Adventures in Innovation

Another Perspective from Nepal - Social Media As a Civic Activism Tool.

Fri, 27 May 2011 08:49:00 -0700

Writers at various blogs and newspaper columns have responded to the protests demanding a constitution by the May 28 deadline organized largely on Facebook. In fact, I was inspired to write this article after reading the great summary at Global Voices from Bhumika Ghimire--"Nepal: Social Media as a Civic Activism Tool". Her article is only the tip of the Iceberg regarding coverage of this set of protests: much reporting, and even more commentary both attacking and defending the "Facebook protestors" exist all over Nepali media.

While I very much like the increasing recognition of social media-based civic efforts, the landscape hasn't been well covered. So I write this article to highlight two recent efforts which I think are equally worth mention but that have escaped the limelight due to a variety of reasons. (There are others as well--I will hopefully get to those in time).

1. Youth Volunteerism for Change: Lets Clean our Airport

Two youth organizations--AYON (Association of Youth Organizations of Nepal) and YUWA--called for youth throughout Kathmandu to gather together and clean the Tribhuvan International Airport first on April 30th and then on May 17th (after the first event was mostly rained out). The venue was selected because of "Visit Nepal Year 2011," an effort by the Tourism Ministry of Nepal, and a feeling that many venues in Kathmandu like the International airport are not very clean.

Yogesh Gyawali, a member of AYON, told me that part of the point was to highlight the relative uncleanliness of the airport despite enormous spending for the visit nepal year so far. Others at the event felt that the event was important for raising awareness about the need to clean one's city (Japanese volunteer Namita), as a symbolic gesture towards the need to clean (Koshish from Classic College), and because it built a community of like-minded individuals who were inspired to do something with their own hands (Himalaya).

I heard about the event through Facebook, and attended with great pleasure. For young people frustrated by the lack of progress in governmental processes, there is normally not much to do besides complain and protest. Even when they do, prominent cultural commentators like CK Lal write in derisive tones about the inherent class divisions that events organized on Facebook preclude, and the drinks in Jhamsikhel and Thamel that conclude them. The event cleaning the airport was an attempt to construct a process where some immediate *productive* action took place (a protest, and complaints online or offline, are ways to prompt action rather than to act, in contrast).

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I was impressed that 500 youth came on April 30, when the rain stopped activities early. And that 1000 youth showed up on May 17th, for the historically low-class/low-caste act of cleaning rubbish in Nepal.

2. 5000 signatures in support of the Supreme Court

Another Facebook-related piece of activism that impressed me tremendously were 5,000 signatures in support of the Nepali Supreme Court. The signatures were solicited to "follow the bright spot" of Nepal's Supreme Court's tough stand against corruption cases recently. Facebook was used to collect signatures in support of a letter organizers Ujwal Thapa and company had written to the Supreme Court commending their work. The organizers eventually delivered the letter to the Supreme Court, and got a statement from the Supreme Court Chief Justice that is now on YouTube ().

What impressed me most was the way this event approached social activism. Most activism that talk to higher powers so with an opposing stance: whether by writing a petition to change course of action, staging a protest, or complaining in the public sphere. This piece of activism went the other way: by supporting and appreciating something that the "activists" were in favor of. Co-organizer Ujwal Thapa calls it "follow the bright spots," a suggestion I highly support myself.

What I also liked about this movement was that it was slacktivism at its best. The effort required by everyone participating in this intervention was very small--they each just needed to like the page in order to offer up their name as a petition-signer. And on the other hand, that was all that was required for the Chief Justice and Supreme Court officials to realize that their recent actions are appreciated. Actually, the Facebook group also shared articles about the Supreme Court's work and had discussions related to corruption in Nepal surrounding the petition. But, the core activity was as simple as it needed to be--solicitations of names that supported a Supreme Court fighting corruption in Nepal.

Again, in a climate where the public sphere's main duty has been to talk truth in opposition to power, this campaign brought about a refreshing change by appreciating the effort of some civil servants who are doing well. In "Understanding Corruption," Lawrence Rosen writes that building professional pride may be one of the key components of reforming corruption at large. This effort is a small set in an ecosystem that fosters professional pride for activities that are morally right.

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Mobile/Social Media in the Nepali Media

Wed, 18 May 2011 20:27:00 -0700

For those not in the know, I am now in Nepal, and will try to blog from here about some of the Innovative things happening here, with the perspective of someone who has returned for four months after ten years of living abroad.

First, the pleasant surprise delivered by the likely most read newspaper in Nepal.

