CISV from the Balcony.

Notes.

2010-03-10T08:44:14Z

CISV now has a YouTube Channel. Watch Kiran explain the new activity templates!
If Cairo is not your cup of tea, how about an Internship in Newcastle?

Interns in Cairo.

2010-03-08T14:42:41Z

Two CISVers have become social entrepreneurs in Egypt.

Not too long ago, a whole bunch of my friends became "fans" of a facebook page called Interns in Cairo. Without looking deeper into it, I simply thought it was a probably a...TV show. I know, you're laughing, but don't you think a bunch if international students doing internships in various companies and organisations would yield in an entertaining daily soap?

It turns out, Interns in Cairo is a company founded by two CISVers, Laura/ITA and Mathilde/FRA, who somehow got stuck in Cairo, after - exactly - doing internships there. The basic idea is to offer a service to both students interested in an internship abroad and to companies in Egypt, who longed for international input. You can get a better idea by visiting their (beautiful!) website.

Now, even if Interns is obviously a service company, there's something genuinely CISVish in there. In fact, to me, it's the true incarnation of what CISV's education should lead to. (Check out the post on Sachi's Bordercrossers for another great CISV spin-off.)

Here at FTB, I've been arguing before that these kind of ideas deserve support, so I hope mentioning their project here will help spread the news.

I was curious to learn more about their ideas, so I did an interview with them. Here it is:

FTB: How did you end up in Cairo?

Laura: I personally moved to Cairo on February 13th 2009. I've been living the year before in Paris, learning French and working with an NGO. After it I should have gone back home, but it would have been to hard because of the love-hate relationship I have with my mom. After Paris I went staffing a Seminar in BA and there I started looking for an Internship abroad...I confess the Cairo choice was mainly due to love related issue as the boyfirend is a "product" of the Cairo Chapter.

Cairo it's hard to deal with sometimes, so I started begging Mathilde, one of my closest friends, to come over. And surprise-surprise she did it, for reasons she'll explain better but mainly to take a gap year and do an experience abroad.

Few days before Math came me and my flatmates were kicked out of our house as apparently we were having orgies every day. ( in the egyptian culture is not very socially acceptable a girl living alone having guys friends over. It always depend on the landlord, and we haven't been lucky.) But "serendipitly" me and Mathilde ended up living together in a really nice place ( must thank our IJR and friend Rowan El Shimi who totally helped us in this).

Maybe if we weren't living together we wouldn't have spent so much time talking about culture and differences and acceptance,and we would have never came up with this project.

Mathilde: I just graduated from university last December for that to happen I needed to run a 3 months internship over the summer. I was applying to things in France without being convinced, was hard to find something relevant and rewarding for such a short time. I wasn't sure I wanted to take a master right away after my bachelor or taking a gap year and living abroad for a while was something I wanted to experience. I decided to go for the gap year abroad. Egypt had always been a country on my to do list because of all its wonders, CISV friends and Laura. But the choice of Egypt is mainly because at this time I was looking for an eye opening and surprising experience, something new and extremely different from the western culture. There I go, I moved to Cairo beginning of june 2009.

FTB: Do you perceive Interns in Cairo more like an NGO offering an exchange programme or a for-proft company that will pay your salaries?

Laura and Mathilde: Well actually the non profit idea was our starting point: living in such a different environment is really challenging and there is a huge social / cultural gap within egyptians. However the bureaucracy here in egypt is something crazy: said with easy words the government is really protective in general towards its communities so something labled as NGO run by 2 girls foreigners etc....in such a conservative place is not easy at all.
So the lawyer (that we would have need anyway for any establishment) told us to go for a LLC (limited liability company....which has no minimum capital as we are "poor" as we are 2 students and we put our own money in this) told us that under this lable in the eyes of the government we are investors in the country and not trying to "corrupt" the society. Still one of the main goals is to give the possibility to western minded young people to experiment such a new and different culture and learn from it (and vice versa of course) as a tool to build bridges towards cultures, taking a step forward other than CISV which is mostly limitated into camps and put it in "the real world". Of course the money we get out of it are also for
- afford our expenses to make this possible and get back all that we invested in this
- for all the time we are spending trying to make it happen for real
As you can see programs that do the same thing (sometimes without providing the flat) are costing between 600 and 1500 USD ...we ask only for 350E a student for everything.

