A couple of years ago I found myself sitting with the organiser of a cultural centre in one of the many favelas that ring Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The favela was mainly controlled, he explained, by paramilitary gangs. They provided a measure of safety to the community but at a considerable cost. Their candidates were the elected local politicians. They controlled access to utilities and ran the shared taxis that shuttled people into town. Nothing of any significance happened in the community without their approval.

The favela was poor. People eked out a living as best they could. Conditions were in some places primitive. I wondered what gave him hope in the face of such apparently desperate conditions.

“Education gives us hope,” he answered. “Education to get skills and better jobs and technology to connect us. That is what gives us hope.”

The recipe  – education + technology = hope – is one you find people clinging to all around the world.

The centre in Rio was lucky because it was an affiliate of the inspirational Brazilian social organisation CDI, which had provided computers, internet connections, classes and tutorials. CDI’s mission was to allow people to learn and take greater control over their everyday lives, through the creative use of technology.

I was lucky enough to be shown around by Rodrigo Baggio, CDI’s founder, who then asked me to join CDI Europe as a trustee and advisor.

When CDI came to apply its principles to the challenges of motivating young people to learn in the developed world, it quickly found it needed to adapt to a world where computers were more common and young people were turned on by smart phones.

So through the painstaking work of Iris Lapinski, CEO of CDI Europe, we managed to create Apps for Good, a programme that uses smartphones to pull young people into an intensive programme of creative design and entrepreneurship, as they research, create and make prototype apps for mobile phones.

All around the world people want education. But everywhere you go people also realise that much of the way we provide education is dull and unengaging. Young people, especially at secondary school, are often physically present but psychologically absent. The skills and knowledge they are being taught – to recount facts, recall information, repeat answers – often seems disconnected from the world they already live in, one which demands the ability to adapt knowledge and information to new contexts, to work with others to devise better solutions to problems. Very few schools make full use of the creative potential of new technologies but instead use computers merely as a new tool to deliver traditional forms of learning.

Apps for Good attacks all those issues head on. It aims to draw more people into learning by creating a highly motivating programme that offers the right mix of structure and experimentation, creativity and self-discipline, challenge and support. In its own small way the programme is a model for a new way to learn, together, with support, learning by thinking and doing, making and then presenting and selling your idea. It is a little gem.

The idea to create CDI Europe came about in Salvador, Brazil, at the meeting of a large financial company. CDI was invited to discuss the area of social responsibility and technology, during the discussions it emerged the bank’s CSR offices were located in the UK. From there the idea to set up a CDI office in London was born.

Soon after we started to mobilize to create CDI Europe. The initial idea was to a set-up a fundraising branch, similar to CDI’s office in New York, whose objective it would be to gain resources to support CDI’s work in Latin America.

Several months into the process of establishing CDI Europe, carrying out studies, road shows and networking, I started to realize that we were generating significant interest in CDI’s methodology and the concept of transforming lives through technology. Soon organizations began to ask about the possibility of bringing the methodology to the UK. This question inspired us and we began the process of imagining how we would apply our proven model from the developing world, to the developed world.

The requests from organizations and individuals continued. However, the process was put in motion when Esmée Fairbairn, a leading UK-based foundation, decided to invest in a feasibility study. The study focused on how CDI could replicate its methodology in a way that would create positive impacts for individuals living in low-income communities in London.

Over several months a team of people from several regional and international CDI offices helped to co-create this proposal. The study found that smartphones offered great potential to generate digital inclusion amongst young people, from where the concept of Apps For Good was developed.

Soon after the feasibility study, we gained the support of a big partner – Dell. Dell believed in the power of the idea and decided to invest in a pilot. For me it was a moving moment to see close-up the reality of High Trees community organization in London and to see the young people enthused and engaged in the project. Through this experience of learning while doing we carried on developing the Apps for Good concept.

Apps for Good continues to inspire me and the CDI network through its embracing of our mission to transform lives and communities through technology. The use of smartphones on the program indicates to us the future path for digital inclusion, as millions of individuals are gaining their first access to the online world through these mobile technologies.

