Seasons greetings and next steps

Dear friends of PI,

Season’s Greetings to all.

Looking back at 2014 and into 2015. A year ago, the whole project was still at an ideation stage. We were busy presenting, networking, establishing partnerships, further conceptualizing, planning and budgeting and of course fundraising.

Twelve months later, and six months into the first phase of the project we have made good progress and produced results that we can use to progress the project into its next phase: the design and development of a first prototype of the PI platform. This would not have been possible without the engagement of a number of individuals and staff of various organizations. Thank you very much.

Thanks to a first grant from the Humanitarian Innovation Fund (HIF) we started the first phase of the project in July 2014. We presented PI to a series of international organizations (ICRC, IOM, OCHA, OHCHR and UNHCR), NGOs (Amnesty International, Free Press Unlimited) and the Liberia Peacebuilding Office and ran workshops with some of them to elicit their needs and requirements and define the features of the future PI platform.

A number of these organizations have pledged to remain engaged with the project in the development phase (Amnesty International, Free Press Unlimited, ICRC and the Liberia Peacebuilding Office), by identifying yet to be named focal points and testers. Also, both the Leiden University Peace Informatics Lab and the Delft University of Technology have likewise pledged academic supervision, coaching including on Agile Methodologies as well as peer review.

Begin of next year we’ll finalize the invention phase of the project after running the remainder of our workshops with Amnesty International and the Liberia Peacebuilding Office. In parallel and thanks to the recent award from USAID we will also start the development phase of the project and employ two part-time developers to build a first prototype around a set of core features. We look forward to it.

Thank you again for your support.

The PI team,

Yilin, Alberto, Julien, Ashraf, Martin, Christophe