OUR AIM IS TO
Interest activists in technology for transparency
Help them understand how tech can help achieve their goals
Empower activists to work with tech experts
BARRIERS WE OVERCOME
Activists are often afraid that:
TECH FOR TRANSPARENCY IS TOO ADVANCED!
The language used by techies makes it impossible to even start
LEARNING CHALLENGES
Training offered in this area often prove to be too difficult because:
Repetition of facts without context is not useful to practitioners
Programs are often overloaded with information
At the end of a course, participants still don’t know where to start
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN EXPERTS
Civic activists and tech specialists often don’t understand each other:
NGO-TRANSPARENCY JARGON
TECH-JARGON
WE TEACH HOW TO:
ACHIEVE YOUR MISSION
with smart use of technology
USE DATA
to get evidence & a clear understanding of problems
USE DATA-STORYTELLING
to engage people
TRAININGS CONCEPT
TransparenCEE Data Advocacy for Change education program is based on three principles:
Introducing activists to the fundamentals of data during offline workshops designed for strengthening open attitudes, acquiring basic expertise and building skills on cooperating with experts.
Conducting offline workshops lead by two equally important experts:
- Data expert
- Adult education expert
Inviting the alumni of workshops to join the TransparenCEE network and use social media and Slack channels to keep them engaged in the community.
During our workshops we focus on enabling participants to start using technology in their organizations and to cooperate more effectively with tech experts. That said, we focus less on passing the technical expertise and skills, and more on understanding how modern day technology can be helpful in their everyday work.
We empower participants to work with tech experts, because often they feel unprepared to have balanced collaboration with programmers, data scientists and designers. This “less is more” approach ensures that participants are eased into the subject and get confident in their future collaborations.
We create teams composed of two trainers, an adult education specialist and a technical expert. The importance of this combination cannot be overstated – it provides the balance in the program of the training,
and it ensures that the expertise does not come before attitudes and basic skills. The preparatory work of this team is crucial – they thoroughly prepare engaging learning methods and choose relevant examples from the participants’ field of expertise.
The workshops are just the beginning of the learning process – they open participants’ minds towards thinking about how to use technology in their accountability work. In the TransparenCEE community we provide an ecosystem of learning opportunities: a website with various resources and contact to community leaders via different channels, peer2peer working groups, online and offline education opportunities, face to face meetings like large conferences as well as smaller meetups.
Learning by doing is emphasized through scaling tech tools across the network with mentoring from experts and practitioners. This is how the “less is more” of the first workshop approach in the long run supports efficient and independent learning directed towards independence in planning and implementing usage of technology by participants of the workshops.
FOR WHOM?
LIST OF EVENTS
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Working with Data for BeginnersHow to start working with data? Anna Kuliberda and Grigoriy Sorochan guided the participants through the stages of preparing and analyzing data sets. Warsaw, 9-10th October 2017
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Data Storytelling for ChangeCollecting data is just a first step on a long way to advocating organization’s findings to the audience, so we practiced how to change data into an intresting story. Sarajevo, 7th May 2017.
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Data Advocacy: visual know-hows for NGOsThis workshop explored the possibilities to promote the data NGOs collect and to make it more understandable for their audience. Gdańsk, 8th April 2017.
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Training of TrainersSupporting geeks in their development as educators was the aim of this training organised during the TransparenCEE Community MeetUp in Tbilisi, 13th Septemeber 2016.
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Open Data in ActionOpen data magic on PDF Ukraine: how synergy between local governance and civic activists can be achieved? Cross-sector workshop, Kyiv, 26th September 2018.