1. In the Kantipur daily, an SMS poll sponsored by the NIC bank.

2. In the weekly Friday edition, the "week's tweets."

3. In the weekly Friday edition again, HelloShukrabar's (translation: HelloFriday) Facebook page.

Also, at the end of almost any opinion article, there is an invitation to send in comments via SMS.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Translating Ushahidi the Ushahidi Way (On crowd-sourced / collaborative translation)

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 16:17:00 -0700

At the Innovations Lab Design Center, we have been working on an Ushahidi-based project. We have been hacking it to our own ends (not crisis-related, and only vaguely crowd-sourced) in fun ways I'll talk about next post, but I wanted to spend some time on an experiment we carried on along with the project: crowd-sourced software translation.

Working in a tri-lingual envrionment (Kosovo has three official languages; Albanian, Serbian, and English), language and translation are always on one's mind. So I decided to experiment with a translation service based on the web-based software Pootle, and see what it takes to get software translated to a new language.

In this post, I will talk about our experiences with crowd-sourced/collaborative translation, as well as the technical bits required to set up a similar project yourself.

CROWDSOURCED / COLLABORATIVE TRANSLATION

We have been working with the local free software organization (FLOSSK) ever since the beginning of the Innovations Lab, as both open software and open source culture are deeply important to the Lab. I was lucky enough to get here right as FLOSSK was holding their annual SFK software freedom kosovo conference, and FLOSSK members have been working on projects with us and holding some informal PHP language classes and some mini-workshops around mapping at the Lab. The members of FLOSSK are diverse and come from various different backgrounds, but the most active members are high school students with free time but little professional experience. As they had done other free software translation tasks in the past, and were interesting in translating Ushahidi when they heard about it, we started to work with them to translate the software. I set up the collaborative translation software Pootle, and volunteers who were visiting the Lab anyways for other activities (mainly a PHP class) dove into the translation.

Pootle is built for collaboration. It has two main tools that were helpful for the volunteers to motivate themselves for translation: a percentage that counts the percentage of total strings translated, and counts for the number of strings individual members translate. With those two numbers to guide them, three volunteers in particular (Shkelqim Ahmeti, Agron Demiraj, and Gent Thaci) pored into the translation, and finished translating some 6000 strings in a few weeks time, working for a few hours each.

During the process, they referenced the completion indicators frequently. Shkelqim translated a tremendous amount at home, and Agron sometimes dropped by the Innovations Lab just to do translation work. In a few weeks of off and on work, 100% of Ushahidi software (and most user-facing strings) has been translated into Albanian.

CHALLENGES

After the translation process was more or less complete, I packaged up the translation files and provided it to our software developer Arbnor Hasani to migrate into the Ushahidi site. Arbnor is an Albanian speaker (and a bit of a perfectionist), and he noticed right away that the some of the translations were a bit off-kilter; the translations were not yet ready to be put onto a public site. I am absolutely proud and thankful of the work that our high school student volunteers, never trained in translation (forget software translation), and trying this for the first or second time in their lives, did. However, given the moderate quality of translation strings, we now have to devise a strategy for revising these translations.

So far, the best idea we have is a process similar to a code-review. We plan to go through large portions of the translation done by FLOSSK members in front of them, and provide feedback about quality--whether the strings are good or bad, what improvements they need, etc. After that, we will go through a revision process that I hope that newly "trained" FLOSSK members can participate in. I think this is a good strategy because it gives skill and knowledge back to the volunteers in return for all the hard work they have put in. But I welcome other suggestions and opinions as well.

THE SOFTWARE

We used the web-based translation software Pootle for the project. During my time working with the One Laptop Per Child several years ago, I had worked with this really cool piece of translation software. It offered a web-based interface for translating strings, ability to collaboratively review translations, and suggestions based on the corpus of text already translating. And even more, it offered metrics of who translated what. From my time translating software to Nepali, I found that it was fun software to use because I could see how much work I was doing and the impact I was making to a project I cared about [1].

So I googled around a little bit, and spent a couple of hours setting up Pootle for our needs.

For a quick experimental project, the installation is stupidly easy [2]: you go to the Ubuntu software center, search for "Pootle" and hit install. A simple "sudo Pootleserver start" then gets the default server that Pootle comes with up and running on sqlite3 (a file-based database). Its a web app with fairly good usability after that, and it took me about five minutes to set up the project after I had my .po files ready to go. (See technical bits #1 and #2 at end of post if you want to do this yourself).

