Welcome to the live feed for the Akvo Track Day in Amsterdam, on Thursday 23 May 2013.

The action kicks off at 9am Dutch time and runs until 5pm.

See the agenda for the day, and who’s coming, here, or check out the Nairobi or Washington DC events.

Welcome to the live feed for the Akvo Track Day in Nairobi, on Thursday 23 May 2013.

The action kicks off at 9am Kenya time and runs until 5pm.

See the agenda for the day, and who’s coming, here. Or check out the Amsterdam or Washington DC events.

Early this year Cordaid’s new website went live. The site unites Akvo RSR with Cordaid’s own project management syste. The first 139 projects of Cordaid’s total portfolio, which numbers a few thousand projects, are now visible online with the help of Akvo RSR. For Cordaid this is a first and significant step in opening up information about the work they do. But to actually bring to life what’s happening on the ground, it is important that their field staff and partners start communicating about project progress.

Akvo RSR workshops aim to train partners in the use of the RSR platform and reporting on project progress, challenges, milestones and anything else that helps those interested understand what’s happening or what’s not happening, and why.

In order for Cordaid field staff to start updating on their projects, on 14 May a first RSR training session was held for Cordaid staff from their Ethiopia, Uganda and Kenya offices. Together with my colleague Phylis I facilitated this workshop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Here you can see my pictures from the training. 

Practicing video interviews with a smartphone

Caroline Kroon from Cordaid’s head office in the Netherlands kicked off and explained the strategic vision behind their recent reorganisation, opening up about the work they do, and how that resulted in the use of Akvo RSR. After showing Cordaid’s new website and their RSR project pages, the majority of the day then involved an interactive and hands-on training in practicing what makes an interesting project update, doing video interviews and adding online updates to projects. Caroline also asked us to include a hands-on training in social media such as Twitter, and how this can be used to share project updates and experiences.

Cordaid-branded training kit

It was great to see the enthusiasm from the participants, both for taking part in a practical training session and for having the opportunity to share their experiences from the field. This workshop was the first to show the RSR updating process from a different environment than Akvo.org. Cordaid staff and partners can add updates from their own project page on the Cordaid website. You can read more about that in this blog. As this hasn’t gone without technical challenges, particularly in the days prior to the training, it was great to hear participants saying that it looks good and is easy to use. Special thanks to my colleague Adrian from the Akvo Dev team for making it possible.

Thanks also to Caroline Kroon for assisting with the workshop, and to Eva Yohannes from Cordaid’s Ethiopia office for handling the logistics. Phylis and I are still grateful for a good internet connection – which was quite the opposite the day before the training – and we are looking forward to seeing the first updates coming in on Cordaid.org.

Charlotte Soedjak is a project officer at Akvo.

It’s just 10 days until the first international edition of the Akvo Track Day. Here Sebastian Wafula talks with Akvo’s Luuk Diphoorn and Mark Charmer, at Akvo’s East Africa hub in Nairobi.

Sebastian Wafula: Imagine I’m a six year old. What is Akvo Track Day?

Luuk Diphoorn: It’s a place where people come together who use cool technology to make their work better, and to share experiences with each other. They all work in the field of trying to make the world a better place, and trying to help improve the lives of people. They have a common purpose but they do it in different ways.

SW: So, for a six year old, Akvo Track Day is a day when people from far distant places come together to share ways that technology – especially gadgets and gizmos – are making their lives just a bit better? While they work hard to make other people’s lives better.

Mark Charmer: Yes! We need to learn to explain it like that too.

SW: So give me some examples of the people coming, here in Nairobi?

LD: We have people coming from Kisumu in Western Kenya. They’re going to talk about how they’re using smart phones to make short videos to show the world how football is going to help kids in the community stay away from germs and diseases.

We also have Care Kenya joining us to explain how they’re using smart phones to very quickly map out all the water points and toilets in the north of Kenya, to make informed decisions about where interventions are needed.

MC: And we’ll find out the process that UN-Habitat is going through to open up how and where it is spending money globally, even encouraging whistle-blowers to report on where money isn’t being spent where it was supposed to be.

SW: What range of problems do Akvo Track Day people work on?