FTB: Sounds like "social entrepreneurs" to me! Great. Now, how has the response been so far?

Mathilde: We are still in the process of developing our companies data base and internship opportunities. But lately companies has started approaching us to get interns.
Concerning application the next past weeks we have been receiving a lot of application. At the moment we are working on 6 applications but we still didn't welcome any interns yet. If things are doing well, we might make the first pick up at the airport beginning of april.

Laura: Yes "inshallah" how we say back here. It' s actually understandable tho (in the sense that it's not upsetting people did not come here yet) as we started being operating Jan, and it's not that people decide to move abroad in a week ...unless they re Mathilde :) The only little problem we have is that our tools to spread the project are kind of limited: we don't have a "marketing" department and it's just the two of us running it and counting mostly on our friends support at the moment.

FTB: Thanks and Good Luck

Editorial Note.

2010-03-04T18:54:11Z

If somebody wants fresh, juicy content in their e-mail inbox, you can now subscribe to CISV From The Balcony by e-mail. (You'll receive one e-mail per post, nothing else.)

I've also switched the RSS-feeds to Feedburner, which gives me a little more feedback on how many people are following and reading posts through an aggregator. So if you are subscribing already, please redirect your RSS-reader to the following feeds:

Posts: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CisvFromTheBalcony
Comment Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CommentFeedForCisvFromTheBalcony

I may discontinure the old feeds in the future. (Evil me!)

All links can be found further down in the far right column, for future reference.

Central Information Officer.

2010-03-04T12:23:07Z

Should CISV get into the data mining business?

The latest edition of The Economist has a special called "Data, data, everywhere" (full-text PDF for download free at the moment!). It's about the fact that things like digital cameras, Walmarkt records and your footprints on the web create more and more information that can be stored and used for different purposes: Private companies build internet tools on free Government data (like crime reports), Google built a spell check created from trillion spelling mistakes made in the search box and Amazon "knows" what books and movies you may like by mining through other customers data.

Of course one of the articles also refer to one of my favourite guys, Hans Rosling and his Trendalizer software*, which I used to create the CISV bubbles. Yet, one of the most interesting paragraphs of the special report was the description of an emerging executive job:

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) have become somewhat more prominent in the executive suite, and a new kind of professional has emerged, the data scientist, who combines the skills of software programmer, statistician and storyteller/artist to extrac the nuggets of gold hidden under mountains of data.

This is exactly what I've been trying to do, with all the "Statistics Nerd" posts here at FTB. But whereas my amateur attempts may have sparked a few ideas, I wonder if CISV should take the issue more seriously. How about building a database, that contains much more than just how many camps where hosted by whom in which year? Let's add cancellation data and evaluation data. Let's try to track down costs (of travel and hosting). Finally, how about getting somebody into IO who's good working all this out to benefit CISV?

Of course collecting and handling such data will lead to privacy and security, even legal issues. Already now German parents find it difficult to register their kids at CISV friends. But I'm sure there's so many things we aren't aware of, that could be extracted: Maybe some camps in some chapters are way more expensive than others? Or maybe there is a quality trend, that summer camps for 15y olds are much worse than the others? With that information, maybe trainings and programme development could be applied in a more targeted way?

On a different note, the special report also contains the following paragraph:

Best Buy, a retailer, found that 7% of its customers accounted for 43% of its sales, so that it reorganized its stored to concentrate on those customers' needs.

It reminded me that Arne-Christian/NOR, then IFC-chair, told the board in 2002 that 10% of the NAs were hosting 60% of all camps. Should CISV concentrate on those NAs needs?

*The artilcle calls the software "Gapminder", which is in fact the name of his organization, which shows that the mighty Economist is sometimes a bit sloppy in checking their facts.

Crisis in CISV.

