Presentation: Tweet"Technology for Development: Failures, Successes, and Building a Global Network of Local Talent"

UNICEF’s Tech4Dev teams work closely with private sector and academia to create open-source scalable solutions to some of the world’s most challenging problems. These solutions (which often, simply, use the magic of technology to create faster paper) are built with end users in some of the most difficult operational environments on the planet. Recent successes have RapidFTR – a tool that uses mobile devices to register unaccompanied children and reunite them with their families after disasters and RapidSMS – an open-source platform for developing enterprise, national scale mobile data collection systems. Recent failures have included a prototype emergency information kiosk and a partnership to collect stories from children using mobile phones. Based on some of these successes and failures, this discussion will examine how to realistically and authentically engage the global technical community (developers, engineers, designers, etc.) in the challenges of international development and how to ensure that those engagements create the next generation of hackers, thinkers and builders in the places where their skills are most needed.

Keywords: mobile, design for development, humanitarian emergencies, collaboration, realtime data, tech4dev, east Africa, teaching open source

Target audience: designers, developers, pm’s, people interested in engaging humanitarian challenges, open source evangelists, team leads