#tech4peace

by Mehmet Erdogan

As part of our efforts to innovate at Mahallae and UNDP-ACT, we are very keen on the Work out Loud approach. This is why we as the Mahallae team provide ongoing support and mentoring to our winning Challenges teams in designing and implementing succesful social media and outreach strategies.

Yet we sometimes notice confusion and even resistance in our innovating teams towards social media, preventing them from being as good at “talking” as they are at “doing.”

I am wondering whether drawing parallels between Twitter and house parties can help demystify social media and even further encourage its use for working out loud.

1.             When you first show up at the party, who you know matters.

As a beginner to Twitter, you may want to reflect on who you know that already has a solid web presence. These people (“influencers”) can support your visibility by retweeting or mentioning you, opening up new pathways for communication.

Don’t be afraid to crowdsource new contacts, simply by tweeting to ask if your followers have any recommendations for you in line with the work you do. This is not very different than asking your friends to introduce you to people with similar interests at a party. The #FF (Follow Friday) hashtag can also be a fun way of suggesting new contacts to your list.

2.             When you start a conversation at a party, you stay around to watch it develop; you don’t merely suggest a topic and leave.

Yes, apps such as Hootsuite can tremendously support your online outreach by helping you to schedule tweets and track comments in advance, but only if you show up throughout the week to check and respond to feedback.

Chances are you are already using a smart phone; enable notifications so that you can respond to comments in a timely manner. Of all social media channels, Twitter is perhaps the most real time and unforgiving: a comment a day late is a comment too late.

3.             Have something to offer; don’t be a wallflower.

Many of us feel more comfortable doing the work than discussing it, both in real life and online.

Yet if you want to network successfully, the harsh reality is that you have to strike a balance between modesty and transparency. If you spend the whole party listening to others, chances are you will not be remembered by the next day.

4. Talking a lot doesn’t make you popular; you also have to listen.

If you want to engage your friends in the long term, you strive for the perfect balance between talking about yourself and listening to them.

If you want to generate followers on Twitter, you want to build a web presence that does not center around your stories, your accomplishments, and your needs.

In the context of social media, this may mean checking your feed regularly, favoriting tweets that matter to you, replying to comments in a relevant and timely manner, and retweeting anything you think your followers may find useful.

5.    Don’t be awkward (how and where you talk about yourself matters).

You can’t show up next to a group of people discussing Justin Bieber and start talking about peacebuilding; they simply won’t listen to you. Instead, you want to make sure you are talking about the subjects that matter to you with people who also care about the same topic.

Give your subject a context. This is easier on Twitter than at a house party: simply use the relevant hashtags. We at Mahallae find #tech4peace, #innovation, #inno4dev, #genderIT and #Cyprus particularly useful to amplify our work and use them often. Don’t simply tack them at the end of your tweet – find creative ways to work them into your sentences. Don’t use too many (best practice says more than 2 hashtags in one tweet is simply too much.)

6.             Move up the social hierarchy: Help make connections.

Being in a position to introduce people at gatherings is a wonderful way to create a presence for yourself. This works exactly in the same way online, too.

Making connections between people, projects and organizations can help you become a more central figure in your small Twitter universe. Use the previously mentioned #FF tag on a Friday to showcase some of your favorites. Amplify other people’s voices: encourage their efforts, congratulate their successes.

7.             Look good. Or at least, presentable.

You don’t need to look like a model, but you don’t show up to a house party unshowered and badly dressed, do you?

When new followers click on your name and come to your page, their initial impression of your organization is important.

Do your logo, banner, or overall colors reflect the character of your idea, project or organization? What do your aesthetics communicate about you? Are you approachable – if you were a stranger to this organization, would you feel like you could talk to them? Would you feel like following them would make a positive impact on your life? We know from research that people are more frequently inclined to share positive stories than negative ones; it wouldn’t be much of a leap to say that people are more inclined to follow people with a positive feeling around them.

