Capacity Building

The data pipeline We are very grateful to the School of Data for their clear explanation on how the data pipeline works! Once you have a clear understanding of your data action cycle, stakeholders and targets, you can begin manipulating data. The process of working with data can be broken […]

Data Advocacy Essentials, Pt II: The Data Pipeline

What is data? How can we use it for advocacy? Advocacy is a process by which people, groups, networks and coalitions seek to bring about positive change by influencing policies, as well as the actions and opinions of others. In evidence based advocacy, facts in the form of data are […]

Data Advocacy Essentials, Pt I: Action Cycles and Stakeholders

I recently spent two days facilitating a workshop on how to evaluate the impact of data training and learning endeavors for Open Knowledge, several School of Data chapters and like minded organisations including DataKind UK, SocialTIC from Mexico City, Code4SA from South Africa, and Metamorphosis from Macedonia. At the end […]

What I’ve Learned about Impact Assessment

I was inspired to write this after reading Lucy Chambers excellent post proposing how a dystopian theory of change might be helpful in creating long term strategies. In it, Lucy points to a DIY theory of change template that simplifies the process of developing a theory of change plan and […]

What I’ve Learned About Theory of Change

What is it like to bring over 100 individuals together in a room to talk about the issues surrounding ‘Follow the Money’ (FTM) and the impact that technology and data have on it? On January 21st and 22nd in Berlin, FabRiders was fortunate to be able to support the efforts […]

What I learned at #FTMTech

Preamble As individuals supporting movements working for rights and justice, we believe in transparency, collaboration, open data, and shared knowledge. We strongly believe that resource creators should strive to be accountable to the communities they aim to serve. Content creators should not dictate accessibility by the user, and should strive […]

Responsible Resource Creator Manifesto (Draft 2)

Just back from Oakland, California feeling nourished and re-energised after attending the annual Nonprofit Development Software Summit (#NPDev). This is Aspiration’s signature event, bringing together a collection of radical techies, graphic designers, campaigners and non-profit staffers for three days of organised chaos that is unbelievably productive. We were honored to have […]

What I learned at NPDev Summit 2014

Understanding how any technology used in campaigning functions as a tactic to further your campaign strategy is essential. For every training session that Fabriders runs, whether it’s about utilising data effectively or social media, we’ve found it important to start with an exercise that gets participants to thinkabout the goals […]

A Quick Advocacy Strategy Exercise w/ Stakeholder Mapping & Power ...

This list of questions was derived during a session at the Responsible Data Forum in Oakland on March, 6th 2014. Our desire was to create a list of questions to ask yourself when working as an intermediary with marginalised communities. The answers you will come up with, might or might […]

Questions to Ask Frequently (QAFs) when working with Data and ...

I had the privilege of traveling to Cambodia last week to work closely with Allen Gunn (Gunner) and Misty Avila from Aspiration, running an event for the Open Institute called ‘Open Cambodia.’ We had over 100 participants from all over Cambodia, who were largely interested in using technology to support […]

What I learned at Open Cambodia

Grateful thanks to Heather Leson (@HeatherLeson) and Maya Ganesh (@mayameme) from Tactical Tech for their valuable insights and input into this blog post. I’m working with Eurasian Harm Reduction Network on a project addressing police violence against women who use drugs in Eastern Europe. The overall goal of this project […]

What I’ve Learned About Mapping Violence

As I mentioned in part II, I found the circuit rider network to be absolutely invaluable to getting access to the right expertise in order to do my job. The environment for this was the circuit rider network, and it was during the second Minneapolis Round-up I attended that I […]

My History of Circuit Riding (Part III)

Aspiration’s NPDev Summit was remarkable this year on a number of fronts: most notably the participants were ready to share and absorb knowledge on equal measure, resulting in a dynamic agenda packed full of a wide range of topics and facilitators. Also notable how the Aspiration team, Gunner, Jess, Jordan, […]

What I Learned at NPDev Summit 2013

I’ve just completed a 6 month project working with the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s mentorship programme. I spent two days last week with felow mentors Tunji Eleso, Sarah Schacht, Gaba Rodriguez and Lucy Chambers, along with Allen Gunn (Gunner) in London to discuss what we’d learned from our projects. […]

Making Tech Mentorships Work

In my previous post, I told you how I came to work for the Low-Income Networking and Communication’s (LINC) Project; and of meeting some amazing people at the second ‘Riders Roundup’, ‘Riders’ being roving tech consultants with a particular mandate to assist NGOs in specific issue areas. Following that meeting, […]

My History of Circuit Riding (Part 2)

Thanks to the Transparency and Accountability Initiative’s mentorship program, I was able to spend a week in Bratislava, being a mentor to Fair Play Alliance. The goal of the mentorship is to help Fair Play Alliance become more agile and flexible in its ability to manage projects and identify how […]

What I Learned working with Fair Play Alliance

At the end of March of 2013, the InteRider mailing list was shut down after what must have been over a decade – partially due to lack of traffic but also because of UK budget cuts. The list was initially set up to support a network of consultants who were […]

My History of Circuit Riding (Part 1)

In November and December of 2012, I spent six weeks traveling to seven different countries on three different continents. During this time, I facilitated at six different training/workshop events. Since 1998, trainings have been a core part of what I do, but I am far from the perfect trainer (If […]

Lessons from the Road: Six Things I learned about Training

The Transparency and Accountability Initiative (T/A Initiative) is a ‘donor collaborative committed to strengthening democracy and development through empowering citizens to hold their governing institutions to account.’ The Bridge Meeting is part of their ‘New Technologies’ programme and is designed to foster collaborations between organisations working on transparency and accountability […]

What I learned at the Transparency & Accountability Initiative’s Bridge ...

Six years ago I left the US non profit tech scene and had swore never to return (more about that in an upcoming blog post – stay tuned). There’s only one person who could possibly persuade me to come back to attend a non-profit techie event, and that is Gunner […]

What I Learned at NPDev Summit 2012

Ten years ago, I travelled to a small town in Missouri, with a fellow Circuit Rider, Arif Mamdani, to help a small low-income organising group called GRO migrate from Windows to Linux. The lead-organiser, Robin Acree, had her computer completely wiped out by a virus and she’d had enough. So we spent a […]

Facilitating Collective Power