Digital Literacy for Development Professionals featuring Rodrigo Moran, SID'16 and Emilio Velis

should welcome everyone again uh and you should be seeing on your screen uh rodrigo's slide so i'm going to just briefly introduce our two guest speakers for this hour you may recall and some of you may have participated in our uh in the pros seminar that rodrigo and emilio offered earlier uh this year in the fall on a digital media for community development and this is a topic that we have been working on and and actually expanding uh in our portfolio in the sid program for a number of years now we should give credit to one of our friends and colleagues professor francisco belda our colleague from brazil who really began this work at the heller school with his students at the state university of sao paulo and rodrigo uh and his colleague emilio were have been have carried on this this work uh i will briefly introduce them and then just say a very quick word about why we think this is so important uh rodrigo many of you know i'm proud to say that he was my student but also uh he was my teacher i think at the heller school he got his degree from heller uh in 2016 uh and since then has gone on to have a fascinating professional life uh including now work with the undp in el salvador and rodrigo has always been one of those boundary crossers frontiersmen working to bring technology and youth and his interests in peace uh very important for the central american region of course together uh his friend and colleague emilio whom rodrigo has introduced to us uh is actually an industrial engineer he comes from the hard science side of this work uh he is based in san salvador as is rodrigo at the moment and he works in a variety of roles in non-profits one thing that stands out from his cv that i think is quite interesting is that he worked for a number of years as a international volunteer officer for habitat for humanity in el salvador so emilio also is a frontiersman in the sense of a boundary crosser and the reason that this work is so important is you know technology is on the present here we are in it literally uh where would we be if we did not have technology during these times of the pandemic but uh more and more uh technological tools are accessible for humanity in general for good and for not so good but we can also see that particularly as applied to the field of development there is an enormous and ever increasing interface between technological and technology-based strategies and the kind of human-centered rights-based development that we are interested in and so being uh aware of what this what this digital revolution means it's an ongoing revolution what it means for for our field and what which are the tools that are most relevant uh for uh us in our careers what there's such a broad array i think that the idea here is that uh to share with the broader heller community beyond those who could take the pro seminar exactly what this uh interface looks like uh and um i think that uh you have before you hear two practitioners uh of uh and people very familiar who are engaged in worldwide global networks of people that are engaging in this digital space in order to promote the kinds of equitable and sustainable development that we're interested in so it's a real privilege to welcome your both and uh rodrigo with that i turn the floor over to you thank you so much professor dassen thank you victoria for helping us arrange this session and and thank you for uh being here today uh it's so good to see familiar faces new faces uh i feel like i'm back at heller which is always a good thing we'll try to be quick because we do want to make this session as engaging as possible um it's important for us to remember how it all started and professor dawson talked about this a little bit this is 2014. this is a picture taken from the first pro seminar that professor francisco belda facilitated that year that's me in the like in 2014 with uh less facial hair and a lot less experience and and it was just such a fascinating pro seminar that really ignited something in me and and led me to work in in the intersection of technology innovation and development and this is how it's going uh we had a pro seminar as professor dawson mentioned last fall with great participation from amazing sid students some coex students as well so it was a great and fabulous experience that we we shared last year uh we're gonna do a lightning recap of what that seminar was all about because it's it's important for us to uh share some of the core concepts of the the technology technology for development practice and what is the the key message that we wanted to leave students at the pro seminar with um so just reviewing very quickly some of the concepts that we went over uh we wanted to shift the paradigm from this concept of solutionism which you know it's a tool-based interventions which seek to solve the wicked problems by by applying tools you know uh this can all be summed into the app solutionism uh you know i guess uh paradigm which is uh this conception that everything can be solved through an app or a platform or blockchain uh we we need to move from that that paradigm to the the one of appropriateness which is a more contextual approach to development and designing interventions that are considering the systemic issues of inequality and justice and and before start thinking about the solution another paradigm shift that we wanted to move away from is gigantism as a mindset that drives all economic growth towards scaling we hear this a lot in the development world scale is everything if it's not scalable it doesn't work if it's not disruptive it doesn't work and and we wanted to move away from that it's not that scale is not important but sustainability is more important finding out what's the right scale for each intervention is what's going to drive the future of development as we know it now that we are facing even even greater challenges and and with less resources because covet has impacted so many aspects of our lives and [Music] we realized that local is uh is coming back in a big way and we need to balance the social aspects of our interventions and the planetary sides of our intervention moving forward with centralization towards distribution we needed to convey this idea of that concentration of decision making and resources is is detrimental to the the future of development and and this should be distributed methods that involve equal access to knowledge and resources are key for us to have a more sustainable practice and this can be exemplified through our usual practices of extracting information and data from communities versus giving it back we don't usually give back the information we go and collect uh in in in in person or through digital means this is not redistributed as it should be in many occasions so through this lightning recap we wanted to land on the