric that is maybe inappropriate to the particular conditions and you judge your work on that basis you might miss the point and sometimes stability is a good thing and sometimes you know it's not a good thing and like autocracies can be very stable and so I would urge us to think about if you're going to apply a metric like that apply it in combination with other ideas and maybe don't necessarily think a bit about as a vector or a goal but as a more empirical measure that you can look at in combination with other ideas about what's occurring in the place that you're studying and try to reserve some judgment about its meaning and implication because if you take that perspective you'll have I think a data set that is more reflective of the reality in the context I think also we're not there yet but I'm excited to see where data and analytics go for 25 years conflict and political scientists have been looking at what indicators can help from bread to just general economic information what indicators can help us see conflict coming and in the past there really hasn't been much success and a lot is because politics is nuanced and culture is nuanced and the way that people use language to talk about it in different places changes but I actually just last night got back from San Francisco and met with a couple of groups that aren't there yet but are really doing some interesting stuff with large scale and here I go with the big data but large scale analytics that include sentiment analysis and a lot of more nuanced analysis across different languages so just staying on top of those trends and really look at what's happening in the private sector as well I think the development doesn't look enough at what our colleagues are doing to sell Samsung phones or fiat and we can learn a lot from that because they're looking at these markets for a specific thing and how do we use those same tools to really understand a little bit more about stability in those places there's a saying we have around transparency that data likes to touch other data and you learn a lot of stuff when you get different sorts of data to start to play together and that requires that it be open, it be fungible, it be possible for you to get those data sets to work together and that's when you can start to ask those interesting questions and continue to be inquisitive and continue to be honest to yourself about what's going on so that's why open data is important and there are still key data sets, really important data sets about disaster and conflict that are funded through public funds that are not really open or accessible in the way that you would want them to be so I think that's a first step, let's open up those data sets. Data liking to touch other data I think is where you're bearing into the creepy portion of me. Another very thoughtful question from the audience how do we approach data collection sometimes in the absence of clear and direct requirements from donors? How do we approach data collection in the absence of clear and direct requirements from donors? Set the standard, this is something that we shouldn't be waiting for donors to tell us what to do, we should do it the right way and we should be very opinionated about have it make it a conversation but we should be the ones who are setting the standard about what's responsible to do with data and encouraging the donors to adopt that and spread that and not the other way around. Great. When we talk about ICT, that's information and communication technologies in the digital age, is it inevitable to deal with some countries where ICT is limited or it's even filtered by those with their own agenda and asking just to reflect on that? Absolutely. That's the environment that we're working in. If you're talking to somebody in Myanmar, you're talking to somebody in a city. If you're calling them on a phone or Skype or whatever, that's where they're going to be but it's changing rapidly in each of these countries, the problem with technology is the specifics of the context drive so much of what you can do. This is why I really want to rely on local technologists more than anything else because yes, I know that Skype is available in Dakar but I don't really know all the surrounding stuff of what they're using it for. I know when I call countries and it's worse than almost anywhere else but a few other countries but pick your context, the specifics of what's driving Egypt right now is very different from Iraq which is very different from Burma and the technology landscape looks completely different in each of those countries so if I'm trying to figure out how to engage, if I'm not connecting with the local tech community you're really losing the best opportunity to figure out what's possible and what's easy. So in 2007 I was at NDI, we done a few programs with SMS in election observation and we thought we were getting pretty good at it and I was sent to Sierra Leone pretty much specifically because the country office there thought they were going to use mobile phones and collecting data on the elections and I was basically sent to convince them that that was a bad idea because this is Sierra Leone right and how could we possibly do something with mobile in 2007 in Sierra Leone we got there and actually started trying to figure out what's the right way to do this we would get out to the rural areas where the only way to get information was a 10 mile bike ride to a place where there was a a hospital that had a CB radio to get to the state capitol and then send it in but what we found was that actually mobile phones were an important part of that communication if we were asking people what's the fastest way to get this information to Freetown it was always going to involve mobile phones in some way and so those areas that are most information deprived where there are blocks on what people can get and what they can't where there isn't much infrastructure it's those places that data makes the most difference and where very small and smart investments in technology and data can be very very impactful dropping off 200 iPads is almost always the wrong idea in every program stop putting that into your proposals but smart applications and appropriate applications of technology in the hardest environments can make the biggest difference I also want to add that approaching things strategically you don't always need to go for the thing that is most threatening and going back to what Noel is talking about is building this local capacity to even understand what's possible and using non-threatening ways help