Just got word from Chris that Jeff Warren (Newsflow/Cartagen, Josh Levinger (VirtualGaza), and Nadav Aharony (Comm.unity) are headed to Amman, Jordan, for an amazing workshop hosted by UNICEF Innovation and our friends at Mobile Active.
It’s called “Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in the Middle East”. Snips from the registration site:
UNICEF Innovation and MobileActive.org invite you to attend a three-day workshop on distributed and real-time data collection, monitoring, and visualization of data with mobile technology.
What is this About?
With the ubiquity of mobile technology, data collection and monitoring of key indicators from the ground up by affected populations is now possible. Mobile technology in the hands of people can now be more than a person-to-person communication medium but can be used for capturing, classifying and transmitting image, audio, location and other data, interactively or autonomously.
By involving people in defining and participating in their own data collection, this approach can address significant unmet challenges in large-scale data collection for public health and citizen participation.
In this three-day workshop, we will explore the critical issues, technologies, and architectures involved in collecting and utilizing data-from-below, bringing together the key technology and research leaders on distributed data collection and distribution in the Middle East.
What are the Goals?
[…]
- An exploration of key issues in citizen-driven data collection in the Middle East. These include technologies, systems, architecture, tools, standards, and people, among others.
- Kick-start a regional working group / community around open-source data collection, aggregation and visualization using mobile technology
- Map the landscape in the Middle East of applications/technologies, developers, and key thought leaders around real-time distributed data collection, monitoring, and visualization using mobile technology?
- Help UNICEF build a roster of potential partners, possible vendors, academic institutions of interest, and groups or individuals to advance UNICEF regional goals.
- Prototype new products or improvements of existing products about distributed data collection.
The impetus for the workshop is UNICEF’s national-scale project in Iraq collecting data from various populations about key indicators and use that data to effect policy and programmatic changes that can improve the lives of children.
As part of this work, MobileActive.org, a global community of people using mobile technology for social impact, and UNICEF partnered to explore, with key leaders in the Middle East, critical issues on large-scale, citizen-driven and bottom-up data collection.
[…]Why Attend?
If you are a thought leader representing academia, foundations, civil society organizations and the private sector in the Middle East exploring data collection from the ground up with mobile tehnology, we’d like you to contribute your experiences and knowledge.
If you are a a coder, hacker, or technical expert interested in this space and/or have relevant applications, systems, or prototypes for real-time data collection and analysis, we encourage you to apply!
We wish the guys and other attendees a fun trip! Stay tuned for reports back from Jeff, Josh, and Nadav, and if you are attending, drop us a line or Tweet us (@c4fcm) and let us know what you learned.