Building from ground up—IT Officials and Data Champions synergize at SUSASAN School
SUSASAN has faced challenges in these one and a half years of implementation in terms of data and development of tools. Though data portals have been launched along with other tools to support the local governments but we have failed to interact with the government officials, the central beneficiaries of this project. To change that, we brought together the IT officials from the local governments, the civil society organization’s representatives and the partners of the project in a single room by organizing a learning and co-creation workshop. And it has turned out to be a much needed interaction for the betterment of the project.
SUSASAN, Sustainable use of Technology for Public Sector Accountability in Nepal, is an ongoing project being run by CECI Nepal in 6 districts in partnership with 12 Local Governments. SUSASAN is an initiative to bridge the existing gap between the government and the citizen, especially the WMGs(Women and Marginalized Groups), with the use of Technology and to help the government adopt the open government practices, to help them be more accountable and transparent.
You can find more about SUSASAN here.
Into the event
YoungInnovations conducted a 4 days long, July 3 -6, learning and co-creation workshop for the 12 IT officers of the Local governments and 6 Data Champions from each DCSOs (District Civil Society Organizations) of the project at Chispani, Kailali. The aim of the workshop was to transfer knowledge to the participants about problem solving, data process and analysis with the use of tools and setting the ground for co-creation to develop future technologies for the project together with the participants.
Day One — Think out of the box
The day started with an icebreaker where the participants had to introduce each other with the help of portrait they had drawn of each other and other information to get to know each other. The participants were then introduced to Gitlab through which all of the resources and schedules for the workshop were shared.
The first presentation, by Bibhusan Bista on Creativity and innovation started with a game of connecting dots with straight lines. The participants were encouraged to think out of the box. The participants talked about how to connect the governance on government level as well as local level government, civil societies and citizen engagement though technology.
“ Mr. Bibhusan has described about the innovation, preparation, construction, inclusion, illumination, evaluation and verification of modern technological service processes. When he told us about these terms of technology we understood the process. For example, making a policy is not the matter, the matter is its implementation.” — Team Bajhang
Following the presentation, the participants exercised their creativity and innovation by developing Techno-hub centric solutions for the problems they identified in their districts.
Later, the participants were introduced to the concept of Design Thinking by actually making a wallet for their partners, facilitated by Rakesh Pradhan and Bibhusan Bista. The participants went through all the five steps of Design Thinking - Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype and Test. The crash course gave an insight into building technological tools- to understand the user’s needs and desires, to the process of creating solutions, testing them fast to see what works and what doesn’t and iterate based on the feedback.
“The concept of wallet taught us what it takes to prepare a technological tool, we must take the user’s needs and desires into consideration. Especially when relating to WMGs.We understood the connection of need, action and opportunity of different people.” — Team Bajhang
Day Two — Dive into data
The day started with day’s goal setting and the participants were divided into 6 district teams. Each team selected a problem statement which is relevant to their district and could co-create to develop viable solutions.
The participants had an interaction with Binod Upadhyaya, Governance Advisor, about good governance and the focus of the project on WMGs and their rights. This was followed by presentation on data, process, technology and everything by our data expert, Anjesh Tuladhar. The participants learnt about what data is, data sources and data process. They learnt to use pivot table and VLOOKUP function in excel to analyze data. They exercised the four steps of the data process: scraping, cleaning, analyzing and visualization. They all engaged in group exercise to analyze and visualize the district and municipal data in various ways. For the rest of the day they worked on a mini-data challenge.
“We learnt about the data process. We found this quite useful in our daily job too.” — Team Sindhupalchok
Day Three — Research and design
The day began with goal setting for day three. The day’s first session was on Effective Presentation, explaining the bad practices and highlighting dos and don’ts of effective presentation.
“Everyone realized that a good presentation can connect, inform and inspire for remarkable outcome in business and communication.” — Team Achham
In the second session, the participants learnt about User Research preparing them for the field visit. The participants went out to the near by village to find out the need and goals of the WMGs around the venue, their pain points and get an insight into the lives of their target users. The participants worked on their district’s problem statements.
The next session was on prototyping; how and why it is done. They learnt about story boards to capture their ideas on solutions for their problem statements. They also learnt about the making wireframes to visualize the solutions their users would interact with. Then for the rest of the day the participants worked on the storyboard and wireframes for their problem statements.
Day Four / Final Day — Techno-hub, Storytelling and beginning of Data Challenge and Co-creation
The final day of the workshop started with goal setting for the day. This was followed by presentation from each district group of their story boards and wireframes. They presented to the jury and were judged on the basis of the clarity of their problem they were tackling and their solution. Team Lalitpur won and Team Achham came second; both teams won cash prize.
Saroj Bista presented to the participants learnt about the function of the Techno-hub; What a Techno-hub is, its role and functions. He went on to the next session about story telling, how to tell a compelling stories to create impact in the lives of the readers and viewers.
SUSASAN Open House was facilitated by Bibhusan Bista and Binod Upadhyaya for all the attendees of the workshop including the rest of the facilitators. The floor was opened for all to ask questions about the project. The motive of this exercise was to build a common understanding of the project.
“The 4th day’s training also became very important for each participant to be clear about the theoretical and technical significance of the project SUSASAN, Techno-hub, e-profile, citizen-government engagement and the importance of the SUSASAN in reality. The program motivated the participants to be honest on their own duties and responsibility.” — Team Dadeldhura
Finally, the teams were briefed about how we were going to move ahead for next four months to co-create solutions for the problem statements they got for their districts and the Data Challenge. the output of which they were to present in the next workshop and the cash prize for the challenge.
The four days long learning and co-creation workshop was completed with success on, not for just being a successful event, rather for the participants to have gained knowledge which they could use to fulfill their day to day responsibilities and role at their work.
Everyday we captured how the day went from the participants and this is what it looked like,
Thank you Team Bajang, Team Sindhupalchok, Team Achham and Team Dadeldhuda for your help to write this story.
