Panic Button: Lessons for the Tech for Good Sector

• by Jun Matsushita, 03 Sep 2017
• Blog
• panic button

This post is by Tanya O’Carroll, Adviser Tech and Human Rights, Amnesty International; Danna Ingleton, Adviser, Human Rights Defenders; and Jun Matsushita, Founder and CEO, iilab.

Making the decision to cease support for the Panic Button app was not an easy one, but it was also not an empty one. We believe that diving into the challenges we faced, and sharing them with our communities is key to building similar – and better – tools in the future. The challenges we faced are interlinked, and by no means specific merely to us.

Panic Button: Why we are retiring the app

• by Jun Matsushita, 01 Sep 2017
• Blog
• panic button

This post is by Tanya O’Carroll, Adviser Tech and Human Rights, Amnesty International; Danna Ingleton, Adviser, Human Rights Defenders; and Jun Matsushita, Founder and CEO, iilab.

In 2012, Amnesty International, with support from our partners at iilab, The Engine Room and Frontline Defenders, began developing a tool that would provide human rights defenders with an alert system in their pocket: the Panic Button app. Now, we’ve made the decision to cease ongoing support for the app. Here, we share the lessons learned and what it means for the future of developing security tools for human rights activists. .

London community using our prototype Nexus Calculator

• by Jun Matsushita, 26 Nov 2016
• Blog
• infrastructure engineering, co-design, community, water, food, energy, waste, nexus, prototype

Today, in an Estate near London Bridge in the UK, a community of inhabitants from an estate used our prototype Nexus Calculator to discuss various design options for food sharing, food growing, collecting rainwater or composting on the estate. This is the second time our team meets this community, as part of the Engineering Comes Home project in partnership with University College London and Open Lab at Newcastle University we blogged about a few months ago.

Engineering Comes Home to test new paradigms in infrastructure engineering

• by Dr. Kat Austen, 06 Jan 2016
• Blog
• infrastructure engineering, co-design, community, water, food, energy, waste, nexus, prototype

Sustainability. Resilience. Scarcity. Climate change. When it comes to resources recently we’re worrying that they are going to run out, and about the impact of waste from their consumption.

At iilab we’ve been working on understanding the systems around water with our mapping of the UK water systems and contributions to the Ofwat Resilience Task and Finish Group last year, and with Open Droplet. These projects look at water from a systems and from an end-user standpoint, aiming to see water resources and wastewater in a holistic manner.

Ten recommendations to make the water sector more resilient - open data and citizen stewardship

• by Dr. Kat Austen, 01 Dec 2015
• Blog
• water resilience, open data, citizen stewardship

How do we make a difference to water resilience? Today’s report, published by Ofwat and compiled by the independent Water Resilience Task and Finish Group, contains ten UK-focussed recommendations for improving water resilience.

Countdown 2030 - Citizen Science Challenges and Opportunities

• by Dr. Kat Austen, 30 Nov 2015
• Blog
• citizen science, embodied cognition, social development theory, human-centered design

Citizen science is a pretty wonderful phenomenon that is changing the dynamics of knowledge generation in the same way that open access is changing the dynamics of knowledge ownership. So how can we make it even better?

Help us make a new tool to guide network mappers

• by Dr. Kat Austen, 14 Aug 2015
• Blog
• influence mapping, network mapping, tools, human centered design

We are surrounded by complex systems and power structures, not least of which are the networks of links between people by which they change and are changed. Understanding these links can sometimes have important consequences - for instance if you see that a policy-maker has strong personal ties to a lobbying organisation, you may see their decisions in a different light.