premise that technology is a tool for sustainable development not an end goal and this is um you know seems very straightforward um you know common sense if you will but it's not always that and we need to remind ourselves that the solution it's not always what we should strive for but you know digging deeper into the root causes of uh of the problems the wicked problems we're trying to to tackle and amelia's gonna dive into the the broader scheme of uh the intersection of this this um factors of the natural technological and social yeah so thanks a lot first of all and nice to see you here here um i think that when we consider technology it's uh sometimes it can get very one-sided and the reason for that is that there are other different types of incentives to create and to scale technology that differ philosophically from the end goal of international development so how can we make good use of technology in our work for bettering societies one way to see it is by looking at the individuals or communities as part of a system that intersects with the natural world which is the environment um the social which is other people other communities and the technology which sometimes can be seen as an extension of the abilities of humans and on the next slide you will see a different um set of uh different uh elements that comprise uh each of these systems and when we think of technology this is only one side of the equation with different tools infrastructure systems mesa productions all of these are created by humans to improve either speed or ability to organize content or to communicate and whatever change is done to this system will affect others um one one um application of that that we discussed with rodrigo a lot during this there's this brainstorming of for this presentation is this the tetrad of matlocha because mcluhan what he did is think of what new technologies would bring that would better um society but then what would be detrimental as well or what would be put aside as obsolete or what would be retrieved so the international development worker needs to have a systemic view of how the person is being affected by all of these systems and how can technology be used whether is it relevant for a specific context or not um can you put the next one yes so when we think of international development the first thing that has to come to mind is the people and how we liberate them how we create a better environment for them to take decisions for um empowerment for organization and that will not change technology is not coming to change any of that and rather should be used as means to enhance the ability for people to communicate to empower themselves to take decisions to organize in the past few years with the advent of new technologies we have seen how new opportunities for using technology will give us tremendous amount of promises of how the world will be changed and how a simple piece of tech or the application of certain technique will completely change the um the way that we do things and sometimes he can to a cost so with this we're not saying that we're against technology but rather we are promoting how international development can work closely with technology in ways that really connect with the needs of communities with the motivations of technology developers and in and all this happens in different mindsets and in different cycles of product development of project management so that alone brings new needs for competencies that we need to have and for that we we tried to think of how the cycle of innovation works when you think of how a project comes from start to finish coming to the market and being put to the service of of a market to be sold interchanged there are different um there are different um life cycles and there are different timelines that are seen can you put this one so you will see here that there's always a disconnect with the necessities of communities and these motivations how can we make both of them work and for that i'm going to give you one personal example that happened to a personal project this is a card game that we used in san salvador to map um violence uh prevalence in downtown in the center so this is a somewhat dangerous community that we're working in and we developed the game based very uh closely to cars against humanity where people would vote so it is it difficult uh to uh cross the traffic or to go out at night without being involved in the intersections of such and such that people would vote and then we would put in real time um these points in the map and give the data back to them and they would validate our findings so but coming to this in order to come to this we have to go through a process that looks um like levels of complexity um that we had to get rid of so the second slide is one year before we were doing a workshop on which we were developing open hardware sensors in order to validate the needs of a community um and to help them communicate in case of natural disasters and that had a small component of community mapping so and if you if we go a year before that we will see that we were on the testing of a open hardware initiative for people to communicate and then the final one is the proposal that we had on which we won the grant to start this technological initiative when you think of what we did on the first slide which is the most recent it's way way more simple than what we had proposed and that comes to this mindset of solutionism that we had as a group five years ago on which we had this idea how about if we develop a hardware for people to communicate and then we can save lives and and then we put it into the community we tell them this is going to work let's file validate it et cetera and in the process we started stripping the the project of all these uh very expensive cost of technology and came down to a very simple card game that only put data on a script and then would uh project it on a wall so these processes will continue to happen and the reason is because there's always this disconnect there's always the ideas that we put together with the needs of the community and there's this process that's very iterative um and um that differs a little bit from what we would see on different projects where technologies that are appropriate are very simple to implement people understand them we've see we've seen them used in different places around the world and we know that they're going to work but in this case we have to work with other people who are outsiders who are developing technology who have their own interests and we have to validate whether these solutions work we have to think about how we can strip from different costs of development we have to prototype a lot more we have to be faster and we have to share these decisions with communities in order to learn from them and and for them to say yes we want this or no we don't want this or to observe in order to know what