Month: July 2015

Using Technology to Fight Ebola

Christopher Whitaker

friends-of-the-congoAt last week’s Chi Hack Night, Kambale Musavuli, consultant at ThoughtWorks and spokesperson for Friends of the Congo, talked about his work in providing support to African techies at the frontline of the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea.

The Friends of the Congo is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, DC. The Friends of the Congo was established in 2004 to work in partnership with Congolese to bring about peaceful and lasting change in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire.)

Thoughtworks is a global software and consulting company focused on software design and delivery founded and based in Chicago. Thoughtworks has over thirty offices in thirteen counties. Part of Thoughtworks’ mission is to is to better humanity through software and help drive the creation of a socially and economically just world.

In November 2014, a team from ThoughtWorks Porto Alegre (Brazil), got involved in a mission to help tackle a crisis and more ThoughtWorks offices got involved as the crisis deepened. The team ran a hackathon to prototype possible solutions as well as worked with non-profit organizations like Save the Children to build apps like Ebola Ghana Alert and mHero.

One of the solutions that came out of the hackathon and by talking with workers on the ground, was a way to perform patient intake using iPads – which helped in an environment where wearing full protection gear made it difficult to use traditional pen and paper.

One of the things that Kambale was quick to point out that tech by itself can’t solve the problem. You have to be on the ground and understand what’s going on inside the nations affected. One of the lessons learned was that teams had to be prepared to work regionally and speak languages of not only the host country but their neighbors as well.

You can learn more about Kambale’s efforts at techresponsestocrisis.com/

 

Week One News You Can Use from Youth-Led Tech

Smart Chicago

Here’s an excerpt from our first newsletter for this summer program. If you’d like to get this to yer Inbox, sign up here.

Our first Youth-Led Tech program is off to a great start. This is our first weekly update made especially for the youth, parents, guardians, counselors, instructors, and everyone else who cares https://slack-files.com/files-tmb/T06U90JBB-F073DMAF7-ddc6f54633/slack_for_ios_upload_1024.pngabout the people in Youth-Led Tech. If you know someone who should be getting these emails, tell them to fill out this form.

lucia-roseland-projector

 

Time to sign up is running out

For anyone still thinking about signing up for this program, the time is now. We are making a final push for enrollment and we need all eligible youth to sign up here. Visit the project page for full program information.

Keep in mind that this program is supported by Get IN Chicago and is run by theSmart Chicago Collaborative. Get IN Chicago has 18 target populations and communities and we can only serve students who come from those specific communities. You can see a complete map of these communities here.

You can determine eligibility by finding neighborhood names using this tool maintained by the Chicago Tribune. If you have questions, comments, or issues about an application that has been declined, please contact me directly at the information below.

What we’re learning

This week we’ve focused on lots of startup activities— forms, figuring out meals we all like, getting computers set up, doing team-building, and (yes) even starting to learn how to make websites. One of our principles at Smart Chicago is openness— we love to share exact details of what we do and how we do it. Here’s the complete curriculum for our first week: Day One, Day Two, Day Three, Day Four, Day Five.

The instructors at each location go at their own pace, add their own flavor, and respond to youth input, so there may be differences between this curriculum and what the youth are learning so far in your location. Please download, share, and try this out at home— even if you can’t make it to our sessions this summer, we hope you can get value out of our work.