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UnaMesa Association Update June 2008

Summary

UnaMesa works with educators, caregivers, and other social service providers to create and deliver free software tools and web services that fit their work practices. Since the last newsletter we have begun planning for a pilot project called the UnaMesa Academy. The Academy aims to reshape the relationship between technology and social service agencies. Instead of paying high-priced IT consultants to solve their problems, the Academy will help organizations invest in their staff and develop their own best practices using simple, free tools developed by UnaMesa and others. The Academy will bridge the gap that prevents many social organizations from using technology to better serve their clients.

We are in the process of selecting participants (up to 12 organizations that share common challenges) for the first pilot. Currently we are considering community clinics, parish nursing, and language immersion classes in the California Bay Area for the pilot course, which will take place in September or October of this year. Please send questions and/or comments to our project coordinator, Heather Zenone at Heather@unamesa.org.

Additional updates:

MORE project - Virtual Interactive Classroom launches in Bangladesh. You can watch first lesson and an intro to the project.
UnaMesa Academy - Heather Zenone and Paul Lamb joined the project with the support of the Communty Network Services group at Ricoh. Heather and Paul have been putting together a plan for the initial pilot.
TiddlyWiki - Confabb, the world's biggest directory of conferences and tools for conference attendees, launched their "Notes" sharing tool at the Personal Democracy Forum. This tool is based on TiddlyWiki and supported by the Osmosoft group at BT. We're talking with Confabb to continue support for their tools and make them available for free to all NGO and noncommercial conferences.
Hesperian - On a related note, the nonprofit publisher Hesperian has engaged UnaMesa as one of their technology partners to develop a new, multimedia version of Where There Is No Doctor based on the prototype we developed and presented to them in early June.
BT - The Osmosoft group of British Telecom became an official financial supporter of the UnaMesa Association. We gratefully acknowledge their contributions and the continued support of Ricoh Innovations.
ServiceLink/ SharedRecords - The video capture and retrieval component has been deployed at the pilot site. However, the full system using SharedRecords to store encrypted copies of client records has stalled while we wait for the site's IT administrator to complete the integration with their local practice management system.
Bangladesh Virtual Interactive Classroom - We have helped improve the stability and reliability of the software used to collate responses for this project.
Health Education in Bangladesh - In conjunction with Dimagi's World Bank project, we have been working to prototype software that can be used with a mobile phone card to aggregate responses directly on an instructor's laptop (without the need for them to contract with a service provider). Dimagi has been testing that system but it has not yet been deployed in practice.