PARTING THOUGHTS

This was a cool experiment to run at the UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo for several reasons. The first is that it connects the various things we are doing at the Lab--developing software-based solutions for UNICEF counterparts (in particular using Ushahidi to aggregate youth NGOs for the Ministry of Youth Culture and Sports), providing youth increasing ways to use their creative energy for social good, as well as building up the free and open source community here in Kosovo. The second is that it reveals interesting challenges in attempts to work with non-formally-trained people to build quality products. And the third that it has given us some insights into the mechanisms of collaboration (progress-tracking has been an important tool, for example).

The experiment has been partially successful already. We have a rough-cut version of Ushahidi translations in Albanian. I am excited to see how the "code-review" type process with translation review proceeds, and carry forward similar translation projects with new software (as well as with the same software in other languages: Serbian!)

IF YOU WANT TO DO THIS YOURSELF [in language x]

Feel free to email me. Two pieces require technical chops (which for me meant some python and unix tools like sed and gettext): (1) generating (bilingual) .po file [3] from Ushahidi language files, which are monolingual and (2) re-integrating the translations into the Ushahidi source.

[1] - Nepali kids were getting software, and of course I like many felt that it was absolutely essential they be able to understand the interface.

[2] - If you have .po files. For more on .po files, see [3].

[3] - Before you can work with pootle, you will need to generate .po files. The short version of understanding .po files is this: it is a way to represent text in two different language, the original as well as the new one. [The long version is available here.] These files also have support for a couple of things useful in translation, like the ability to mark translations "fuzzy" (or "I'm not sure if this is right, but this is a good guess"). On the left below is a screenshot of such a file, viewed using text editing software.

On the right is the format of translation files Ushahidi uses. It is a set of php files that other software can directly execute to return useful translations for the software in general. It is a "mono-lingual" file, in that it only represents strings in one language, and not more. I had to convert the .php files into .po files, but that wasn't very hard. For integration, I used polib and a quick python command or two.

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Innovations Cafe #5, and Wikipedia-editing in the Classrooms of Kosovo

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 14:27:00 -0800

Developing the Albanian Wikipedia: Can the classroom help?

After an unplanned six week hiatus (sorry!), I am back with a brief report from the last Innovations Cafe, and description of a WIkipedia-editing project that I find very interesting. Hope you are excited :)

First, briefly, I have to say that the Innovations Cafes have been going well. The last one clocked 20+ people, and we had two vibrant project-oriented discussions: one around mapping the public institutions of Kosovo, and another around integrating Wikipedia editing into classrooms. I'll discuss mapping in another post; in this one I want to put down thoughts about Wikipedia editing in classrooms.

This is a project-in-formation, initially pitched to the lab by different members of FLOSSK. We have been helping youth develop ideas like this one from FLOSSK, and this post is an experiment to seeing how much my blog can help the process :) Arianit Dobroshi also wrote about this idea in Albanian on KosovoInnovations.

(The discussion).

The basic idea is this: the Albanian language Wikipedia is quite young, and needs a lot of work [1]. One way to develop it would be for students [in high schools and older] to edit it. To do this systematically, the project would work with teachers to assign students Wikipedia editing as homework, and offer whatever help is necessary in order to help the process along.

Of course, as with most things, the devil is in the details. Given that there is a lot of conversation about teachers telling their students not to use Wikipedia as a research source [2], will teachers actually buy into this? How would the process work in a classroom setting? How will project members convince teachers this is worth whatever extra hassle this will give them, or find teachers who will be fired up by this idea? Will this ever work in the classroom setting? Do teachers grade student-writing on Wikipedia?

Some of those questions have easier answers than others. I want to summarize a bit of the conversation we had, and the action items project members are thinking of, so that any readers can offer further thoughts.

