USAID award and next steps

The news is out, USAID awarded a seed grant to PI among other winners of the Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention co-sponsored by Humanity United.

A lot happened since we applied for this USAID seed grant earlier this year, including being awarded a first small grant by the Humanitarian Innovation Fund which allowed us to make some headway in presenting PI to a series of prospective human rights and humanitarian stakeholders, running requirements elicitation workshops and forging partnerships including with the academic world. Indeed, Delft University of Technology and the Leiden University Peace Informatics Lab pledged to provide coaching, peer review of project results as well as supervision of research on issues related to the PI project.

In terms of next steps, we are looking forward to holding another two workshops; one with Amnesty International in London and another with the Liberia Peacebuilding Office in Monrovia as soon as the Ebola crisis subsides.

Thanks to the USAID small grant we will work at bringing the PI project a few steps further. Independently from when we we manage to run the two additional workshops, the our team will start working at the definition of the technical requirements as well as a first architecture necessary to start building a first prototype in the course of next year. During the next phase we will further look at how to build synergies between PI and other technological initiatives.

Wish us success.

(This is a partial cross post of the Tech Challenge blog)