On Monday, as part of IFRC’s Solferino Academy, Laurent Fernandez, and I ran a ‘How to use Zoom’ Skillshare for National Societies in the Americas. We broke the participants up into small groups to discuss their challenges and generate a list of questions in a google doc. We then spent the rest of the session answering questions, and of course, we ran out of time. So we kept answering the questions in the google doc for the participants after the session ended. We will be refining the session design next week.
On Wednesday, provided support to Jude Habib and Helena Hastin to run a virtual workshop to wrap up Sound Delivery’s programme to increase diversity and representation in the media. Both Jude and Helena have participated in The (Session) Design Lab, and they’ve fully embraced ADIDS (Activity, Discussion, Input, Deepening, Synthesis) as a workshop model. During the workshop, the discussion turned to how difficult it is to become a journalist unless you can rely on the bank of mum & dad. One of the participants who is a journalist described how hard it was to have to work an all-night shift and then attend classes during the day. Another participant surmised that the reason the journalists called the Brexit referendum so badly wrong in 2016 was that they all have privileged middle-class backgrounds.
Announced a Third (Virtual) Session Design Lab. My aha during our April 23rd Lab, was that I didn’t have to do the whole thing in one day as it’s virtual and people don’t have to convene in one place. So now running it over two half-days on May 27th & 28th, allowing me to do it at times more optimal for the Americas – from 10 am to 1 pm Eastern (3 pm to 6 pm BST). Tickets have already started selling.
On Thursday, also as part of The Solferino Academy, we supported the running of a second Cartoonathon for the Climate Centre. This time we got the 150 participants broken up into small groups relatively early and got them to discuss how things had changed during COVID-19 and asked them to capture tag lines into a google doc. Cartoonists that were on hand took the taglines coming from groups and created a series of cartoons. By the end of the 90-minute session, participants had: created the taglines, heard from the Spanish Red Cross and Italian Red Cross on their learnings from the past few weeks, and voted, then commented on the cartoons that the cartoonists had created during the session.
We are preparing a virtual workshop with the European Centre for Non-Profit Law on “The Unheard Voice of Civil Society in EU Policy on AI”. The first workshop will focus on raising awareness of AI for networks of civil society groups in Europe. Our challenge is not to get bogged down in getting the definition of Artificial Intelligence right, as it’s being defined quite liberally by many different actors. However, we do know we need participants to understand how the European Union sees it, so they can then effectively impact EU policy.