NiJeL was honored to be invited to the Innovations in Mobile Data Collection for Social Action in the Middle East workshop next week in Amman, Jordan, hosted by UNICEF Innovation and MobileActive.org. Our executive director, JD, will have the pleasure of attending this workshop and is looking forward to showcasing some of NiJeL’s most recent work and learning from the impressive roster of attendees! You can follow JD’s updates from the workshop on Twitter here: @nijel_mapping

Here’s a quick description of the workshop:

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.
• Please note that the workshop will be held primarily in English (with some Arabic sessions).

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.

And here’s a list of the impressive organizations invited to be there:

Al Jazeera
ArabiaGIS
Cisco
Development Seed
Gapminder
Institute for War & Peace Reporting
Intel
Meedan
Mercy Corps
MIT Media Lab
Open Data Kit
Open Mobile Consortium
Rootspace
Royal Scientific Society of Jordan
Sharek961
SMEX Beirut
Souktel
Thoughtworks
UNICEF Iraq
Union of Arab ICT Associations
Ushahidi
Women in IT, Lebanon
Zain

Many thanks to Chris C. at MIT Media Lab for facilitating our involvement at this workshop, and to Katrin Vercalas at MobileActive for inviting us to attend. Thank you!!

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