Learnings & Reflections

Looking back at our partnership with EVA Nigeria

At the beginning of this month, The Engine Room team–all 17 of us!–met in-person for our annual team retreat. This year, we gathered at the Redondo de Guayedra on Gran Canaria, complete with stunning views and even better weather.  This year, we did things a little differently than how we’ve done them in the past. […]

A few months ago, I shared my thoughts on why I believe there is enormous potential in introducing more principled waste management techniques in the civic tech sector. I received valuable feedback on the piece and some clarifying questions, a few of which I thought would be worth sharing and answering. 

*sound on* We’ve curated a collection of our favourite tech + civil society podcasts to brighten up your commute or chore list

Data and technology can help civil society organisations increase their impact. But that doesn’t mean that digital tools are superior to analogue methods.

A rights-based approach to designing, implementing and scaling best practices for the use of data could be leveraged beyond the civil society sector.

In this post, we share some thoughts on how civil society could advance our collective advocacy on digital ID systems.

At the core of our work is supporting organisations to accelerate their social change and social justice goals by responsibly integrating data and tech into their work. To do this in a sustainable and impactful way, we’ve learned the importance of centring their expertise, style of work and understandings of different contexts.

Within civil society, we can’t control what technology is developed, but we can control how we choose to engage with it.

Many of us already invest time and resources into minimizing our plastic consumption, reusing paper, or composting our food. But what about the digital waste we create in our work as nonprofits? Human rights defenders, transparency advocates, and many others working for the greater public good repeatedly design technology-heavy projects that cost a lot of […]

This is not about the WFP or Palantir, but about ensuring that exploitative data practices have no place in civil society work, be it through pro bono partnerships, in-house development or paid contracts.

Conventional wisdom might dictate that organisational values are something that you design with an executive director in the room, or at the very least in the organisation. Well, we didn’t really do that, or not exactly.

In the intersection of technology and social change, diversity means that we need to embrace the inherent complexity that comes from the often dissonant voices and conflicting needs of the sectors we work in. These voices might seem mutually exclusive – sometimes downright contradictory – but they need to be heard and taken seriously.

At The Engine Room, 2018 was our most prolific blogging year yet, with over 60 posts. As the year draws to a close, we feel gratitude towards all of our external contributors and our dear readers. Take a quick look at some of our – and our readers’ – favorite posts!

At The Engine Room, we are an entirely remote team. Since we can’t see our team in-person that often, we design unique ways to check in on and promote each others’ well-being.

Earlier this year, The Engine Room and ONE partnered to better understand how civil society in Sub-Saharan Africa is using data to achieve policy reform. Our findings have implications for how the international data community supplies data to local actors, expects data to be used, and supports further work with data.

We’ve implemented two security audits in South America to support emerging organisations that are using civic technology to advance social justice. Here, we share some insights developed over the course of this work, and explore how we will put these learnings to use in the future.

We recently undertook a two-part plan to assess our impact. Today, we are sharing a Primer on our approach, which summarises our objectives and methodology.

What do the two crises have in common? It seems that many of the advocacy and regulatory arguments made around new data protections are eerily similar to the arguments made during the call for regulation of the financial industries.

Today we are launching a recruitment process for my successor. This post outlines the problem we have worked to solve, our role in solving it, and the ‘why now’ of my transition out of the organisation.

Through our Matchbox program we partnered with Code for Sierra Leone to navigate the murky waters of identifying local solutions meeting water service delivery needs in Freetown. Here’s what we found!

We want to understand why funders share data, how they share it, and the challenges they face in doing so responsibly. We’ll be surveying a wide range of people and interviewing funders about their experiences, with the ultimate goal of producing a framework that can help them to make informed decisions.

We’re excited to announce the launch of our 2017 Retrospective, where we dive into not just our work, but that of our brilliant partners around the world.

We’re retiring The Compiler – not because we think that the mission of it is any less important, but because we think it’s time to focus our energies on other ways of achieving that mission.