From the moment in which we first saw the applications designed by these young people, the strength of their ideas and the changes in their thinking brought about by the course, learning to think critically about the use of technology, we were inspired and motivated to expand the program’s reach. Today we are in over 40 secondary schools throughout England.

Now, I would like to invite and mobilize individuals and organizations in the UK to get behind the Apps for Good movement, so that we, together, can increase the impact and quality of our work.

]]> http://cdieurope.eu/2012/02/07/origin-cdi-europe/feed/ 0 http://cdieurope.eu/2012/01/23/cdi-network-annual-meeting/ http://cdieurope.eu/2012/01/23/cdi-network-annual-meeting/#comments Mon, 23 Jan 2012 17:16:02 +0000 admin http://cdieurope.eu/?p=1648 Luisa Gockel reviews her last trip to Brazil, for the CDI Network Annual Meeting. 

The 13^th CDI Network Annual meeting took place in November 2011 at Itaipava, Rio de Janeiro. Sixty leaders from various CDI regional and international offices discussed pressing issues such as electronic waste, the role of mobile technology in our programmes, social media, cloud computing and changes to our methodology. For the first time in 13 years, the agenda was 100% built by their participants using Facebook. Tim Berners-Lee bless the social media!

Two task forces were created; one to look at e-waste and the other one at the revision of CDI’s methodology. The network unanimously decided that we need a unified plan led by the headquarters to tackle the e-waste issue. CDI Brasilia is leading the advocacy efforts to pressure the Brazilian government for more regulation on who should be responsible for discarding electronic waste such as computers and mobile handsets.

CDI Campinas is leading the efforts to publish an updated version of our renowned 5-step methodology. The idea is to bring ICT training and community action to the 21^st century trough the use of social media, blogs, mobile, tablets and video. The work is very advanced and CDI Campinas’ presentation was one of the highlights of the Annual Meeting.

All leaders left Itaipava with the commitment to improve the information flow between all CDI offices and to make a better use of the different expertises present at CDI network. Because we are stronger together!

CDI was recently selected as one of the Top 100 Best NGOs in the world by The Global Journal, once again showing the strength of the CDI as leading NGO.

In November Interim CEO and Head of Partnering Debbie Forster attended the World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE). WISE is an international initiative and platform for a multitude of established and new educational actors to collaborate proactively all year round. Here is her round up:  

Going  to Doha, Qatar was an exciting change for the start of  November  and I think I’m still working through all the things I saw, learned and people I met.  CDI Europe was invited to give a presentation at the World Innovation Summit for Innovation.  It was a great opportunity not just to share with others what we were doing on Apps for Good, but a chance to listen, learn and work with education innovators around the world.

With over 1200 people in attendance, every session, workshop and even the coach rides to and from the conference venue gave me an opportunity to talk about what was happening in education, what problems different countries were facing and the exciting innovations which were taking place to address those problems around the world.    This year’s theme was “Changing Societies, Changing Education” and each day had a different focus.  The first day looked at how innovation and change happen in different sectors, the second focused on innovation in the education sector and the final day explored a vision for the future.

It was both comforting and daunting to realise how universal the problems were, how much everyone agreed that most education was not preparing young people for the challenges for tomorrow and how hard it was to change direction for education systems.  More inspiring was seeing the many programmes and initiatives which were springing up around the world to address this.  Apps for Good fits in that overall drive and it was great to see how much interest there was in the our programme outside the UK.  This opens some exciting opportunities for us in future.

It was also interesting to see how many programmes around the world are starting to focus on teaching young people about problem-solving,  innovation and entrepreneurship.  Everyone seemingly agrees that this is what is needed to address the increasingly complex set of problems facing us; there is growing concern that current education systems are rarely developing this in our young people.  The key challenge discussed by all centred around how to scale these programmes, how to learn from each other and to leverage this to get the maximum impact from these innovations.