First, Wikipedia editing has several benefits to the writer/editor, not just to Wikipedia and/or the world at large. These benefits were especially interesting to me, as different people articulated them in different ways. These benefits are important to think about, especially if project members need to convince teachers of the merits of Wikipedia.
- School students use computers a lot today, but in many "unproductive" ways (Facebook and Messenger, here in Kosovo). Wikipedia would be a productive way of doing the same.
- The assignments students get in classrooms of Kosovo are quite boring. Editing Wikipedia and working on the Internet would be more much fun than most average homework.
- Being able to edit a public webpage gives you a sense of power. You have the power to contribute to a source that others look to. This can lead to a personal sense of empowerment.
- The power to contribute to public information also shows people how easily information can be produced (and "manipulated"), which helps lend a critical eye towards public information. This, in turn, is a necessary skill for the citizens of a young democracy (and participants in the cultures of the Internet).
- Given Kosovo's status, editing English articles about Kosovo will no doubt lead to interactions with Serbs (both from Kosovo and outside). Some of this interaction will be nasty, but I personally hope that much of it will not be. Either way, Kosovo Serbs and Albanians will have to figure out different ways of mediating these interactions. This co-operation, whatever forms it takes, is only a good thing from my viewpoint.
- [And after I wrote much of this post, I found this list of school and university projects for editing Wikipedia, which echoes much of the spirit of what I said above, as points out a few more things.]
Writing for Wikipedia is different from just 'writing.'
- Writing for Wikipedia is not just 'writing.' In fact, the phrase "a state of mind.. appropriate for Wikipedia writing" came up in our conversation. Writing for Wikipedia means you have to follow Wikipedia's principles, which include "no point of view" and reliance on other sources rather than anecdotal information. So telling students to go and edit wikipedia isn't enough, they have to be taught (1) the mechanics of editing a wiki (2) about analytical and 'no point of view' writing, and (3) to look for, evaluate, and cite, sources.
Translation maybe the easiest win.
- Given the above, asking students to contribute original articles to the Albanian Wikipedia may be a tough sell, especially to begin with. Perhaps translation from the English Wikipedia is the right way to start, as even quite basic information has quite some room for improvement (see the articles on triangle, in English vs Albanian).
- Given this, perhaps the right teachers to get in touch with are Albanian teachers in high schools or universities. In fact, we found out that one of the tracks in the Faculty of Philology is a 'translation' track: perhaps project members could approach some professors there to assign article translation as homework.
The English Wikipedia should not be forgotten; there is plenty of room for improving articles about Kosovo.
One shouldn't forget students. In fact, some conversants felt that students would more readily get Wikipedia than teachers. However, to have a larger impact and to be a bit systematic about it all, most people wanted to try approaching teachers to integrate Wikipedia in classrooms. It was felt that the right kinds of students would grow into Wikipedia champions through classroom exposure.
No matter what, given that the project wants to work with teachers, getting teachers who will *get* the idea, and will be passionate about it, is the biggest challenge.

As a result of the above, those participating in the conversation agreed on approaching the Wikipedia writing project with three action items, for now:

Identify teachers in the translation department of the Philology department and get feedback on what they think about the idea.
Identify high-school Albanian language teachers (and English language teachers) with the same.
Identify any other teachers who believe in the power of the Internet in improving education, and work on making it as easy as possible for such teachers to ask students to write Wikipedia articles.

Thanks to members of FLOSSK for the source of the idea, especially Taulant Ramabaja and Arianit Dobroshi. Thanks to Petrit Augustini, Amy Schirmer, Gokhan Balaban, Sarah Jane, Elizabeth Gowing, Altin U, Agron D, Ardian H, Gent T, and others at the Innovations cafe for the thougths that I have tried to record above. Thanks in advance to whoever takes the ideas forward as it develops further. All opinion is, as always, mine.

[1] - There are only about 30,000 articles, and Kosovo-related articles need quite a bit of work. As a quick test, I pulled up the Albanian-language article on Prishtina, the capital city of Kosovo. The article is really quite weak, especially compared to the English version (or the German article on Vienna, to take a nearby capital as an example).

[1, cont.] These same thoughts apply for other Wikipedias as well. The Serbian one, with almost 140,000 articles, is doing much better, but could use much more work. Incidentally, a Nepali living abroad also sent me a concept of an idea similar to the one I describe here, but for the Nepali wikipedia.

[2] Wikipedia, being universally editable, is not accepted as a citable source by many teachers. While this is changing slowly, this short article's title (Will Wikipedia ever be legitimate?) brings forth the ever-present tension.

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And the public library

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:51:02 -0800

It really impressed me how much the Dutch think about their public spaces.
These pictures are from the Amsterdam public library; a tiny hint of the true awesomeness that lies within.

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Innovations Lab, in action

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 06:17:00 -0800

The Innovations Lab space is now up and running! These pictures are from a presentation we did among staff et al. a couple of days ago; more up to date ones are on our facebook page (http://facebook.com/KosovoInnovations).

The bean bags are excellent for meetings, and I cannot wait for the Innovations Cafe happening next Tuesday, when we'll fill the space, and see what young Kosovo innovators think!

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Innovations cafe...

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 03:39:00 -0800

Yesterday we had the first of our bi-weekly 'Innovations Cafe's. Before the lab space is ready, this is how project members are able to connect with each other, get some face 2 face time with the lab staff, and give updates about their projects. After the lab space is ready, more of this will happen in the space ambiently. But even with That, most like the idea of pre-scheduled hang out, chat, and feedback time at least two times a week.