will happen if we continue down the line and that comes to the point that technology is never never neutral and there's always power being exerted when we bring technology so we have to ask ourselves who are the stakeholders who are really interested in implementing this technology who's really winning power is it the communities is in power can be exerted through uh the means of production in order to generate a certain technology or to implement it or to maintain it or to learn how to use it so all of these carry different stakeholders that we have to learn to manage and for that we have the cycle of innovation knowing how to innovate correctly while bringing the needs of the community is one of the most important skills that bring others into concoction so that we can work together in order to develop good solutions and be able to tell what's good from what's bad so the usual innovation process has four different uh items first is having an insight understanding what's wrong and coming up with an idea then developing a problem um definition testing a solution and finally uh creating a business model and down on the on the lower side of the of the image you can see that there are different um mindsets and paradigms for design and some of them are close to how we generate these ideas how we go out and look at how people um do their daily lives what are the problems that they have how do we bring together from different perspectives and how we can come up with ideas of how technology can be used to solve these problems and this is this here is the issue process of innovation that can come for us to help us uh solve a problem and some of them come at the end just taking a solution and scaling it up um but now we have um repurposed this in order to think of how international development can use make use of this and what are the skills needed to um develop good solutions that are appropriate so i leave it to you rodrigo and i'm going to make a quick pause at this moment because i want to go back a little bit to amelia's story which we picked very intentionally because it serves multiple purposes but uh and and the first one is that i asked amelia to to share this story backwards because we were going to share the story in in a linear way chronologically but then we realized that it was it was an interesting exercise to see how the solution was so simple like the things that the community needed were a lot a lot more simple than having a technology device that was based on the internet of things and that had a bunch of sensors and really cool stuff and and just changing the narrative uh backwards and and realizing how they they had to strip the original high-tech uh model from its uh unnecessary elements and and getting down to a simple solution and that that served the community probably better or the same it doesn't have to be better or worse but the same than the actual technology device and and this is important for for several reasons but um i wanted for you to think about the different roles in that story uh you had um emilio and his team as the pro and within his team there was an idea there was someone that designed this idea and thought wouldn't it be cool if we did this uh with with this technology there were other members of the team that went into this set the problem defined the intervention moved on to implementing the solution and there wasn't even a business model that was created afterwards so think about those different roles think about the different roles that we serve as development practitioners in our organizations at the moment when we go and and see the next slide because you'll see how how they apply in this scenario so in in repurposing this innovation cycle one of the conversations that we were having prior to this session with professor dawson in the waiting room was how the conversation originated from the the pro seminar where we discussed the core skills that the development practitioners should have but from a more a philosophical standpoint from a more um soft skill perspective and as we were working with uh with a heller crowd right that is very very aligned with with um liberation as as a way to see development with social justice we wanted to start there but as as the conversation progressed we started thinking about okay so if if the heller students already have um a good set of soft skills that they can build on hard skills what are those right and and we started thinking about that and and and went into the tech world went into the innovation world and saw the intersection of these two worlds and and came up with this um this you know realization that development is already picking up on some of these trends but we need to develop them more intentionally if we want to serve communities in alignment with our with our ethical values as well so going back to the to the graph we we have this inside section which is a lot more on the on the research side it's uh going into communities and and and conducting ethnographic research networking connecting with the different stakeholders in the community in a very basic way just trying to understand what are the the key insights this uh reflects on the tech world as you know your your um probably sales person that goes into the the different communities but not the communities in the sense that we know them and and does a little bit of research right but transitioning to to the problem we saw some of the core skills that development practitioners have around project design participatory methods stakeholder management these are some of the the things that we have identified there's uh that um this intersection right so and these are the the skills that we need to develop as we incorporate more of the technology of technology solutions into our into our practice and um talking about solutions we are seeing new skills that probably were not in our wheelhouse before we were talking about the architecture and engineering of solutions this doesn't mean architecture in the uh in the sense of a profession in architecture but designing the principles and the structure of uh of a solution of a technology-based solution and the engineering part is you know how does that work in in real life uh and there's additional skills around community validation testing which complement the the skills that we learn at health right like pni pro like you know monitoring evaluation all of this combined in this new comprehensive development practitioner that draws from the tech world from the innovation world the soft skills of agile design of design thinking and other methodologies and combines it with um with specific skills that that are in in the harder side of things and and lastly we have a business model so you will need to develop business development skills uh impact communications exploring new markets and i'm i wanna you know walk you through uh different roles of development practitioners