Tag: tech for good

Anyone Who Needs Help Seeing Has 2 Million Pairs of Eyes Available With This App

Posted on by robbie

When Rory Hoffman needs to read the labels on his cassette tapes, he opens up an app. Marian Helling Wildgruber finds the spices in her kitchen cabinet by pulling out her phone. Tabitha Jackson grabs her phone before she goes grocery shopping.
Hoffman, Wildgruber and Jackson all are blind or visually impaired. So tasks like reading labels, selecting the right herbs and navigating stores can prove challenging.
That’s where Be My Eyes comes in. It’s a mobile app that connects people who are blind or visually impaired with volunteers who have normal vision. By tapping their camera’s video function, volunteers can guide people with vision impairments in a variety of daily tasks.
The app launched in 2015, and within 11 days, it had 100,000 volunteers. Now, four years later, two million volunteers have joined Be My Eyes. It’s part of a movement coined microvolunteering, whereby small tasks performed by many people can add up to real impact  on a large scale. For Be My Eyes volunteers, there’s no commitment to a certain number of calls. It’s just a chance to help someone out when they need it.
There is an estimated 1.3 billion people with some form of visual impairment worldwide. People who are visually impaired might have family or neighbors they can rely on, but on-demand support 24/7 is unlikely. Sometimes an extra set of eyes is helpful.
Hoffman uses Be My Eyes a few times a week. He typically relies on a neighbor to help him with tasks that require normal vision, but it’s nice to know there’s immediate help at hand, he says.
“I don’t have to wait for anyone to come, I can just take care of it immediately.”
Hoffman, who is a musician, recently wanted to replace the strings on his guitar. But it was impossible for him to feel the slight differences between each string. So Hoffman pulled out his phone and using the phone’s voice recognition feature, made a call on Be My Eyes.
There, a volunteer popped up and read the guitar string labels. In just a few minutes, Hoffman had the right strings for his guitar.
“There are some times when having somebody with a pair of eyes just makes things helpful,” he says. “And to be able to just connect to somebody who’s available to help, that’s really a great idea.”
The app was founded by Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish furniture designer. Widberg, who is visually impaired, was talking with a few of his blind friends when they said they all relied on FaceTime to connect with family and friends for assistance.
Widberg realized this idea could work with volunteers. He brought his idea to a startup weekend in Denmark in 2012, where he met Thelle Kristensen. Together they formed a team. It took two and a half years to develop and bring the app to the market.
“The fire in our belly was to make a worldwide network of volunteers to help out, and it’s been great to see the reaction with ten times as many sighted as blind people,” says Kristensen, the co-founder and CEO of Be My Eyes.
Lauren Traut was deep in conversation when her phone rang, and she received a notification from Be My Eyes that someone needed assistance.
“I told my friend, ‘Hold on. Pause. I got to take this call.’”
On the line was a woman who needed help reading a letter. It was from a church thanking her for a donation she recently made in honor of her husband and daughter who had recently passed.
Traut said the appreciation in the woman’s words had a lasting impact.
“Granted that task probably wasn’t life-changing for her,” Traut says, “But it’s simple things like that that maybe fully sighted people take for granted.”
Traut says the sheer magnitude of volunteers on the app is incredible. But this also means a single volunteer won’t get too many calls.
Traut downloaded the app in June 2017. Since then, she says she’s only received six or seven calls.
But for Wildgruber, it’s reassuring to know she won’t be bothering anyone.
“You know the volunteers are answering the phone if they want to,” she says. “And knowing that if you call a few times a day, you’re not bothering anyone.”
“Sometimes it’s a quick fix, other times it’s a longer conversation of what’s life like where you are,” says Christian Erfurt, the chief executive of Be My Eyes. “That reminds us that we’re not that different, and the gap between ‘us and them’ is minimized.”
More: The GovTech Apps Changing the Way We Live

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Editor’s note: An earlier version of the headline incorrectly stated there were 100,000 volunteers on the app. The correct number is 2 million.

The Tweet That Launched a Movement

Posted on by robbie

Two thousand and forty-four miles.
A distance that would take 677 hours to walk.
A distance that would take around 30 hours to drive.
A distance that technology immediately obliterated as four passionate citizens united against police violence.