Depending on how it goes, we are also thinking that this will be a good time to invite those wondering about what the Innovations Lab is to come and learn directly from the project participants.

I was impressed yesterday by how engaged everyone was, the feedback and conversations between projects, and that some people busted out their laptops immediately after the chats and stated working. I personally am looking forward to more of these, and more project work in the coming months!

(Apologize for not taking a better picture...)

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Designing the Innovations Lab Space

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 08:22:00 -0800

We had great results with a crowdsourced logo for the Innovations Lab (see http://facebook.com/kosovoinnovations for that!).

So I thought I would at least put up the design of the Innovations Lab for feedback here. I asked for and got some great design ideas on my own facebook page a couple of weeks ago. Based on that, and recommendations of better-people-than-I at UNICEF, we have come up with a tentative plan for the new Innovations Lab space. We would love feedback, and of course, attached is a a Google Sketch Up file to mess around with if you please!

(Notes: It is only to rough scale. Colors are a bit random, and the long table's top will probably not be glass. The chairs will certainly not be bright yellow either!)

The idea is that the long table space will be filled with computers. Two at each end (the table probably won't be rectangular, but I couldn't find a suitable non-recangular table in the Sketchup Galleries), and then a series of four to five desktop computers side by side on the right hand side. The other side will be empty, to be occupied by people doing desk work (Arduinos anyone?) or working on laptops. There will also be a couple of cabinets that we haven't figured out where to put yet, and we are working hard to make sure the areas painted red in the pictures are covered with whiteboard paint (something like http://ideapaint.com).

Anyways, enjoy the pic, and give us feedback if you have some. (And soon too, we are gearing up quite rapidly).

UILK_Sketchup.skb Download this file

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Ideation at the Innovations Lab

Sun, 14 Nov 2010 10:53:00 -0800

We have now been through the first round of project proposal review at the Innovations Lab. When asked for feedback about the application process, we have been told that more support needs to be provided to projects before they submit proposals. While we tried to provide office hours and some additional mentorship for the first time around, some ¹ have suggested that support at the Innovations Lab should be available much before "projects" are thought of. That we should think about supporting youth with "ideas" or problem statements, not just "projects." "Projects", after all, are fairly detailed, need quite some effort for formulation and proposal-writing, have a budget, and much more. What about nuggets of ideas or problem statements, which many can propose, and are far from "projects" that only a few can develop and follow through with?

Well, one thing I personally (and other members of the team here) feel is that ideas aren't the hardest part of innovation; the hard parts are the implementation, the follow through, the tweaking of the idea, and actually making it work. (Smarter people, including serial entrepreneurs and writers about entrepreneurship I have read, largely agree.)

But still, in a land of high unemployment, one wishes someone would try out an SMS job board (like Souktel). In a city where indoor public venues are filled with smoke despite legislation to the contrary, I wish someone would start campaigns to decrease smoking. I'm sure NGOs or other groups with specific and concrete problems might not mind passing them onto others with talent or capacity to help "solve" them. And I wish that the Innovations Lab provided some framework for listing out what was just said in this paragraph.

So, a challenge for the Innovations Lab is to build appropriate mechanisms for fostering the creation of problem statements (like, create more jobs in Kosovo), ideas that contain possible avenues of attack (like, create SMS job boards), in addition to projects (which would contain a plan for how to launch the job board, who to target, the budget, etc.).

Some potential ideas that may help:

An Idea Wall at the Innovations Lab. Originally, we were thinking of this as cork board, with lots and lots of sticky notes. These would be organized in some way (perhaps by problem/idea/project), each with "comments" coming from others at the lab in the form of more sticky notes. This would not be a "solution" ² to the problem, obviously, rather an input into the creative processes of the minds that walk into the Innovations Lab. We are now thinking of having entire walls at the Innovations Lab covered in IdeaPaint, and that some of this space will be used as the Idea Wall.

Accepting lab members without "projects". In the current formulation of the lab, all Kosovo youth wanting to use the lab (on a regular basis) must have projects they are working on. Relaxing this constraint to accept those working from problem statements or ideas rather than "project proposals" would be one way to address this challenge. Which, as usual, offers an interesting trade-off. Relaxing the constraint completely would mean admitting any Kosovo youth to the Innovations Lab, and investing quite some facilities and mentorship resources into him/her. How does one justify such an investment? Putting it starkly, how can we figure out whether someone working on "refining a problem statement" or "developing an idea" is actually working towards something, or is just wasting his/her and our time? I believe many will not be, but the question this avenue of approach brings along is whether it is possible to tell.