people envision how to use technology for agriculture or for lowering infant mortality or something that everybody can get behind including the government and then once those tools are there and people actually understand the possibility they'll take it where they want to they're not going to forget how to you know people excited about a Facebook page and things like that starting small I know we have a project in Uzbekistan that's an agricultural project that we have put our guides out for pest and disease on an app and it's wildly popular and we're disseminating it through farmer associations partly because getting it in a format where it can be downloaded and using the telecommunications infrastructure is just not politically possible or easy at this point but it will get its own legs and it'll start to kind of push those boundaries a little bit more Great and our last question focuses on social media and recognizes the fact that it can be used for for organizations to do outreach for us as donors to inform or monitoring and evaluation and to help us to understand what's going on and fluid environments so I guess turning it back to the panelists where do you see the greatest potential in those areas either in your own work working on projects and then also we can turn it back to OTI I would say that the potential is in all of it and using it strategically DAI was the implementer of an OTI project in Tunisia where for the longest time we weren't using social media all that much until one day we got a call asking how to make a video go viral and I was like whoa we can't just it's a viral one you call this guy and then you're like number one on YouTube but I think what we took away from that was it opened the door to that conversation where we actually started today and talked about what was possible and when I went out to the project all of the staff was using it I actually did a poll where people raised their hands how it kept it I used it one time a day two times three times one guy had used it ten times a day and was willing to admit that in front of his boss but we saw that we were like the Tunisian population was definitely using social media but we weren't necessarily leveraging that to amplify the impact that our grants were having and part of it was people were making a lot of assumptions one they were making an assumption that OTI didn't necessarily want it because it could be risky what if someone posted something negative about the US we were also making an assumption that it was just urban liberal folks but when we went out and found a survey that had been done by a local social media firm or a local media firm found that while 39% of people were on the internet and 33% of people were on Facebook 100% of Tunisians that were outside had reported accessing Facebook at one point and when you looked at those who got information whether it was first hand or second hand from some social media it was the entire population so that really was a marking point in our project where we started to really leverage that a lot more posting videos from events publicizing events doing reminders and really using it to collect momentum behind a kind of notification campaign so I'd add that when you think about social media the first thing that you might want to do that's important is to really understand the media ecology behind it so a word like virality basically when we use it what we're saying is we don't know what happened but actually we do mostly know what happens and we can investigate each one of those moments and instances of virality so called virality and we can see that there is actually a visible chain of behavior and there's a whole field of study that looks into how information flows across network societies so if you think about social media as an opportunity to promote or strategically communicate your content you're kind of missing the greatest thing about social media which is that no one's really in control of it except for the company that but that's a separate panel if for a moment we presume that they're in aggregate there's still the possibility of working with social media networks in which people have the ability to own and control some aspects of them then the greatest value is that you are actually in a context in an environment in which you're talking to everybody more or less equally or you have that opportunity and things are going to happen in that space that you might not be aware of and that's really good actually and you want to embrace that idea because you'll find out really quickly whether the things that you're working on are relevant to people and if they don't like your work they'll tell you and that's good knowledge to have too so I would encourage you to absolutely use those tools but use them with the awareness that you're opening yourself up to a conversation that is going to go everything from questions about power to questions about the nature of your work and your ability to do it well to of course inevitably you'll wind up dealing with trolls and you want to be able to deal with that too if you're going to because it will be there this is somewhere that getting back to how we reorganize ourselves just like in real life a social media approach that would be ineffective is just shouting it would be like going down the road with a megaphone expecting to have a conversation with people the right media the right social media approaches involve actual engagement talking to people like it's a meeting like it's a cocktail party like it's a rally actually being a participant in that and you don't do that well if you have the social media person in DC that's responsible for posting all of the tweets and Facebook posts and all that because that person isn't connected to your program what you're doing isn't you're not going to be knowledgeable you're never going to be successful in social media if that is your approach what you need to do is unleash your staff unleash your experts to be more open on these platforms about why they're doing why we're doing what we're doing and trust them to be knowledgeable enough to engage in these conversations without having to get clearance or blessing from the executive office every time they want to engage in those spaces there's a chance maybe less than 50% but there's at least a chance that you will be successful in your social media and be able to get the sort of benefits that Ivan talks about two quick points one of the interesting things for social media in conflict zones and in developing countries is its potential for reverse