The discussions of innovation and scaling going on throughout the conference made the conference worthwhile in its own right.  But what it really resonated was the fact that this was Doha, in the Middle East, after the Arab Spring.  This flavoured every discussion, challenged assumptions and offered both hope and threw down a gauntlet to all at the conference.  The status quo is no longer unchallengeable–talk of an “education spring” echoed throughout the week to varying optimism, caution and cynicism, caution and cynicism mostly from the middle-aged attendees (like me!?).  More interesting was the input of the younger attendees.  One young woman, a newly qualified doctor in Doha,  offered the challenging observation that these innovative programmes did not empower people so much as accepting and helping the young people see how much power they already possess.    We hear that echoed from the young people who have completed the Apps for Good course.  Many admit they come to the course lured by the exciting technology but what makes the real difference is the realisation that they can find, define, and create solutions themselves…and “the real world” listens to them and takes that seriously.  It is a powerful concept for young people, and one we want to continue to build on in Apps for Good.

To find out more about Apps for Good visit our website.

If you’re already on our newsletter list, we’ll move you across. Otherwise, you can join the newsletter and view our April’s issue here.

It’s been a while since my last blog post about LWF in January, but apart from us running courses , Dragons Den and pitch events (see our Apps for Good blog), we have had to navigate a significant change in channel strategy.

So let’s give you some context…

Local Marketing challenges

When you start a new project or venture you always encounter unexpected problems. Over the past year a surprising number of things have gone right for Apps for Good (massive expert support, public attention, interesting app ideas like Stop&Search, huge growth in public market awareness and use of apps, etc.), but there was one key thing we kept struggling with: local marketing and the number of young people applying to our open courses at High Trees.

(Once we got them to apply and come to the course, our educators worked their magic and few dropped out, but just getting people onto the course was a huge issue)

So during January and February 2011 we put things to the test and ran 2 “taster workshops” at community locations in Central London and Brighton in order to see whether our challenge was South London specific or whether there was a deeper cause.

The turn-out of both workshops (5 and 1 young people attending) made it really clear that this was not specific to one local organisation or area, but far more systemic: getting young people who have dropped out of education and are not in employment or training onto a new technology course (or event taster workshop) is hard and tedious work.

System challenges

On top of that, we had to learn that the overall system of employment advice and support is also not working in our favour:

(1)    Local Job Centres refused to refer young unemployed people to our courses as we were not a preferred and pre-paid supplier; they were also worried about the potential issue of benefit fraud if unemployed people earned an income through apps; they wanted to see more employment advice as part of the core course time rather than the plug-in; and the list of concerns went on and on…

(2)    We were not able to incentivise intermediaries or other social organisations to refer young people to us on an ongoing basis, since we could not provide sustainable value in return: Apps for Good is a free course, so we cannot pay financial commissions. And even if the course is very successful, intermediaries referring do not see any direct benefits from young people succeeding, e.g. better results, more indirect impact which translates into more funding. Collaboration is therefore always driven by personal enthusiasm rather than tangible benefits for referral organisations. And in a time of severe funding cuts, this is a hard sell to make.

The way forward

The result of all this learning, we are now primarily focusing our expansion for 2011 on the area where we are seeing most demand and where there is the biggest potential for scale: schools.

At Central Foundation Girls Schools more than 40 girls applied for 20 places on the September 2010 Apps for Good course, so far the only time that we have been strongly over-subscribed. And as we are in conversations with dozens of schools to run the course as an after-school activity (and in a selected few cases we will be testing it as part of the curriculum) we are taking Apps for Good to where the demand is.

Sounds too opportunistic?

I don’t think so. Our aim is to bring leading-edge problem-solving and technology skills to as many young people as we can.  We had to realise that, for the moment at least,  we just don’t have the marketing muscle or budget to compete with commercial brands and get mindshare of young people outside existing high-volume marketing channels like schools.

We haven’t completely given up on NEETs and continue conversations with different youth organisations and networks.  But we now think that getting young people excited about Apps for Good when they are 13-17 years old and haven’t yet dropped out of school is not a bad place to be either in terms of long-term impact.

As our public visibility, branding and the number of app success stories grow, we will actively look at the community space again – probably from 2012 onwards.