Online Ideation Platforms. Jerri Chou has been working on many projects to foster ideation: ChangeConnect is one, InnovationAfrique another. She and I are also familiar with a few other similar projects, including MIT Global Challenge, Africa Rural Connect, OpenIDEO, and Ashoka Changemakers competitions, among others. I have been doing some browsing, and it seems that the essential elements of these systems are: forging new connections, allowing collaboration and discussions around ideas, and allowing "remixing" of ideas. So the Innovations Lab team will be doing some thinking about what would make sense for our context. I already like the fact that whatever we do, there will be follow through possibilities (resources, motivation, mentorship etc.) at the lab itself. But even before, a system that echoes some of the existing ones I've listed, and somehow synchs with our offline "Idea Wall" will probably be the best fit.

Others?

[1] -- Credit where credit is due. Maesy Angelina, members of FLOSSK, and members of the project review committee.

[2] -- One of the things I take to heart from my time at MobileActive.org is that there are no "solutions" to problems, especially in development contexts. Press releases like to talk about "solutions" all the time, but there are very few "solutions" to tough social issues; tradeoffs and unintended consequences always rear their ugly heads. What I mean here is that I don't even think of the Idea Wall as a "solution" in the sense a press release would use it. The Idea Wall is necessarily a small part of helping this process.

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So... What is this Innovations Lab again?

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 15:51:00 -0700

After submitting a project proposal to the Innovations Lab (By Youth For Youth projects), a Kosovo youth (DR) asked: so what exactly is the Innovations Lab again? Since I have been trying to articulate it concisely, I felt I should share it on the blog. So what follows is a whirlwind tour of our thinking regarding what the Innovations Lab¹ is all about.

Process The Innovations Lab provides a process (frame?) for youth in Kosovo through which to enact projects that benefit other youth in Kosovo. The process/frame that we are beginning with is described below, and we will be iterating based on feedback from lab members and other youth here (and you, if you have any to share):

Youth apply to the Innovation Lab with a "project proposal," which is usually team-based, but can be individual too.
Accepted project participants become "members" of the Innovations Lab, and meet each other as soon as projects are approved. Projects are reviewed every month.
The Innovations Lab members work on their projects, inside and outside the physical lab.
Every two weeks, all members that can come (including at least one member per project) gather for an "Innovations Cafe". The idea is to share progress with others and bounce around ideas in an informal atmosphere. We are also considering to make this a space in which newcomers interested in finding out more about the lab can come, hang out, and develop ideas.
Every two months, all projects present to a public audience their projects and progress in the last two months. The public audience will consist of other youth, organizations and institutions that work with youth, as well as the general public.

I realize that youth interested in projects will not be focused on process as much as we are, but we want to make sure there is continued engagement by the youth with each other, the lab, as well as the general public.

I think it will also be helpful for the lab members to have regular deadlines and milestones to make sure their projects are moving. What I like about the events (which help track progress) we have planned is that they involve reporting to peers and the public rather than to an institution. I hope this helps youth be productive without being threatened or becoming too institutional.

//

Support The Innovations Lab provides support to Kosovo youth to do projects. This includes not only (first and foremost) mentorship, but also equipment and infrastructure, the Innovations Lab space, a small budget, links to institutions national and international, as well as "credibility" and institutional backing.

