http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/index/ en U.S. Department of State 2012-05-20T23:11:38+00:00 Civil Society 2.0 initiative. These TechCamps brought together three areas of focus for Secretary Clinton: strengthening civil society, innovation, and empowering women and girls. American and international trainers from companies, such as Facebook, Meetup, and Yahoo!, teamed together with the State Department's Office of Innovation and eDiplomacy to help raise the digital literacy of civil society organizations focused on women's empowerment though separate, intensive two-day workshops.

Each TechCamp focused on how to help ensure women and girls have the know-how and education to harness new digital tools that will help them advance their organizations in Israel and the Palestinian Territories in the 21st century. Participants focused on some of the unique challenges faced by both Israeli and Palestinian women civil society organizations that deliver important services that women and youth rely on for education, health, social justice, and business development. A key priority for Secretary Clinton and the State Department is to harness digital tools for good, and TechCamps over the past year have educated civil society organizations on the transformative impact of putting new technologies in the hands of people seeking change.

TechCamp Tel Aviv brought together more than 80 civil society organizations and paired them with both international and local technology experts. Hosted April 30-May 1, the event was made possible by the incredible support and leadership of the U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv and Appleseeds Academy, a local non-governmental organization (NGO) partner. TechCamp Tel Aviv kicked off with an icebreaking exercise led by world-renowned artist Hanoch Piven, who had participants choosing random objects that represented aspects of themselves to then create images representing the 21st century woman. You can see photographs of the images the groups created on the TechCamp Flickr photostream.

For TechCamp Ramallah, the U.S. Consulate General in Jerusalem partnered with local Palestinian organization Ellam Tam to bring together more than 80 Palestinian women-focused NGOs from Gaza City, Hebron, Nablus, Jerusalem, and along with many more from Ramallah.

In Tel Aviv, one group identified illegal waste dumping and its negative effects as a continuing issue in their community, and worked with technology trainer, Gregory Asmolov, a crowdsourcing and mapping expert to dramatically improve their shared understanding of these sites by setting up a "crowdmap" to better track and allow witnesses to report activities at these illegal dumping sites. In another group, Iris Stern Levi of "Turning the Tables," a new organization that helps former prostitutes enter into society and provides them with life skills, worked with Merrill Beth Ferguson from Meetup to help Iris set up a crowdfunding site to generate the resources necessary to have an actual facility and training center.

In Ramallah, a group worked with Elizabeth Linder from Facebook to connect their high school curriculum with social media exercises in order to more fully engage their students. A second group set out to create a map of the blogger community that would give visual representation of where Palestinian bloggers are working and how they could come together to build better methods for communication.

There were a number of problems and related solutions that were tackled at both TechCamps. For example, Tel Aviv and Ramallah both brought together women's organizations working to combat domestic violence. The approaches to address this important issue in both TechCamps reiterated the importance of raising awareness among women for personal empowerment, and also addressed ways to help educate men to change the perception of what is socially accepted. Both TechCamps also actively discussed ways to empower women bloggers, both to increase their visibility and credibility. Both TechCamps looked at means to connect NGOs working on women's issues, and how they could form larger networks engaging even more groups who are not yet working or connected to each other online. Finally, both TechCamps raised the need for women NGOs to find innovative funding solutions to help better execute their missions.

Both TechCamps were extremely successful in raising the digital literacy of the participants, in developing low-cost, easy to implement solutions to their problems, and in connecting them with a larger network of NGOs and technologists internationally and within their respective communities.

One of our trainer's summed up TechCamp best: "TechCamp is an excellent opportunity for participants to gain world-class training on the latest technological methods that will be invaluable to their work. This workshop offered benefits to the trainers and participants alike, providing everyone with the unique chance to expand their network to include international experts as well as a wide range of great...organizations and projects."

You can learn more about TechCamps by visiting www.TechCampGlobal.org.]]> http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/techcamp_tel_aviv_ramallah/ 2012-05-09T19:33:42+00:00 Civil Society 2.0 initiative. This TechCamp focused on capacity building for more than 50 civil society organizations working in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. Hosted by Assumption University March 20-21, TechCamp Bangkok provided training that helped equip the civil society groups with new knowledge about how to leverage free and low-cost digital tools to strengthen their organization's missions. The missions of these civil society organizations ranged from combating human trafficking, to election monitoring, to helping support refugees, to environmental protection.