I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts and comments about this issue, and if you have ideas we can use to address this channel problem then please let me know.

At LWF we had the honour of speaking right after Karen Cator, Director, Office of Educational Technology, US Department of Education. Pretty nervous, but well-prepared, I climbed the stage which I shared with two of our students, Amarah (13) and Ahmed (23). They did amazingly well in front of an audience of nearly 1,000 people to share our current thinking on what we are about and what we are trying to achieve. I won’t write it all up here, but if you want to know what we are all about  just watch the video:

Once I had given my speech I could relax and really listen to the great speakers Graham had lined up. Speakers as well as delegates at LWF seemed to fall into two groups:

• People who are using technology to improve, but equally sustain traditional learning models
• People who are using technology to re-invent learning and challenge traditional learning roles.

While there are justifications for both approaches, I obviously got more excited about the latter. But then, at Apps for Good, we are currently not restricted by the ICT curriculum.

There were many things that resonated with me: Keri Facer speaking about the importance of embedding technology practice in communities and Lord David Puttnam speaking about the need to increase productivity in learning rather than class hours. This is currently one of the things we are investigating as part of our work to continually refine and improve the Apps for Good course. Towards the end, Jimmy Wales spoke about scale as a key challenge for learning initiatives and again this felt very familiar as we are now gearing up to scale significantly over the next few months.

It was inspiring to see how many teachers are passionate about technology and education. I was only annoyed that I had not mentioned our plans to opensource our full content via an online platform during the course of this year to allow anyone anywhere to run their own Do-it-yourself Apps for Good course. If I had, I wouldn’t have had to explain this 20 times afterwards….

But now I know that people from Australia, to the US and UK would find it useful – and that’s a huge motivation for me.

So what is the Nominet Trust? The Nominet Trust is a UK charity that provides support to organisations who are contributing to an accessible, safe and diverse Internet used to improve lives and communities. It is passionate about supporting imaginative uses of web technology that help to solve social problems.

Dell remains our key strategic partner for Apps for Good, and have granted us a Dell YouthConnect award of £300,000 to continue our Apps for Good programme in 2011.  Dell has been a strong supporter of CDI and Apps for Good from the start (Michael Dell even tweeted about us recently!) so we are very happy to be continuing our partnership with them.

Kevin from Novoda also invited the Apps for Good students to attend Droidcon and to speak about Apps for Good. You can find my presentation here below, and while the first few slides are pretty much a standard introduction to CDI, the final slides are not: we have been learning so much about specific problem solving and specific solution design that I don’t even know where to start.

We will be writing about this more, but basically if you cannot find 3-5 people with names, faces and real lives who have a specific shared problem, you have no market. We have been taking some inspiration from the guys at Strategyn and a lot of practical expertise from our experts, and will share more of that very soon.

Jeff Gilfelt, developer mentor of the Stop&Search team at the first Apps for Good course, presented his ASBOrometer app as an example how data.gov.uk data can be used.

The MySociety community spoke about quite a few of their new projects including FixMyTransport; and then there were Emma & friends from RewiredState and Laura from FrontlineSMS. It was an inspiring day and interesting to see how many different people work in this field now or get excited by it.

Apps for Good has a broader remit than government data, but I’m sure that sooner or later students on the course will be passionate about ideas that require public data, so it was good for me to make more links and to meet some familiar faces.

My presentation focused on CDI and the key learnings from the first course. It became very clear to me during the day, that there is one thing everyone who is serious about solving civic problems needs to keep in mind: unless you are a genius like Steve Jobs, most disruptive innovations emerge when you ask the people most impacted. Stop & Search came about because Aaron, Sat and Gregory had real life experience of how it feels being stopped as a young man in difficult areas in South London – which often does not apply to white, middle-aged and middle-class developers [no offence!].

I think the strength going forward lies in combing diverse skills and life experiences on an equal and respectful footing. Then, true disruptive innovation can flourish… OK, enough preaching…

I have been told that there will be an audio recording. Once I get hold of it, I will update this post.