Sitting in the audience at a myriad of events across topics of humanitarian action, social innovation or entrepreneurship, I often get twitchy. Truly I enjoy the engaging talks, learning new things/perspectives and networking. But in the back of my mind, I am always asking: “Nice policy, what does implementation look like?” The worlds of civic technology, digital literacy, humanitarian response, international development and entrepreneurship steadily connect. Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk with a room of entrepreneurs about how they could apply data-driven innovation to their startups. Increasingly, I am struck how applicable the skills and techniques I learned from Digital Humanitarian activities are for entrepreneurs and vice versa. This is becoming fairly standard in North American communities, but it is still new ground in MENA. If you look to UNICEF big ‘moonshot’ on investing $9 million dollars in open source entrepreneurship with the Unicef Innovation Fund. The types of digital and data literacy gaps differ some in the entrepreneur community from the civil society/civic tech circles. This comes down to purpose and goals. Yet, the curriculum stands the test of transfer as we consider how to build a civic and digitally engaged community.
If you are in Qatar and want to keep in touch with others interested in learning data-driven innovations, we set up a SLACK channel, simply just share your email with me.
My slides from the Data-Driven Startup talk include extensive notes and references. Thank you to School of Data, Data-Driven Innovation Mena, Open Data Institute, Aspiration Tech and the Digital Humanitarian Network for being so inspiring.