Local technology experts partnered with technologists from around the world to run interactive training sessions and small group discussions to identify the current obstacles that civil society organizations face and to think through how technology could be applied to solve challenges. Technology experts provided training on how to create a free SMS network for your organization, how to build a social media strategy, how to practice digital safety, how to build a digital map, how to use live video for citizen journalism, and more.

Kicking off the first day, the TechCamp engaged participants in a unique ice-breaking event called a "spectrogram" that solicits opinions from participants on technology and NGO work. For example, participants were asked to agree or disagree with the following statement: "If NGOs had more responsibility during the recent floods, the response would have been better." This elicited a lively discussion from civil society and technology experts and set the stage for further discussions. Engaged and sharing ideas, participants spent the next two days joining a variety of interactive training sessions and brainstorming in small groups.

As we neared the end of TechCamp, civil society organizations presented a series of challenges and applied their new knowledge about a variety of tools, listing solutions that could be applied to their missions. A civil society organization that focuses on combating human trafficking worked on adopting a new network that would allow persons in need to anonymously report instances of trafficking by using the Internet and mobile technology. Another group focused on mobilizing and engaging youth worked with technology experts to determine how to better leverage social media to spur action from youth on social good issues. Several participants offered to volunteer and help contribute social media strategies these groups could use. Each group detailed out their challenges and solutions sets in documents that can be viewed through the TechCamp wiki.

Joining a global network of TechCampers, the over 100 participants from TechCamp Bangkok catalyzed new learning between local and international technologists and civil society. These groups are now a part of the over 400 civil society organizations trained as a part of TechCamp worldwide.]]> http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/techcamp_bangkok/ 2012-03-24T21:10:44+00:00 Civil Society 2.0 initiative two years ago to build capacity among grassroots organizations. Since then, the State Department has dedicated itself to increasing the digital literacy of those working in civil society through the TechCamp program, orchestrating half a dozen camps around the world with more planned for 2012.

Our most recent project, TechCamp: Bucharest, was held in the Romanian capital's historic Central Library and hosted in partnership with the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Society, the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI). The agenda focused on helping working-level staff from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) serving Roma and other socio-economically disadvantaged communities, including people with disabilities and orphans, use technology and digital tools to advance their missions.

Staff from over 50 civil society organizations participated alongside local and international technology experts, as well as representatives from the Gates Foundation Global Libraries Project and the State Department's American Corners in Romania, to explore current challenges they face and understand how technology can help address them. For example, Eric Gunderson from Development Seed worked with Roma NGOs to find ways to collect more accurate data on Roma families to help better inform the communities in which they live. They started by mapping recent census data on the Roma, a population which participants agreed has been historically under-reported. Take a look at Eric's blog about the TechCamp and the map they developed here.

Other participants worked in small groups with technologists to discuss a variety of ways technology could be employed to help achieve their objectives. Examples included:

· Developing a jobs platform for the disabled;

· Working to change the image of the Roma in the media, including highlighting positive role models;

· Using technologies to decrease the high school dropout rate among Roma students;

· Engaging people through technology during emergencies such as earthquakes and floods to increase the efficiency of the response;

· Linking people leaving orphanages to those providing job training or housing; and

· Reaching isolated communities with limited access to technology.

These insightful discussions lead to detailed participant-generated action plans with dates for follow-on activities. We anticipate innovative initiatives from TechCamp alumni in the months to come that yield tangible results for the communities they serve. In the long run, many of the NGOs are now connected with new resources and services available in local libraries that will help them advance their causes, and we see terrific potential for the TechCamp network built among activists, librarians, and American Corners staff to provided a valuable forum for relationships that create new avenues for cooperation -- a critical facet of every TechCamp's success.

Learn more about Bucharest and other State Department hosted TechCamps at techcampglobal.org.]]> http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entires/techcamp_bucharest/ 2012-01-02T05:40:20+00:00