along this chain which you can start imagining in in the future where where you'd like to be are you more of a a researcher are you going to be the person going into communities and being able to identify the key issues that the community is facing bringing that back to the folks that are going to design an intervention and with that if you're interested in in the intersection of technology and development you need to have those skills to identify uh digital contexts observe what is the digital and connectivity situation of of this community in particular and being able to communicate that with the teams that are going to develop the solutions or are you going to be that team that that gets that initial input and designs uh technology-based solution where you're going to need the skills of knowing where to tap into in terms of service providers uh you know technical teams you're going to need to um know who is is selling you a good product whether it's off the shelf you know open open source or proprietary you need to have that that set of of skills to identify what's what's right what's appropriate how to validate these solutions with the public with the communities and bring that back iterate test and and then implement once you implement the solution you will transition that to the business development team probably at your organization and maybe you are part of that team where you will need to take that implementation extract the learnings from that implementation turn that into whether it is a new proposal for a new funder to scale with the same funder that invested in the first solution or you will explore the market and see how that can be adapted into a new business model so you know this is the intersection of these two worlds that we wanted to present to you uh so that you can start imagining the roles that you currently have or that you have held previously in your organizations and think about some of the future roles that you will have um you know in in the cycle again you'll have uh the problem definition stage where you'll be co-designing this development projects acting like a liaison between the needs of a community their expectations and the limitations of technology and and this translates into skills in the participatory thinking ux user experience design and solutions mapping this i introduced from the from undp's accelerator lab practice in the solution design and implementation you'll be working with different people from different technical areas as well so you'll need to navigate between disciplines and and and carrying that information back and forth so you need skills in information architecture validation and testing in-house tech management some teams will be fortunate enough to have in-house tech teams but if not you'll be able to coordinate with a vendor or service provider management and know exactly what you need and how to communicate that with them so that when they deliver the actual product you know whether it is a good one or not and and lastly again with the business model and scaling you will be able to develop a strong case for raising additional funds and scaling the use of these technologies through actionable evidence so you'll need a skills on digital uh and impact communications predictive analysis you'll be able to gather data to construct your evidence-based approaches and you will also develop skills to create capacities within the communities to you know make your initiative sustainable and and one thing that's very important is future thinking we usually are strained by the the theory of change which only thinks about one potential future whether you do this you will get this but future thinking allows you to think about the multiple ways in which your intervention can uh end up in and it's a new skill that that um development practitioners should embrace and and uh it can be tech enabled or just um you know using traditional future thinking uh methodologies and uh lastly we just wanted to leave you with some some food for thought about some of the the development jobs of the of the present right now they're not even in the future but uh they might look like that for us at some times but roles as data for development analysts are going to be super important in the next few years they already are this will mean everything from what you learn with professor ravion on the gis class but taking that and and analyzing the data uh in in a large or small scale will be relevant for justifying an intervention in one place versus the other having roles as technology for development liaisons is going to be very important this is good news for everyone that is not a technologist like myself and um and i speak from experience when i say that this is a role that many of you will be positioned to carry out very successfully because it only requires you to know or be really interested in technology on you know a small percentage but then be very well versed in in the needs of a community and and uh the more theoretical approaches that you are familiar with and bringing that information back and forth technical teams is going to be very crucial um for for the new the future of development innovation leads technology is usually equated with innovation but it's not always the same so people that are able to apply innovation frameworks to the design of development interventions user centered design user experience models uh gamification will be crucial as well um for for that there will be specific roles in the ux and design lead space so um i think with that we wanted to open the conversation for you to share some of your impressions around what the the present and the future of development jobs is going to look like and if this are skills that are you know at your disposal right now or that you would like to develop in uh through a program like uh like the sid program and i don't know if you want to add anything else before we open two questions immediately yeah very quickly i think uh three things come to my mind um just to close very briefly uh first one is that the concept of rural what is rural changed over the over the past 60 years came from rural is poverty to now a more diversity uh yeah a view with more diversity reality is a view where there are so many different ways of life many different ways of production of lifestyles etc and i see technology having to deal with not only one narrative that's being imposed by capitalism for example that says your life should be better and technology is going to help you be this uh but rather we we are going to have to create a narrative on which technology in the future will help us achieve what people want so that is one the second one is the idea of the growth because there is this whole paradigm that's coming that is saying it's not all about being big and we uh rodrigo mentioned about jaggedism at the beginning so how can we scale back while still making people