There are countless ways to measure a year, to reflect on work done through meetings held, events convened, research conducted, blog posts written. This year, Engine Roomers — and our guest authors — published 53 posts on topics ranging from transparency in Latin America to digital security among funders. We even had a love letter! […]

The Social Impact Dilemma: When measuring support gets complicated. It’s an ever-relevant question for organisations working on social change — how do we know that we are making a difference?

DataKind UK decided to develop a set of principles to guide their work in a process led by their network of volunteers (in DataKindUK fashion).

One big gap in many organisations’ security culture is the use of Slack. In a dream world, we would all have the capacity and resources to manage our own servers and implement an open source alternative. Right now that’s just not realistic for most, so if an organisation needs to use Slack it makes sense to help them use it more intentionally – meeting them where they are – rather than brute-force their switch to a Mattermost server, for example.

In July 2017, I realised that many of the issues we were discussing at the African Open Data Conference (AODC) were similar to the ones I’d seen in Ghana. These links got me thinking about the importance of sequencing in designing open government initiatives.

If you find yourself in the throes of a redesign, at some point you will need to transform user research into platform mockups. We hope that our approach can help you to zero-in on the goals of the redesign, and make more pragmatic decisions as you move forward.

This post is by Tanya O’Carroll, Adviser Tech and Human Rights, Amnesty International; Danna Ingleton, Adviser, Human Rights Defenders; and Jun Matsushita, Founder and CEO, iilab. Making the decision to cease support for the Panic Button app was not an easy one, but it was also not an empty one. We believe that diving into […]

This post is by Tanya O’Carroll, Adviser Tech and Human Rights, Amnesty International; Danna Ingleton, Adviser, Human Rights Defenders; and Jun Matsushita, Founder and CEO, iilab. In 2012, Amnesty International, with support from our partners at iilab, The Engine Room and Frontline Defenders, began developing a tool that would provide human rights defenders with an […]

Earlier this summer, I spent six days in Montenegro with 60 ‘data investigators’ – or people working on data investigation – from around the Balkans and around the world. At this Data Investigation Camp, hosted by Tactical Tech and Share Lab, our shared goal was to focus on ‘how we can use data to understand and expose misconduct and abuses of power within a human rights, investigative journalism and anti-corruption framework’.

I see diversity not just as the right thing or the politically correct thing to do to avoid being embarrassed by call out culture, but as a core competency of any organisation. Where I see a homogeneous monoculture, I see an organisation that cannot be effective. An all-male management team? In the long run, you have a very slim chance at succeeding, unless your goal is to serve all-male communities.

Last week, I had the privilege of spending three days on the Berkeley campus with the Digital Verification Corps, (DVC) the student cohort that has been driving video verification, processing, and high velocity support to process video for Amnesty International investigations and other human rights investigations.

Last week, I had the pleasure of being part of the Ethics and Risks working group at the 2017 ID2020 Platform for Change Summit. This event focused on issues faced by people living without recognised identification, and brought together multiple stakeholders, public and private, to discuss these challenges.

Amnesty International has been working on a range of initiatives, including Amnesty Decoders, a microtasking platform that lets volunteers contribute to human rights investigations online, and DatNav, a guide to navigating and integrating digital data in human rights research.

On 12 May 2017 Tin Geber, our Design and Technology Lead, left The Engine Room to pursue studies in computational arts. We wish him the best of luck, and are looking forward to what he will bring back to the good fight with his new-found skills. These are his leaving thoughts.

This week, we held our annual retreat – where all core team members meet in person, and our office goes from being virtual to being a real, concrete house (in this case, one outside Nice, France.).

What do you get when you mix two projects, ten people with 18 data SIMs, five different focaccias, a power outage and a barbeque? Our latest replication sprint of course, which happened earlier this year in Istria, Croatia, as part of our Matchbox Program. Now that some time has passed, we’re in a better position […]