This week we have a chance to hear from Socialholic Typewriter team, one of our 5 winning teams of the Mahallae Challenges.

It was last week that the 5 winning teams of Mahallae Challenge got the chance to meet at a workshop for an exchange of best practices, lessons learned and prototype testing. A warm welcome and friendly faces set the ambience of the meeting. Inspiring people who dare to imagine a better future through projects that can bring about substantial change met for a mutual sharing of ideas.

Each team shared their story and we shared ours or as we like to call it “The story of a Logo”. The Socialholic Typewriter seeks to create an online, social space where boundaries between dichotomized communities and art forms are overcome; within this re-imagined community,  socialholic creators, that is to say each and everyone of us who uses social media as channels through which to stream their creativity, feel at home.

The project grasps this concept and materialises it. We wanted to offer more than just an online platform; we wanted to offer the experience of collective connectedness. That is when it occurred to us that the logo of the project could become the emblem that could bring a community to life. People felt the need to connect and commit to a project and we felt the need to listen.

That is how the idea behind the competition for the logo was born. We asked designers to submit logos which re-imagined the traditional typewriter in a modern social media era. Open to artists from around the globe the competition managed to collect 184 designs from 60 designers, a number that exceeded our expectations! The word was out there, people were gathering up! The recruited ones commented on the designs and then voted the one they preferred amongst the eight most popular. In this way, we made the logo design a collaborative project that invited writers and illustrators to come together and create, connecting with and building our tribe at the same time.

Some of the designs submitted. We were overwhelmed by the imaginative, creative ways designers interpreted The Socialholic Typewriter!

We had excellent contenders, but the one that seemed to gather a lot of attention was the one that used old typewriter buttons and emoticons, taking a vintage element and coupling it with a metacommunicative pictorial representation of facial expression -omnipresent in our social media era. One of our voters said, ‘Number 116 is my favourite. That immediately spoke to chat/social media because it included an emoticon.‘ Our team also felt that this particular design best communicated the concept of The Socialholic Typewriter as it aims to make the traditionally solitary writing journey, social. Therefore, we decided to take this particular design to the final round and after many changes and adjustments, the result can now be seen on our blog.

This is how the project defines being part of a community, to us it means being engaged in every step of the process, having a voice and an opinion. The need for a communal feeling which promotes an interactive flow of ideas is how the story of the logo began. This is the logo that can help build a community; it sparked interest in a playful way and it was able to inspire a movement even before its online debut.

We would like to thank you for embracing the project and helping us push the boundaries of the conventional ways of creative expression. Stay tuned for more.

Drum roll!

Out of 43 #tech4peace ideas submitted to the Mahallae Challenges, later narrowed down to 14 concepts, 5 winners now emerge (see the criteria, which evaluation was based on, here).

  i-Vee - a mobile game for encouraging volunteerism.

  YuBiz - an online platform to help young entrepreneurs kick-start their business.

  WE-ME - a mentorship platform and mobile app for women.

  Socialholic Typewriter -  a collaborative storytelling platform for micro-fiction.

  Hands on Famagusta - a hybrid platform for developing a future vision for the Famagusta region.

  We are very proud of ALL TEAMS who put a lot of effort and enthusiasm in developing very strong proposals, making the work of the panel of judges a tough one. We also thank all of YOU who became part of the process through your comments, endorsements and contributions, helping to refine the projects and make them more relevant.

  Also, congratulations all winners! We look forward to watching your ideas in action.

  As you may know, more than 40 ideas were submitted to the Mahallae Challenges.

  The ideas were evaluated by a panel of judges and 15 most successful ideas received green light to move on to the next stage. As the Mahallae team, we supported the teams of the winning ideas to develop their vision into full blown concepts. Concepts are basically ideas developed more elaborately, with longer descriptions, a budget and teams behind them.