feel uh satisfied with their lifestyle and that is going to be an important part of international development and technology how can technology be uh able to make people happy and also solve their uh problems and then finally that these processes of innovation sometimes are rootless and where they're when they're done in a laboratory that is one thing but when they're being tested in the real world there's the danger of harm so an important part of international development and technology is going to create safe spaces for communities to innovate while still creating a a space of privacy of security in many different ways that technology can bring so uh how can we alleviate or uh prevent some of the damages that technology may bring thanks thanks emilio and definitely this is a way larger conversation we just touched the tip of the iceberg on on what the future of the development you know sector is going to look like in in a post covered era in in a climate change era where the growth is going to be uh very important like realizing what uh what local can mean for uh for sustainable development where we're gonna you know question a lot of the the paradigms that will we have been using for for uh many years so i hope you have enjoyed this glimpse on of the skills that you should start looking for um in order to insert yourself in in an organization that uh that is currently evolving also uh it's important to mention that not only will you be able to work for an international development organization or a non-profit or an implementer but in the private sector in the government all the skills are also relevant and as companies also move to a models where where sustainability is increasingly important this sets of skills will also position you in in in favor and even in advantage of other profiles so uh i'll leave leave you with that and and we can we can have a quick conversation on this topic professor dassen did you want to start with some q a you're muted okay thank you so much uh rodrigo do you want to uh quit the slide show so we can see the speakers there you go great all right well this was a lot of food for thought and you know i i would just i'm sure uh the students have lots of questions i would just start with a um a reflection based on on the presentation thank you so much and it it makes me feel as if uh sid which was conceived as a you know a kind of cutting edge program maybe 30 years ago we really do need to retool in terms of preparing students for the 21st century and you know when i begin to think kind of practically about how we would get there from where we are now it in my mind raises a larger issue which is that universities in general even progressive ones like brandeis are still organized around disciplines and uh 19th century academic culture so the idea of bringing together the latest developments in the innovation space in the engineering space in the uh development world in the world of economic analysis right so much of what you're saying depends on the evolution of global capitalism for example figuring out how that would be done in a university certainly there are you know innovation centers some of our alumni actually work at them uh which are often in engineering schools uh so there's a long way from how even a progressive interdisciplinary academic space like the heller school is organized to the kind of intersectionality and the kind of cross-fertilization that we really need to be thinking about these skills so it's it's a huge challenge but i thank you for laying a marker uh for us and others this is fascinating work and uh the question is how do we how could we as educational providers be thinking about uh how to get ahead of some of these uh curves and and occupy different spaces than the ones we currently occupy so with that i'm sure and a number of you have questions or comments please and you can just address them directly to the speakers okay i have a question i'm not sure i'm going to phrase it very well but i'll try i feel like when we talk about development and climate change you know there's a lot of limitations that have to happen scaling back as the speaker said but i think there still is the idea of sort of development or the ideal sort of goal of development as this kind of capitalist never-ending growth so how how can we work toward these these the scaling back if that narrative still exists if that's still the sort of ideal of what progress and and development and growth look like i think i can start um there are um yeah there are a few ways to address the problem of what technology or what human activity is creating and yeah and some of those responses have to do with you know it's the cost of uh progress for example another one could be let's just get rid of it and become what's the word in english ludits ludics i always forget yeah luddites yeah so you know like no technology at all and let's just get rid of it and then others have to be in the center as in let's create other technology to solve this pollution problem for example and that happens also in the international development so um in other areas but i see in climate change for example um such and such university created a robot to solve the problem of uh plastic in the oceans and we see more technology to solve the problems that of technology um and then there there are anothers of you know let's just get how about if we just reduce the the emissions of carbon dioxide etc so we have to be sure of what it what is the narrative that we are putting in place and we think of the real causes we speak to people about what you're doing is not going to solve the problem for example or is going to solve it at a short term um so you know i i think it's important and that's that is why i think that the role the the main role of international development workers in these problems is to set a narrative and to tell it from the perspective uh that is very human-centered uh in social justice and we have to be a voice that understands technology and understands the value of it but also understands what it is creating and even in the sense of not not only of what is going to be created in terms of jobs and economic growth in 10 years but rather in 50 or 100 years so knowing technology well is a good starting point and taking up those spaces um is important and just as the last thing i i was just on the call where we were discussing the the stack of climate change technologies as in i think they were talking about acquisition governance sharing evaluation so all of these different activities are breaking broken down and evaluated in terms of what is the the you know like the cost for the environment and the discussion was about how about open data and open source technologies etc do they really create um lesser um burden on the environment so you know there's there's space not only for technologies there but also for people who have uh direct communications