New Seminar at UC Berkeley's School of Information

RiOS's Institute's Paul Braund and Anke Schwittay are teaching a graduate seminar on Social Entrepreneurship in ICTD at UC Berkeley's School of Information (also known as the ischool) this semester. We will be sharing our insights and experiences from the seminar on this blog.

For starters, we have confirmed a great group of guest speakers for the class, starting with Matthew Holloway, the VP of the Design Service Team at SAP AG. He will be talking about the design process and working with multidisciplinary design teams. Other guest speakers include Craig Newmark, the founder of Craigslist and Jessica Flannery, the co-founder of Kiva.

We are also working with a number of leading ICTD organizations in the larger San Francisco Bay Area on projects that allow students to apply their learnings from the seminar, while at the same time designing social solutions to local needs. Among the organizations are MAPlight and the Seva Foundation, as well as the Global Alliance for ICT and Development at the United Nations and the Ravenswood School District in East Palo Alto.

Last but not least, the students taken the seminar bring with them very diverse backgrounds, from computer science to public health to public policy, and a wealth of international experiences. One of our students is working for the Clinton Global Initiative, while another spent the summer in a TB clinic in Pakistan. Two students were working in Africa over the summer on technology solutions for rural health clinics, while two others were involved in development projects in India. We are looking forward to having all of these experiences inform our seminar and its search for innovative project solutions.