mentoring so many of these larger NGOs are headed by gray haired folk who are interested in technology not sure but probably you're not going to be doing the Twitter thing all the time there's an opportunity where the 20-somethings can move their organization to a very different place so creating spaces where it's comfortable for them to get that reverse mentoring and really open up their local organizations to that I think is terrific the other point just throwing a bone to Facebook and the like people that have been to developing countries why is Coca-Cola so successful there right people don't trust the soft drinks that their own countries are making is it polluted, is it poison chances are Coke is going to start with clear water it's going to have a lot of sugar but it's probably not going to kill me today you know 20 years that's a different situation I think there's a corollary to Facebook right so yes we talk about the problems of corporate ownership of all of our platforms which is truly problematic on a lot of levels but if you're in a somewhere like a Burma which is just now sort of opening up its environment and you can't even get the rights to create your own newspaper it's no surprise that there's multiple newspapers only published on Facebook right you can ask in so many of these countries you look at the percentage of internet penetration and it's almost identical to the penetration for Facebook and they're probably doing it you know for a good reason but on the same token I think the Edward Snowden stuff just really drives confidence through the floor on those platforms and is really detrimental on a way that you're seeing the IT companies address it but there's a real advantage to having this international platform that everybody in the world is using and now you're in one of these places that's just now getting connected it makes a lot of sense to go there and it is good in the same way that COCA is good and potentially bad right analogy works we have four minutes left and a last no card what can be done to hold meetings online and help local people to decide on projects so just a quick coda to the last point which is that one of the wonderful and scary things about living in a network society is that everything you say even in a closed room like this which is now being videotaped and shared with the world has potentially impacts somewhere else so even though right now we're all talking together the language that we use and the gestures and the messages that we send with the language that we have today is visible elsewhere and I think it's really important to be aware that if you're engaging in social media to know that your language your perspectives and the ideas that you share will be interpreted differently in different contexts and so if we speak about countries in generalities like countries in conflict and individual in that country might say why am I being classed in that way in that room in Washington what does that mean what is the projection of authority and what is the idea so I just like as a very simple level if you think about and to understand the effects of networks if you just think about every time you open your mouth that you're not just talking to somebody else in this room but you're talking potentially to everybody it will change your behavior and that's an interesting effect so that's I think a really important idea that I hope you'll consider and that takes me pretty nicely into the next question how do we build meetings how do we build spaces there's so many ways to hold meetings and there's a whole suite of tools and applications out there in the world that attempt to facilitate virtual communication and global voices the organization with which I work does enough is entirely virtual and we spend all of our time trying to answer that question and there are some things that virtual tools do really well like asynchronous communication the ability to kind of work collectively on documents very important very useful and then there are ideas and projects that really don't work in virtual spaces in my experience you lose a huge amount of communication when we're just using voice or just using text and there are times when you really want to bring people together face to face for larger strategic conversations and so what I would say is think about the goal of your conversation and your particular meeting and then try to find the level of application of tool that's appropriate without going super deeply into all the huge variety of suite of tools yeah I was going to ask if that was a trick question I really think that the better question to ask here would be how do we bring communities together in discussion and what options are available to us and not jumping to online and I think that's the biggest takeaway from this panel is it is so easy with all this technology available to just jump there and go there and say well this is obviously going to make it easier but see technology in all the various tools that Global Voices has the Development Seed has that Noel is exploring with local communities as a tool box along with the community forums and the debates and the working groups and the key informant trainings and all of these different things and then pick what's right for that communication and what's going to get you the best result I'm going to take it a slightly different way but circle back to Jessica's great opening point which is if you are going to have a conversation with constituents beneficiaries do program design with communities and you're not actually having an authentic conversation you are like oh we can't actually work on the stuff that you care about because the donor asked for something else and we're going to get all your ideas and put it in the proposal but we're probably never going to talk to you again and all of this stuff it doesn't matter what technologies you use that will not be a successful endeavor but if you actually are authentic and change the way that you generate ideas if you work change your accountability to be to those communities rather than to the people who are giving you money then it doesn't matter what technology you use those will be successful conversations and in the spirit of still seeing the value of face-to-face communication I need to break us for lunch but we look forward to continuing this conversation with you our panelists will be sticking around for a little while I want to thank them so much for giving their time today and thank you as an audience for joining us have those fun I really like to add to the nuance