Mentorship I consider mentorship one of the most fundamental parts of the Innovations Lab. The Innovations Lab provides mentors to help youth enact their vision. The mentors help youth articulate ideas into projects, provide feedback to the projects every step of the way, help lab members set realistic expectations as and help measure themselves. The mentors also push the lab members as both idea generators and as doers.
Equipment and Infrastructure The lab will have computers, mobile phones, GPS devices, cameras/videocameras, and other equipment youth may need to engage in projects. In addition, we will also build up "informational infrastructure" in the form of easy web hosting, access to SMS gateways, and/or software to do projects. This infrastructure will probably be built as needed (I am personally a fan of airplanes that are built as they are flying).
Space In addition to the equipment, there will be creative physical space in the Innovations Lab. This includes whiteboards, movable sticky notes and markers, couches to ruminate on, some carpet space to spread papers on, and other physical facilities that encourage creativity.
Budget Many projects will need modest budgets to get started, and we have funding for upto 5,000 Euros for each project. We are currently requiring lab members to work voluntarily, and this budget to be used only for supporting costs.
One worry I have is that Innovations Lab projects may become more about getting this money than developing and implementing innovative ideas to serve Kosovo youth. The current batch of proposals (and perhaps the volunteer clause?) has assuaged my fears considerably, but this is a concern worth mulling over my entire time here.
Links to Kosovo's Institutions The short of this is that a recent opinion poll showed a majority of youth in Kosovo feeling "little" or "not at all" say in decisions that affect them. Many of Kosovo's institutions, on the other hand, seem to be looking for youth (and child) engagement and participation. We are hoping Innovations Lab public events are one way youth will communicate with Kosovo institutions, and that other avenues will come up as the Innovations Lab progresses.
Credibility and Institutional Backing One of the first round of project applicants will be dealing with her municipality government if her project is accepted. In order for her to talk to the municipality as a "young person with a project idea," she gets credibility and institutional backing through the Innovations Lab.
International Links Another thing the Innovations Lab will provide is a link for Kosovo youth to others around the world doing similar things. The MIT Media Lab's Department of Play, which develops tools for youth and children to participate in civic matters using technology, is one example of an International project we will collaborate with. Linda Raftree and Plan's YETAM (although they don't know it yet) will likely be another.

A Focus on Technology

Last, and perhaps the least, the Innovations Lab will encourage a focus on technology. It is absolutely crucial for Kosovo's young people to engage each other in technologically mediated forms. They can and should (and already) tap into global collaborative communities that build open source software. They can and should (and already) embrace mobile phones as more than just a communication device. They can and should (and already) take control of social networks and social media like Twitter/Facebook/YouTube/whatever to organize, mobilize, record, and converse.

How much we will push these technological possibilities is a part of another larger question we are facing in the Innovations Lab (for another day, but the gist is: what is the right balance between the ideas of youth and our ideas about what youth should be focused on), but suffice it to say that we will be thinking hard about how to get Kosovo's youth to engage more with open source, mobile, and social technologies.

So, there you have it! A distillation of much of my thoughts about how to get Kosovo youth to innovate for Kosovo youth. Much of this thought is built on the whole team's work as well, so credit where credit is deserved. All problematic issues, I take responsibility for.

Please, as always, feel free to leave suggestions, comments, nitpicks, and corrections :)

[1] - The "Innovations Lab" is made of two parts, as I explained before. But throughout this article, and perhaps in the future as well, I may be sloppy, and use "Innovations Lab" to refer to the By Youth For Youth projects at the lab. This is because this is the more public facing part of the lab, as well as the part we are getting started on first. Apologies about the sloppiness.

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The first set of proposals are in!

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 13:11:22 -0700

For the first round of Innovations Lab "By Youth For Youth" projects, we have the following proposals (in order of project submission):

- Building an "electronic" library. This would be something between a cyber-cafe, a library, and a youth community space. (Yet others are thinking of digitizing Albanian books for this library in the future).
- Running youth training courses for using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
- Mapping polling stations before upcoming elections (in late November/early December, haven't been announced yet); linking the government's website that gives you the address of the polling station to openstreetmaps so you see the exact location to vote in.
- Translation the Open Street Map Wiki guidebook to Albanian, and later training municipality staff to use Open Street Maps.

Comments? Hints for those submitting proposals? Any similar projects you know of?

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Leaving the youth in "youth"

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 04:26:00 -0700

I was speaking with a Kosovar colleague about the Innovations Lab By Youth For Youth projects, and he presented an interesting challenge for us to think about.

Whenever you get "youth" together in a context of projects, proposals, social change, or speaking to possible donors, there is a danger that they lose their youthful vigor.

The colleague pointed out that if he were (still) a young Kosovar trying to design an innovative project, he would organize a text-bombing campaign where a politician's phone would constantly ring with text messages coming from all sorts of different young people. He thought this would let youth vent innovatively, but also point out the incredible communications costs a politician's phone is associated with (especially compared to average Kosovo salary etc.)

And at the same time, he told me that he would be extremely surprised if youth in the Innovations Lab came up with an idea like this. It reeks of youthful vigor, and a fondness for pranks. But whenever you get youth in a room and have them think about projects, even innovative projects, they tend to think more straightforwardly, by the books so to speak. They forget their needs sometimes, their creativity at other times.

This is highly related to the problem in participatory design where "participants absorb the values of the design team to such an extent that they lose touch with the requirements of users not involved in the design process.¹" It is one of many in participatory design. But since my colleague (who has worked with plenty of projects with Kosovar youth) explicitly pointed to this one, we will thinking about how to avoid it in the Innovations Lab. Any hints from projects before, or thoughts in general, are welcome in the comments.