2010-02-28T10:40:29Z

IO just published the new Crisis Communication guide. Even if situations like

Infectious diseases i.e. H1N1 'Swine Flu'
Injuries/Fatalities
Missing participant/volunteer
Civil disturbance
Community evacuation
Natural disasters

probably only happen very rarely, it's great to have a document that helps getting yourself organized.

CISV & Me

2010-02-25T12:23:17Z

Testing an experimental Facebook Application with CISVfriends' functionality.

I'm the kind of person, who doesn't spend hours of thinking and drafting, but loves putting on a jumpsuit and turning any idea straight into reality- even if it may cause trouble once in a while. So, I challenged myself last night, to see how long it would take me to set up a Facebook application that has the basic functionality of CISV friends - register camps, find friends, etc.

So, after three hours, here it is: CISV & Me, the new application for Facebook.

Disclaimer: I don't want to start a rival project to CISV friends - nevertheless I have criticized it in the past for not developing into a social network. CISV friends has been around ages before Facebook became popular, but never had any of the great functionality. So today, I think CISV friends should become an administration tool, and leave the social networking to the professionals. However, I have no intention to develop this app until it is perfect, I just want to experiment to see if it works (I may add some tweaks and a few more features, for the un of it, though). Also, I'm ready to take it down anytime, if people have valid privacy concerns.

I'm curious to hear your comments and suggestions!

Inbox zero.

2010-02-22T12:01:09Z

How to deal with massive amounts of e-Mail (CISV-Hacks)

How to you deal with e-mails? I've hinted at this concept before, but now I want to elaborate on this issue: The more people are involved in CISV, the more you are spammed (in the original sense!) with CISV e-mails. When I was still NJR and in the IPP taskforce I was already one step away from e-mail bankruptcy: I was on at least 8 different e-mail lists, not to forget e-mails I received from work, friends, university etc. I easily received about 25 e-mails a day, in 2002. At that time I already found an article on the web that said something like, you should always remove all e-mails from your Inbox and put them where they belong: Archived, in the calendar, on the to-do-list, etc., which I tried to apply. Meanwhile, with the invention of Gmail handling big amounts of e-mails has become a lot easier, but still remains a challenge.

Today I found this presentation by Merlin Man, who spends a whole (worthwhile!!!) half an hour on explaining how to achieve emptying your e-mail inbox.

A lot of people right now are, for practical purposes, living in their Inbox. They leave their e-mail open all day long, it's auto-checking through out the day. Little bleebs come up, about every minute. An E-mail becomes the access for everything they do with work
They use it as a to-do-list manager, they use it as their calendar [...] scroll through their inbox, to decide what meetings they have to go today.

I'm pretty sure, the following 30 minutes (the rest is discussion, also a goodie!) are easily saved in your future time dealing with e-mail:

I especially like his analogy to a person working in a deli, that keeps checking orders, instead of processing them. I also know a lot of people that are addicted to sorting their e-mail into folders using crazy taxonomy the way Merlin describes.

So, for the last two weeks, I've been trying to get all e-Mails down to zero by using the delete/archive-defer-delegate-do-respond-system. My aim is to organize my life more through my calendar and to-do-list. I've also disabled a program that pops up a window, anytime a new e-mail arrives. So far it feels liberating: What do I want to do next instead of which of all these e-mails needs my attention right now?

Merlin Man, by the way, is also working on a book, and everything about Inbox Zero can be found on this website.

The funny thing is that while I was trying to divert my attention away from my e-mail inbox, Google introduced Buzz and also integrated the Calendar into the e-mail page - it's if they are trying to suck me back into my inbox!

Sidenote: Other challenges in the age of electronic management are "desktop zero" and "RSS feed zero".

CISV France has a new website!

2010-02-22T11:19:19Z

I discovered the (apparently draft) new website of CISV France today - It looks like the standard CISV website (that is managed with OpenCMS) but has a bunch of feaures more: The calendar, and up-to-date news columns, an integrated discussion forum. I like that somebody has put a lot of effort in creating the site, without the narcissism of pushing for an individual design and sticking to the brand guidelines instead. - nice work!

