Learnings & Reflections, News

The work ahead & extending our strategy

Laura Guzman
Paola Mosso

Nearing the end of what was the original end-date of our strategy, we’ve made the decision to extend it for another year, to the end of 2023. More than ever, we need to continue building this strong, resilient and well-networked movement of social justice activists.

Community Call, Learnings & Reflections

Facing corruption with reflection and collaboration

Alma Rangel

Lee este post en español. Last year, we launched a project to support Latin American organisations in reflecting and learning about how they use data and technology in their projects. As many organisations in the region are operating in environments where transparency, accountability and democracy are threatened, adopting a strategic approach to data and technology is an important […]

Learnings & Reflections

Big picture, little stitches at our annual retreat

Zara Rahman

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. […]

Learnings & Reflections

Conserving resources in civic tech

Julia Keseru

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. 

Learnings & Reflections

Theatre for one

Bailey Cordrey

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

Learnings & Reflections

Supporting with humility

Nonso Jideofor

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Responsible waste management in civic tech

Julia Keseru

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 […]

Learnings & Reflections

Making space to name our values

Anneke Victorica

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Embracing complexity is a must, not a luxury

Julia Keseru

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.

Learnings & Reflections

2018 as we wrote it

Laura Guzman

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!

Learnings & Reflections

Reflections on Organisational Security Audits

Paola Mosso
Maya Richman

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.

Learnings & Reflections, Project update, Research

Collaborating to monitor abuse of power: why it matters and how it can be done

Paola Mosso

In the past few years, Latin America has been hit hard with corruption scandals.The alarming Lava Jato scandal revealed how companies used networks of offshore entities across the region to launder money and fund bribes. In Peru alone, the Odebrecht company confirmed to the US Department of Justice that they made corrupt payments to Peruvian […]

Learnings & Reflections

2017: The Year in Posts

Laura Guzman

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! […]

Learnings & Reflections

Don’t let your parties get out of hand

Maya Richman

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Reflections from Africa Open Data Conference 2017

Nonso Jideofor

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Designing for the (not-so-distant) future

Maya Richman

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Panic Button: Lessons for the Tech for Good sector

Guest authors

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 […]

Learnings & Reflections

Panic Button: Why we are retiring the app

Guest authors

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 […]

Learnings & Reflections

Questions to guide the work of data investigators

Zara Rahman

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’.

Learnings & Reflections

Diversity is a competency

Alix Dunn

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.

Learnings & Reflections

Takeaways from the Digital Verification Corps Summit

Alix Dunn

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.

Learnings & Reflections

A Love Letter to The Room

Tin Geber

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.

Learnings & Reflections

GONG and the Mosaic of Influence

Tin Geber

This is a guest post from Lucy Chambers who in February 2017, in collaboration with the Engine Room’s Tin Geber, flew to Croatia to help GONG, one of Croatia’s most formidable NGO’s help kick off their new Mosaic of Influence project. This post originally appeared on Lucy’s Tech To Human blog. GONG is a Croatian […]

Learnings & Reflections

Moving civil society into the digital

Zara Rahman

This week, Alix and I had the chance to attend the Do Good Data / Data on Purpose conference held at Stanford University in the US. After the conference, I attended a smaller workshop on “The Future of Digital Infrastructure,” which provided a great opportunity to work through issues from the conference in a more hands-on way.

Learnings & Reflections

Balancing Acts: Using Replication Sprints to Repurpose Technology without Ignoring Context

Julia Keseru

Diig.io is a lightweight tool for extractive transparency. The Engine Room and the Namibian Institute for Public Policy Research built together a data model and searchable platform of petroleum exploration licences in Namibia to power investigation and advocacy. From that experience, The Engine Room realised that the underlying data model and code can be useful for other organisations facing similar challenges — with the proper support. Through the replication sprint process, we built two new platforms with Citizens for Justice and Oxfam in Malawi and the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association, targeting mineral extraction in their countries.

This site is registered on wpml.org as a development site. Switch to a production site key to remove this banner.