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Just days after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014, civil rights activists DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie were on the ground in Ferguson, Mo., documenting on social media the unrest that ruled the streets. Shortly thereafter, the two connected with Brittany Packnett, the then-executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis.
As #Ferguson became a rallying cry on social media, Oprah Winfrey leveled a critique at the Black Lives Matter movement (which used Twitter to mobilize its followers), saying that it didn’t have clear goals, leadership or asks. Mckesson tweeted a reply, listing demands of the protesters.
Meanwhile, more than half a continent away, Samuel Sinyangwe spotted Mckesson’s response and felt compelled to reach out.
“I replied to the tweet saying that I could help develop a policy agenda that implements these demands in practice. I didn’t know who DeRay or anyone was,” says Sinyangwe, who was doing policy work for a nonprofit in Oakland, Calif. “As a policy analyst, I wanted to contribute policy.”
Two thousand and forty-four miles separated Sinyangwe from Mckesson and the other protesters in Ferguson. Yet Mckesson’s 140-character post forged a virtual connection and jumpstarted a conversation that would, in just a few short months, result in the formation of the far-left leaning nationwide organization WeTheProtesters.
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Initial phone calls between Sinyangwe and Mckesson (and later, Elzie and Packnett as well) focused on a shared understanding that data needed to inform policy making so that it would gain traction with both the public and government officials at all levels.
“What made it work was that we’re all committed to the same goals, and we each have a particular skillset that added value to each other’s work. It was all about the commitment to work; it was not about our own personalities,” says Sinyangwe. “I can analyze the data and identify policy solutions. DeRay can communicate that very well in relationships with media. [Joh]Netta can make sure the information — this sort of ivory tower research — is accessible to people and Brittany has institutional access to make sure these recommendations are embedded in some of the foremost institutions of government.”
Not surprising to the activists, their data mining uncovered systemic problems with policing use-of-force practices nationwide. Taking that information, they developed and launched Campaign Zero, a series of 10 proposed policing policy solutions, like ending broken windows policing, community representation, demilitarization and fair police union contracts.
“No other group had ID’ed solutions and grounded it in data and evidence,” Sinyangwe says.
Sinyangwe and company also leveraged data to create a second resource, a groundbreaking interactive map that provides comprehensive information (name, location, description of incident and a link to related, authoritative news coverage) for each police-involved shooting in the United States.
“In the beginning, it was all about convincing the country that it was a crisis — that police violence was happening everywhere, not just in St. Louis or Baltimore,” says Sinyangwe. “No one is going to read a 30-page report on this, but people will look at something that looks high quality and communicates [the information] in much less time.”
Using off-the-shelf technology (often free or free-trial versions) as they continued to collaborate virtually, Sinyangwe and his WTP cofounders built a tech-powered infrastructure that overcame geographic limitations. (“It was literally a period of months before I met everyone in person,” says Sinyangwe.) They shared information in Google docs and sheets, held meetings in Hangouts, designed infographics with Piktocharts and created data tables using Tableau.
Typeform proved to be particularly valuable to WeTheProtesters in recruiting volunteers. The group used the platform to increase its ranks by around 16,000 people in just two weeks. These helpers were then organized into groups and used Slack to communicate, building a bond in cyberspace.
WeTheProtesters is supported by Fast Forward, an accelerator for tech-focused nonprofits and a partner of Comcast NBCUniversal. Today, the group’s biggest challenge is scaling its systems so that more citizens can become effective advocates.
“Across the country, as I’m meeting people and speaking at various venues, people come up to me and ask, ‘How do I get involved?… I want to do something, but I don’t know what to do about it,’” says Sinyangwe. “In today’s day and age, when you see the hyper-targeting of every political campaign, there is no excuse to not have a pathway to get involved. People shouldn’t have to ask anymore.”
But just in case, WeTheProtesters created a Wikipedia-style guide known as the Resistance Manual. The crowdsourced webpage tracks local, state and federal issues, offers resources on effective organizing and lists upcoming teach-ins, town halls and marches across the country. It’s part of a wave of new digital tools created since the 2016 presidential election in response to people’s renewed interest in politics.
Sinyangwe believes that it’s possible to awaken and amplify more voices, “in part because of the tools that we have available to us, because of the platforms and technology and the creative ways we’re using it.”
If he’s right, this tech-driven era of activism may bring about a level of civic engagement unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
Additional reporting by Chris Peak.
This article is part of the What’s Possible series produced by NationSwell and Comcast NBCUniversal, which shines a light on changemakers who are creating opportunities to help people and communities thrive in a 21st-century world. These social entrepreneurs and their future-forward ideas represent what’s possible when people come together to create solutions that connect, educate and empower others and move America forward.