with communities and to have these these discussions where not only people from the global north are given you know their thoughts because they traveled to africa once or twice or you know and they came back and i understand what's the problem but rather how would do we bring different people together to to yeah to bring voices i'll just add something to that question because it's uh it's really relevant and and funny that you mentioned it one of the the resources that we um looked at in order to determine some of the the jobs of the future of development was and we didn't include it in here but now that you mentioned it it seems like a like a mistake not including it it's climate change and environmental experts that have specific um experience in technology so organizations need people that can tell them which technology interventions are suitable for you know tackling the development challenges that they're facing but also being able to tell them with data and with evidence why sometimes technology is going to have a a negative impact on on the work that they they are carrying out so it's really important for organizations to have this this type of professional that is able to understand technology and and it's uh an assessed with data and and uh with evidence the impact that this technology can have whether it's uh negative or positive and and one thing i'll mention also is that this trend is already starting to um come to you know to the the biggest spheres uh and and talking about undp specifically the accelerator lab initiative is actually intended to do just that reverse the way in which we look at development and and not create new things but start by exploring what's already out there what's what our community is doing already in order to mitigate climate change effects or you know tackle everyday community problems so it's good to see that these trends are already making it to the to the big leagues and hopefully they'll they'll also come down as a as a mainstream practice in the future i see that there's there's more questions hello so i'll move on to yes this is it uh this is probably speaking so i'm i work with the developer sector now i'm a sid student as well for the last 16 years i worked with the develop this these disruptive technologies i think there are two main areas if you segregate this one the technology we use to being a practitioner to design study or have a better poverty targeting mechanisms at that point i think technology really supplement us uh we it doesn't affect the community and for example just in my last project we are supposed to take one million household power scorecard it is it is supposed to cost us millions but we used technology and that cost us 10 percent then the manual so that these kind of things these kind of we should segregate these things the second is taking solution for problems like climate change and doing through technology needs uh some kind of exceptional effect because the technology is disruptive so i think like for the for for example credit programs they want the digital payment system will be good okay fine we did it but at the end we learned that the communities are 84 are illiterate so they don't use mobiles so taking solution uh to the community so technologies are really disruptive that everybody knows but for the development perspective like a being a development professional for us using technology as a means to reconfirm our strategies to reconfirm our approaches i think it is one of the best thing we have to work on it and it has to be scaled up it has to be scaled up if you are going to address a million below poverty line populations the normal conventional way may not help you so this is my thoughts and i think you guys have put something very innovatively like addressing real problems through technologies really have consequences we should be very careful thank you thank you i'll just oh yes professor rodrigo there there are two questions in the chat so that you propose so maybe you want to take a look at that perfect yes uh before i move on to the to those two questions uh i just wanted to react real quick to pervasive comment because uh something that's also uh useful in this in this setting is to or another trend i'd say um for the future of development is moving from from pilots from long pilots that take two three years to experimentation to doing faster iterations uh based on the fact that uh you know the problems we're facing are are changing more rapidly and and um circumstances vary so differently than uh than we we thought about before so experimenting in quick cycles can also help us steer in the right direction uh more agile in a more agile way than than before addressing the two questions how can development practitioners balance the global trends of utilizing tech um with the forms of native tech preferred by host country nationals in the country where a project is being implemented and what sorts of roles in the development utilize tech but are better suited suited for big picture thinkers oftentimes roles require highly analytical number crunching skills that don't match my interests and skills uh i think that emilia should take the first one and i'll take the second one i i was going to say the same yes yeah um for the first one oh man this this is a complicated um one to answer but i would say it's um i think technology is it doesn't have like it's agnostic in the sense of it doesn't belong to anybody to a degree um like knowledge uh it's like saying i play chess chess was invented in india but there's a point on which the whole world is being globalized and technology is um to a degree a just yeah just an asset having said that there's a difference between that where for example an idea was created in one country but it is replicated in another compared to the the the power that uh intellectual property brings into international development for example uh and and some other uh downsides of technology for example databases how we manage the database of members of a community who are going to do something for example how can we make sure that we are not harming people in a specific area by sending personal information abroad to a different server residing somewhere else that is one and there's been cases where uh social innovation startups have had security breaches and databases with even government ids have been just stolen and put in the public and sold so we have to be careful of that then um for local locally implemented technologies the big problem and that that's the downside of local localizing it is having the right skills and for that i think implementing technology despite what it would seem is a long-term job generating the the skills creating the infrastructure having the tools to generate it i see it so my work comprises is is working on sharing knowledge for reproducing appropriate technology uh i work for apropedia foundation which