  You can now view all the concepts on Mahallae here. Simply click “Support a Concept” next to each category, and you can view ideas in detail, make comments, and provide support through endorsement and/or by offering/donating resources to each concept until June 12th, 2014. The winners will be selected by a panel and announced on June 19th.

  See a short summary of each idea selected to go forward into the second (Concepts) stage below; click each project to see it in further detail.

  Youth Enterpreneurship

  1. i-Vee proposed by Maged and Maria

A mobile game app for encouraging volunteerism in Cyprus and Egypt, i-Vee foreesees the gamification approach would have benefits for behavioral and attitude change related to volunteerism.

  2. Project MUSED proposed by Nikos, Michael and Desislava

A platform to help youth interested in digital storytelling find the right partners for project collaboration, Project MUSED aims to create a community through synergies.

  3. Skill Market proposed by Mertkan, Mustafa, Berfu, Paraskevi, Akis, and Kasım

Skill Market is an app, the main aim of which is to address the problem of youth unemployment. People using the app will be able to exchange skills costlessly, and access opportunities to meet with people based on shared interests or skills from different communities.

  4. Stars Club proposed by Cicek, Didem, Faika and Eminay

StarsClub is a mobile platform that informs users when there is a need/motivates users to donate to NGOs. Says Gockun of her idea, “One of the biggest problem of civil society organizations (CSO) in Cyprus - especially in the Turkish Cypriot community - is difficulties in securing national donors.”

  5. EAT proposed by Jonathan, Gabriel and Roberto

EAT aims to establish a Test Greenhouse in Cyprus for the purpose of evaluating the three main Aquaponic growing systems to find the best suited crops for local production in Cyprus.

  6. YuBiz proposed by Panayiotis, Michalis, George, Alessandro and Moyses

YuBiz is an online platform that offers a collection of tools and services designed to help young entrepreneurs to create their business, promote their ideas, find support and establish relationships.

  7. STEP proposed by Efi, Eleni, Panayiotis and Marios

STEP is an online platform where undergraduate and graduate students alike will be able to get real life work experience by completing projects as part of NGOs while still in school.

  Women and Dialogue

8. WE-ME WoMEnPower proposed by Antigoni, Giwrgos, Christina and Maria

Womenpower will be a community platform/mobile app that provides resources and advocates active involvement of women in promoting equal rights in life and workplace. The platform will link women mentors and mentees together to build networks and nurture skills development.

  A Common Vision for the Future

9. Socialholic Typewriter proposed by Louiza Mallouri, Ali, Constantinos and Louiza Kaimaki

A web platform for ‘micro-fiction,’ typewriter would bring together writers and artists from different communities to collaboratively tell stories.

  10. Neighbour to Neighbour proposed by Hatice, Mehmet, Spyros, Caghan, Emine and Susie

A Web platform for information exchange between communities, categorized by different job sectors, allowing people from different communities to create a virtual neighborhood based on solidarity and assistance.

  11. Learning Greek with Hasan Tuna proposed by Sami, Özker, Enis and Ali

The first of its kind, Ozuslu’s idea foresees a Greek language course-program that will be produced and broadcasted via TV, satellite and mobile apps, making language learning more accessible and contributing to a culture of peace on the island.

  12. Pathways to Peaceful Coexistence proposed by Meltem, Alexandros and Ahmet

An online platform/mobile app which will allow Cypriots to express their values, policies and dreams for a unified Cyprus.

  13. Hands on Famagusta proposed by Esra, Emre, Nektarios, Socrates and Munevver

An interactive hybrid platform to engage people in developing a future vision for Famagusta. The team aims to use both online and offline techniques to achieve their goals.

  14. Tag’n’Fix proposed by Ali, Doğuş and Suphi

by Mehmet Erdogan

As you may know, we recently launched the Mahallae Challenges to crowdsource ideas about how best to use technology to address issues facing our communities.