LD: Some are working on environment issues, some on water issues, sanitation, health, education, others on ICT – the use of computers to improve services. But in the end, as a group of people we are in it together.

SW: Why do this? Once you have all these things in place, what’s the end game?

LD: Awareness. You have no idea how many people don’t know that smart phones can become a way to provide safe water. You can use a simple smart phone to do a simple video you can put on YouTube. You can just post pictures online just like you do with Facebook, to connect people working on these problems to the rest of the world.

We’re hoping a lot of these partners will get inspired, on how to move forward with the work they do. After the track Day I want each participant to become an Akvo ambassador to the rest. The people who are coming here are just the tip of the iceberg, compared to the numbers who could be involved one day.

SW: I see this being about demystifying what development projects are. In so many projects, there’s talk about poverty alleviation. But what does that mean? Instead, just saying “Did you know you can now get water because of smart phones?” is a powerful message. People just want water. And they want toilets in schools. Simple things. All of the people coming to the Track Day are working on fixing those problems. And they’re using new technologies to make this process easier.

The Akvo Track Day events are free to attend, and running in Nairobi, Amsterdam and Washington DC on Thursday 23 May. Sign up below.

Sebastian Wafula is a social media consultant at TrINC Media, based in Nairobi. www.trincmedia.com

On 23 May 2013 we will be hosting the next Akvo Track Day. This will be the first international edition, with concurrent events running at our AmLab HQ in Amsterdam as well as in Nairobi and Washington DC.

With different programmes in each location, all three events offer a chance to learn about and discuss the latest ways people are implementing, reporting, monitoring and communicating development programmes, hear about how Akvo partners are using our tools in the field and catch up on all our news – including new product developments.

Amsterdam Track Day

At our Amsterdam event, we are excited to have several guest speakers willing to share their experiences. Evariste Kouassi Komlan from UNICEF will join us to talk about how UNICEF is using Akvo tools in Africa to modernise water, sanitation and hygiene monitoring.

During the Autumn Track Day in October last year, Manuel Salazar showed us how Mars Chocolate piloted Akvo FLOW in the Ivory Coast to map cocoa farms and Akvo RSR to tell farmers’ stories. During the upcoming Track Day, Andrew Pederson will share with us the more strategic sustainability approach of Mars’ ‘Vision for Change’ programme.

We will have KNVB WorldCoach Doreen Nabwire talking about WorldCoaches and girl empowerment. Martijn Marijnis from ICCO will present a baseline survey on food security conducted in Indonesia. Sunita Nadhamuni, former director of Arghyam and an Akvo board member, will talk more about her initiative in India to improve rural governance through data and volunteers. And we will share with you the recent launch of the prototype ‘Go Three60’, the AmLab Phase 2 proposal to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Grand Challenge Explorations programme.

Nairobi Track Day

The Nairobi event includes a mix of presentations and interactive demo sessions. In the morning, Pontus Westerberg of UN Habitat will share insights from the development of Open UN-Habitat and Siem Vaessen of Zimmerman & Zimmerman will present the new and improved Openaid.nl. They will be followed by speakers from the Football for Water and Connect4Change consortia discussing how they’re using Akvo RSR to report their activities and communicate within and beyond the programmes they’re working on.

After lunch, speakers from CARE Kenya and Food for the Hungry will talk about how Akvo FLOW is being used by the Millennium Water Alliance (MWA) Kenya programme.

The visual identity of this Track Day, seen above, was designed by our resident graphic designer Linda Leunissen and is based on vehicle race tracks at night.

At the Washington DC Track Day, we will provide an overview of the latest developments from around Akvo and will welcome guest speaker Ben Mann, who will talk about the Millennium Water Alliance Latin America (MWA-LAP) program and how the organisations in the alliance are using Akvo tools to help increase access to safe water and improve sanitation and hygiene in rural Latin America.

You can read about earlier Track Day events in Amsterdam to get an impression of the day here: Spring Track Day and Autumn Track Day 2012.

Charlotte Soedjak is a project officer at Akvo

Updates: 9 May (Mark Charmer) – Some tweaks to text. Added signup button graphics.