is a large compendium of international development the sustainability technologies and we see that like part of our work and part of the goal that we want to achieve is to give local communities the abilities to reproduce but having that capability brings long work alongside only the knowledge so so yeah i i think it's that is why having everything together is important for technology so so i i don't know if that that was a good answer i hope it was so i leave your video with the second one just uh make a quick commercial for apropedia as well it's uh it's the largest wiki on sustainability and hopefully it'll be useful for for many of your projects at at the program actually there's this massive repository of appropriate technologies that have been documented by development practitioners such as yourselves engineers academics that are just out there and can be replicated adapted to local context and this is the way in which we uh contribute to appropriate technology adoption to reverse those those trends that that matthew mentions in in your question so um the second question i'll i'll answer in from a personal light i am that i am that i i want to think of myself as that big picture thinker i'm not a technologist i am not good with numbers i actually dropped out of professor codoy's class because it was too hard but uh but i do have other types of skills and that and and and those are in in connecting development needs with development teams and this is a role that that is increasingly important we did mention it earlier it's uh having technology for development liaisons right having folks that can understand what a community needs or what a technical team on education or governance or violence prevention wants to do translating that into technical requirements for a technology team of developers of designers of engineers so that vision transforms into reality and being able to navigate back and forth those two is a key skill and it requires a lot of imagination a lot of empathy a lot of good communication skills which is it's something that i see are are probably your skills as well uh methi so this is this is one very specific personal example on on on how i see and we've talked about this with professor dassen that sid students and professionals have already like you already have that coming in the program you further develop these skills as you progress through the program and and it's important for you to know because sometimes you will feel scared or intimidated by by this industry where more people are you know data scientists and and and programmers but don't because you have this specific set of skills that is often needed you know there's a bridge that needs to be gap like that there's a gap that is a bridge between this these two these two sides yeah and i i may just add very quickly that technology like technology requires lots of community builders and that's that is so important especially for the open source community and it's a skill that i've seen many people who don't know how to make a line of code make it really great by helping other people contribute telling them how to work together and putting them closer to communities who are in need being a license of hey i am a startup do you want to go and test and do you want to for example facilitate a workshop uh with a community asking them what they think being you know like a socially aware of what is the real needs of people and there's a very social component to technology because appropriate technology is not only defined by what what works best but what people have the feeling that works best for them and makes them happy and there's always this desire to be modern the desire to uh be part of a trend and we have to put that into account that part of the reason why technology is so big in international development is because people have this um mindset that technology is going to make them happier so um yeah i there's lots of important social skills that have to be put into our work right could i just jump in there for a second i think that's that is so important thank you for making that argument and i guess i would sum it up by saying that technology is too important to be left solely to the technologists you know just as because it's so critical to keep at the root of our vision you know the lens through which we see this our values of equity inclusion our value of environmental justice all of those ultimately really um kind of social and political ideas and at the root of that if we were to delve even farther i was making this argument just today to professor godoy my dear friend that after all sid if we just look at that in particular it's an m.a program it's a master of arts in a liberal arts university and at the root of that is a humanistic let's hope it's a kind of radical humanistic view of human-centered development and understanding you know we we can't turn our backs on these trends i agree with you totally emilio uh it might be fashionable to be to be a luddite but i don't think it's practical in the sense that technology will intrude we we can't turn our backs on all of these trends on the contrary we have to be as engaged as possible but also never lose our capacity for critical analysis at the end of the day that's what is the core of humanistic liberal arts education is critical thinking uh and so that's a skill that we hope that all of the courses in the sid program and at heller address sharpen that in some way in addition to this kind of systems thinking uh that comes out of engineering but really should be applied to the way we think about uh about knowledge not only knowledge consumption but knowledge creation because i think at the end of the day the only way to stay ahead of the innovation curve is to be a good knowledge generator and that means not necessarily staying in an ivory tower so you can do that but engaging with communities around the world and i would just i can't resist underscore one other really key point that emilio made that sid i have i'm very proud of the diversity of people that we have here because the development debates and certainly the large multilateral institutions i mean the world bank being the uh epigrammatic case of this have been dominated by western nor northern voices for decades so while there have been thinkers for decades who have written essays on the concept of de-growth for example and post-development and alternatives they're critical people out there but they've never been in the mainstream right and so the organizations that set the tone and more importantly control the flow of aid dollars those have been very reactionary in the sense in generally in the sense of preserving the status quo but that consensus has broken up it seems to me and so the argument that emilio and rodrigo are making is that there are spaces critical spaces that can be occupied with people by people with a whole range of skills but to