While the use of technology in peacebuilding is on the rise around the world, it remains a relatively new concept. This is especially true in countries we at Mahallae are trying to serve – namely Cyprus and the Euro-Mediterranean region. Although many countries in this region are undergoing important transitions, and have well documented experiences of using social media during uprisings (see: Arab Spring and the Gezi protests of Turkey), a more broad understanding of how technology can help us is vital if we want to engage people in civic engagement in fresh, innovative ways.

Indeed, since we launched the Challenges, we have consistently been asked “What do you mean by using technology for social change?” Although we address this question and many more in our FAQs, we wanted to write a blog entry today to specifically reflect on this question and provide some examples that might clarify as well as inspire. This weekend we attended the BuildPeace conference in Boston, USA, a platform for sharing experiences of using technology for peace, so we have been very inspired ourselves. You can see tweets from the conference here.

So, what can technology do for us? Among others, technology can help us contribute to social change through:

a.      Increasing opportunities for Contact & Collaboration;

Masterpeace, Israel Loves Iran, The Peace Tube,  and many more platforms, even our own Mahallae aim to connect people from different countries and cultures, especially those in conflict – and encourage them to collaborate together on projects.

b.      Monitoring & early detection;

Check out Voix des Kivus in Congo, which “provides a technology to populations in South Kivu that lets them post accounts of events that affect their daily lives, from disease outbreaks and crop failures to population movements and conflict incidents.” The information gathered here is an important resource to researchers and practitioners who work in the region, giving them access to direct data from on-the-ground in difficult-to-access areas.

The Satellite Sentinel Project in Sudan, meanwhile, uses satellite imagery to identify warning signs for upcoming conflict – allowing for early intervention. SSP has also been able to archive and later notify the world of heinous crimes that might have otherwise gone undocumented and unreported.

c.       Encouragement & positive motivation through gaming;

Have you heard about the Good Gym initiative in the UK, which helps people stay fit by ‘running’ errands for their community? Created by a group of runners who aspire to combine regular exercise with civic engagement, GoodGym “increases motivation, gives expert fitness advice” and helps its users to achieve whatever goals they set for themselves.

Yet Good Gym is only one in a series of health based apps that aims to keep up the motivations of the individual. The SuperBetter platform, for example, “helps you achieve your health goals — or recover from an illness or injury — by increasing your personal resilience”; while Fitocracy gamifies the personal struggle for fitness while at the same time connecting you to a social network, to make it easier for you to “reach the next level.”

Although these examples seem too loosely connected to peacebuilding & civic engagement, do remember a peaceful healthy society starts at the individual level; it is also possible to take the seed ideas from such platforms and see how we can apply them for making a change at more macro levels.

d.      Data mapping, awareness raising & advocacy;

Take a look at HarrassMap from Egypt, which allows women who have been harrassed or assaulted to report their experience using an online map, which is then used for raising awareness and breaking stereotypes. A volunteer-based initiative, the mission of HarrassMap is to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment and assault in Egypt. To that end, technology allows many women to report anonymously and without fear of persecution their experience of harrassment, thus breaking down stigmas and barriers in our understanding of how frequently such violations take place.

Elsewhere, Mappiness the mobile app helps map happiness of individuals in UK (try it!), while tools such as Ushahidi and Crowdmap allow people to collect and map data related to any issue they are interested in crowdsourcing.

And many more! Of course, the examples are endless, and it’s impossible to capture the immense range of tools, platforms and apps that currently exist in this field, we can only aim to paint a very broad brushstroke to start the conversation.

It’s also important to remember that we already have begun to host many examples of using technology in fresh ways to encourage civic engagement right here on Mahallae. Perhaps you’ve already checked out our Interactive Tools section – and come across Shared Words, a game that creates a learning experience about commonalities between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, or Nicosia is Calling, an online game that uses a map of the old city of Nicosia to teach children aged 8-14 about the multicultural histories of Nicosia through fun and interactive digital exploration.

Similarly, the Build Peace database also archives initiatives that use technology to build peace, which you can explore for more inspiration!