[1] - Designing for social justice - people, technology, learning; page 23, under "Doing participatory design."

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Kosovo-as-a-Country in the world of technology

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 04:20:00 -0700

To help youth develop projects for the UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo, we have been holding active brainstorms where youth express problems and possible "projects" to help with those problems. Many fascinating issues have come up in these brainstorms, but I wanted to share one in particular.

During a round of "name, place of origin, and 'one thing i'd like to fix in the world,'" two Kosovars said (re-phrased):

I would like to make it possible to select Kosovo as my country when I sign up to online services (like Facebook).

I don't know why it struck me so, but I really felt the need to share this need that youth here feel. Perhaps I like it because it just screams out the political nature of tools and technologies, which we often think of as separated from politics. And perhaps I like it because it brings me back to the most interesting question I came away from the Global Voices Summit with: what happens when public spaces and conversations are hosted on private infrastructure¹?

Whichever it is, it is an important identity issue for Kosovar youth. It is hard to picture the Kosovo government devoting many resources to this; it is more likely busy advocating nations and institutions to recognize its independence. But what matters for youth is recognition by the "institutions" that they interact with.

I am really interested in discussing this with youth members of the Innovations Lab in the future. For now, I will leave with another youth's desire expressed during the same go-around (again, re-phrased):

I would like for Kosovo to have its own soccer and sports teams².

[1] - I suppose I should explain this question a little more. Basically, today's public conversations (like someone saying, I think our community really should have X happen in it) happen on sites like Facebook and YouTube, which are private companies. The rules saying what kinds of things we are aloud to say and not say on these sites is totally their own decision--while the public may choose to say something about the conversations about their community, these sites can choose to ignore them. Basically, we are having "public" discussions, but private companies make the decision or whether or not we should be having those discussions. If you are as fascinated by me about this issues, I would recommend delving further with Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York's explorations.

[2] - Kosovo has no team of its own, and many Kosovars I'm told play in the Albanian football team. Recent spurts of unrest regarding national/ethnic tensions arising from Kosovo have also happened during and around sports games.

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The UNICEF Innovations Lab in Kosovo!!

Sun, 17 Oct 2010 03:29:00 -0700

We have been working hard these past few weeks here in Prishtina to refine a concept of an Innovations Lab relevant and appropriate for Kosovo. I"m happy to say that we have a clear notion of what this might be, after weeks of discussion, and are rapidly ramping forward.

On the one hand is the situation in Kosovo and the need for increasing youth participation and reliable data. Kosovo is a very young country, historically: it declared independence three years ago, and many nations and international institutions still don't recognize it. But the youth is more than historical. It is estimated that 53% of Kosovo's population is under 25¹. Opinion polls show that more than half of this group ("youth") feels that they partipicate "little" or "not at all" in decisions that affect them. More than half of this group is also considered unemployed and unskilled. And all the estimated figures I'm throwing around show another deep need in Kosovo: data. There hasn't been a census for some thirty years, and the lack of reliable data comes out repeatedly in conversations.

On the other hand is the promise of open source, mobile, and social technologies. Open source: lets you adapt, scale, and work with a global community in an open setting. Mobile: loosens constraints around access, reach, and communication possibilities. Social: lets people organize, mobilize, and collaborate cheaply and easily.

So, we came up with an idea for an Innovations Lab that functions something like this:

part 1 UNICEF-specific component that helps UNICEF counterparts (various ministries, NGOs) and UNICEF use open source and mobile tech for data collection, monitoring, and and more. Think projects like ChildCount, or Nutritional Surveillance.
part 2 "By Youth For Youth" projects. This is kind of like an incubator for social change projects that youth can propose. There are only two criteria: the idea has to benefit Kosovar youth, and it has to have a project leader who is a Kosovar youth between 18 and 25. Examples of projects include things like establishing an electronic library and digitizing books for it, mapping polling stations before the next elections are here and distributing maps to young people.

We're currently trying to ramp both the parts of the Innovations lab up, hiring a software developer for part 1 and actively helping youth with project ideas and proposals for part 2. I will share more details about By Youth For Youth part of the project lab soon.

Any feedback on either part, as always, is welcome.

[1] - When I first heard this (before getting here), it didn't sound that drastic. But this statistic is really re-inforced by the streets of Prishtina. To compare, the median age is the US is around 35+ (ie, 50% of people are older than 35).

[Note: name is no longer UNICEF Kosovo Innovations Lab, it is UNICEF Innovations Lab Kosovo].

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