The change is stunning. And welcomed.
Back in 2001, my first year working as an employee of the United Nations, I was a part of a little department of six people (and various interns over the years) within UNDP/UN Volunteers, managing two projects: the Online Volunteering service (then part of NetAid) and the Secretary General’s United Nations Information Technology Service (UNITeS). Our team could not have been more excited to talk about virtual volunteering, technology for development (ICT4D), ICT4D projects by volunteers in the field, handheld computer technologies in community service/volunteering/advocacy, citizen-designed tech solutions, using tech to work with remote volunteers, crowd-sourcing for development (though we didn’t call it that then), south-to-south knowledge exchange ONLINE, hacks 4 social change (though we didn’t call it then), and other tech4good activities to anyone who would listen! It was an incredible four years of my life.
Unfortunately, many of our UN colleagues never understood our projects – or our boundless enthusiasm for such. Despite our events, workshops, one-on-one meetings, online resources, singing and dancing, drums, support from the Secretary General, Kofi Annan, whatever else we could think of, our activities were met with eye rolls by many of our colleagues. By the time I left that assignment, the new head of UNV (now long-gone) was proudly proclaiming that most of our initiative’s activities, save the online volunteering service, were finished – not because they had met their goals, but because they weren’t needed, and never had been. Even the UNITeS web site was taken off-line for a few months (hence why I keep a version here). Our team went its separate ways.
Now, 13 years after we came together in Bonn, Germany and tried to get the rest of the UN excited about our crazy ideas, and nine years after most of our activities were ended, it’s fascinating to see UNDP in particular fully embracing those ideas: The UNDP SHIFT campaign, focused on innovation (and many of the ideas we tried to promote back at the start of the century – see graphic at left), is the week of 22 September 2014, headquartered in New York City (the “Social Good” summit) but happening all over the world, including here in Kyiv, Ukraine (details soon!).
We can’t take any credit for this change happening, of course. But my colleagues can feel good to know that we weren’t quite as crazy as people thought we were – we we really were on to something worth pursuing by the UN. We were just a decade or so early!
(although… we were pretty crazy…)
What a great post, Jayne! You know, it’s curious that I had heard about the recent UNDP Innovation activities, but it never occurred to me that we were working on many of these issues back at the start of the 00s.
You’re right, it’s refreshing to see that there is so much work done nowadays innovating and pushing the edges of development processes. Trying to get knowledge management operational at UNV, starting a great Online Volunteering service from scratch, looking for /testing virtual collaborative spaces, squeezing uses of ICT for dev purposes… It was fun AND challenging (as we can all recall). I do miss that environment, and the ‘liberties’ we were taking… (thanks, Sharon…, you’re probably smiling allright!!).
I’d say that there is plenty to get done still (most of these innovations are by no means widespread). Personally, I’m trying (with little success) to drive across the idea of introducing deliberate, thought-through network strategies in the development sector. I’m sure that in our various pathways all in that crazy bunch (including our super-duper interns like Liz or Angela-Jo and others) have continued to find ways to improve development instruments a little bit. Who knows what we could do today at a place big/important enough to provide means and amplification…? 🙂
At any rate, if UNV is still (perenially…?) with funding problems, perhaps it could just change its name to UNCS (UN CrowdSourcing) and I betcha that all the innovation crowd from Silicon and other Valleys would come pouring. 😉
Thanks again for such a cool, eloquent piece.
Manuel
Dear Jayne:
My name is Mitchell Toomey and I am leading the Shift Campaign in UNDP. As you state in your post, many of the approaches and methods that we are diving into during our set of global events are not new, but demand is strongly emerging for them in international development. You could say that we are finally at a kind of tipping point where instead of us at HQ “promoting” innovation, we are playing catch up with our amazing country offices.
What is emerging now is a strategic organizational understanding of how important it is to build support structures for innovators and entrepreneurs as an organization The work you, and others, started a decade ago helped show the way within the UN for new things to take root, and to show how technology is not just a “painful cost” that should be minimized, but also a transformational ingredient to development solutions.
Thanks for the kind mention of Shift week. I invite you and your readers to follow #inno4dev on twitter to see how things unfold!
Jayne, this was such a trip to read – and a trip down memory lane! What an incredible and life-changing experience for me, fresh out of grad school, to have the privilege of interning and later working with such an amazingly fun and passionate team, and such an inspirational leader of our organization as Sharon. Y’all kinda set the bar pretty high. We knew at the time that what we were doing was revolutionary and had the ability to make a real change for development, but over the past decade it has been incredible to witness those visions come true.
Since the World Summit on the Information Society (http://www.itu.int/wsis/index.html), the term ICT4D has gained traction, and (as we knew it would) we’ve seen the use of mobiles and hand-helds outstrip desktop computers, revolutionizing the way people in developing countries can access and share information for farming, health, education, basically any area of development you can think of (and we did think of it!).
Connections and experience-sharing with the field offices were super important to you, and I distinctly remember Yahoo Messenger and other chat services being banned for use at work during that time (and you being pretty ticked off about it), so we ended up flying in volunteers and/or connecting them via webcast to have them share their experiences from the field at the high-level conference in Geneva. And now, look at how Skype & co have changed the way we work…
Such a good feeling knowing that each of us from that team, in our own way, is continuing with the same passion and vision in our work today. Thanks for sharing, Jayne!
The problem with being a visionary and ahead of your time, is dealing with all those backward thinking people who are behind their times. Good ideas ultimately win out in the end, like these ones, which now define the way things are done.