be effective at the small level you need to understand the big picture and vice versa this is going on sure technology is too important to leave it only to the in the hands of technologies [Laughter] all right perfect other questions we have a few more minutes i think that uh muhammad had a question in the chat box about fraud well i'll i'll see if i can uh answer that question yeah i'll i don't know if i'm i'm gonna talk specifically about frauds but um but knowing what's hype and what's what's actually uh an appropriate technology is uh something we addressed extensively in the in the pro seminar because it's uh and that's why it's important for for people like you to step into these types of roles because you need these filters between startups or you know people that are going to want to sell an organization a really hyped up tool or a blockchain solution to identify what are some of the key aspects of the the technology itself but also the need that it's supposed to be solving so by by having people with this combination of skills you'll be able to filter out the the appropriate technologies because it could be you know a very destructive tool it can be blockchain based and it can actually serve the purpose that um that the organization seeks but but if you don't have a combination of the basic knowledge on how that technology works i'm no expert in blockchain but i can't tell you if something is you know just baloney or if it's actually a real solution um but also knowing in the in the more technical side what the organization does and what are the the challenges that they're uh facing so that's that's one way to put it um i don't know if there's anything else you'd like to add to that yeah yeah the the example that i gave at the pro seminar was 3d printing houses that it doesn't make sense to 3d print houses if the problem for example in our setting at least in el salvador is land like access to land and as a development worker who knows about technology you can save a lot of money and resources by not going in the wrong direction because the technology can also be expensive and that money goes to someone who is you know who wants to develop their solution because they think it's the best um so also knowing how much to how much resources to a lot to each solution and knowing when is the best moment the right time when all the conditions are met that are not technological conditions so that is an important asset you become an important asset for international development if you know when to do it how to do it and how to work with people who are interested in making business right so so that's important just thinking of do we develop locally or do we just buy from a company is our our email going to be gmail are we going to purchase zoom for our calls or are we going to have our own system so all of these are questions that can be can become much more and more and more expensive as technologies you know because technologies can be a black hole of resources and you can spend all of your time developing something that will never be used right and and also you know you can't extract the profit motive from virtually all of the platforms that we have i mean you uh both of you are much more knowledgeable about open source technology and all of that than i am however uh you know here we are on zoom a commercial product here we are answering our gmails uh here we are in the middle of huge huge huge maybe the biggest geopolitical struggle of the day is the u.s versus

china on questions of uh uh technology on questions of 5g on questions of international property and so on and so on so that's where the big picture analysis is really important uh to understand how to balance those motives uh folks we're coming up on our time i know a number of you may have classes at 2 p.m our time for muhammad there in pakistan it's getting very late so thank you for sticking with us during this period uh are there any final questions maybe take one more question and then give our speakers a chance to just offer any final thoughts okay i don't hear anything but uh i know that uh let's put it this way rodrigo is is a hardcore heller uh height uh he he's with us forever no way and emilio also honorary heller student and uh just absolutely uh wonderful to have have such dynamic and innovative uh people helping us to think through you know and i i would just con my concluding comment and i'll turn it over to our speakers thank you i want to just thank you so much for bringing this whole other universe into view it's it's as if our spacecraft got a little bit closer to mars you know like the uh the rover that just landed on mars actually perseverance because we really need to be able to see not only into the present but into the future if we are going to be a responsive and a kind of trendsetter in in the development world and all of you are going to be carrying this forward uh and so that's just critical to know what the landscape looks like so thank you again and emilio or rodrigo any final words just uh thanking you thank you thank you for for opening up the space it all has evolved in a very organic way and has helped us to learn more about this trends as we develop content for for the pro seminar as we started brainstorming around this session it's it's an iterative process and it couldn't work without you um so i'm i'm happy to be a part of this ongoing conversation about the evolution of the sid program of the development sector in general so thank you and and and i hope you have enjoyed this session and and looking forward to the next one thank you yeah i would say that first of all i would like to thank uh rodrigo for dragging me along with him and professor dawson for the opportunity always and i i think the the best assets that i see for um heller students is that you're learning about values the values that that are important for social justice and then technologies just means to an end you should not be afraid of it uh but rather the technology area needs you needs people like you who can imprint real values and who can tell people what are what is technology for you know like a hundred years ago cs lewis was saying that technology is seen by some people like magic you know magic is something that people simply use to materialize their dreams so our goal is to help people find real dreams that are worth living for and that is what technology should drive us to perfect well once again thank you and thanks to all the students and friends of the program who attended uh well we are unhappy not to be in our beautiful building and i kind of resist the limitations imposed by our current moment at the same time the technology has enabled us to hear seamlessly from colleagues in a different part of the world so thank you so much this was very very stimulating and we're sure to return to the topic

2021-03-11 05:59

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