Maybe someone with better French knowledge than me can check for Smashing Magazine's 10 rules of NGO website best practise?

Year of Diversity kicks off.

2010-02-20T08:36:35Z

Many of you received an e-mail a few days ago, introducing CISVs new "Diversity" theme for 2010. Among other things the mail suggested looking into a website called United against Racism, and announced a future "CISV Library" with educational resources.

All, very promising...

Update: Now today I received an e-mail announcing "Identity and Peace Education" as the JB and YM theme of the year. This is a bit strange - can't we agree on a common theme altogether?

Intergenerational Learning

2010-02-17T23:28:21Z

Recently, a new buzzword has appeared in the German youth programme scene: Intergenerational Learning. For me, the first thing that came to mind, is that this is already happening in IPPs: I remember loads of participants that described the challenges and opportunities of "older" participants in their IPP. Of course also other prgrammes have leaders that are beyond the usual 21-25 scope, and also in any village leaders and kids learn together, but in IPPs the participants - the very subjects of that programme - cover a wide range of age.

I wonder if intergenerational learning could be added to the official objectives of an IPP?

If it were, we would have to make sure, that indeed every IPP has participants from different generations, and that the issue is discussed, appreciated and evaluated during the programme. I don't think this is hard to achieve, and would give the programme another compelling element.

Microdonations

2010-02-14T08:45:23Z

Websites that could help CISV chapters raise funds online.

I recently subscribed to the paper version of GOOD magazine - I've been enjoying their website for a while, I've even linked to a few articles here on FTB. Insterestingly, when signing up, they didn't want to keep my subscription fee of 50 US$ for themselves, but instead redirected me to a website called GlobalGiving. Here I could chose between a wide range of small projects that are in need for smallish donations. These projects range from educating HIV-positive kids in Bangladesh to saving a square-meter of rain forest in Brazil. Check out GlobalGiving's about page featuring an excellent video that explains the idea.

The funny thing is that, just about a few months ago, while researching fundraising opportunities for the upcoming AIM, I met with a girl that works for an organization called Betterplace.org, a Berlin-based non-proft that seems to be doing exactly the same thing as GlobalGiving - displaying a range of projects by NGOs or even just groups of people and offering different ways of donating online.

What in it for CISV? I don't think that either of these websites will generate funds from people that don't know about CISV - poverty, education and saving the planet have a marketing advantage compared to us. But - since our own online donation set-up is in such a poor condition, why not rely on one of these websites to help collect funds for specific projects from people that already know about CISV?

At least with Betterplace (haven't looked into the details at GlobalGiving) you can generate e-mails that you send to your members and friends to promote a new poject. You can embed a progress bar on your website, there's also Facebook widgets you can use. Moreover, Betterplace provides the infrastructure of donating online with a credit card, PayPal etc., something that would otherwise be difficult to set up and take care of.

What I especially like, is that since you can donate within a few minutes from the comfort of your living room sofa, even small donations like 5$ make sense. Furthermore, I think presenting CISV on these websites will also help promote our organization in general, and isn't that one of our strategic goals? Finally, compared to huge humanitarian organizations where a high percentage of any donation is spent on administration, at least with Betterplace 100% goes directly to the charity (us).

Obviously this is not a top-down way of fundraising, but has to be initiated by the indiviudal chapter: In need for a new copying machine for the office? Or a printer for the upcoming village? How about fundraising for camp t-shirts? I think that GlobalGiving and Betterplace provide a fantastic opportunuity. We're currently trying to use Betterplace for our upcoming AIM, and I'll keep you posted on our progress.

I actually did search for any CISV projects listed at GlobalGiving, but couldn't find any, so I will probably donate to a children's project in Nepal (I have a personal connection). But here's my challenge: If any chapter manages to set up a project at GlobalGiving within the next two months, send me a note, and I'll be glad to donate my GOOD subscription fee to whatevery you are planning.

Leadership is overglorified?

2010-02-12T08:04:31Z

Maybe our strategic priority should have been "Following is the key to success"?

CISV & Carbon.

2010-02-11T12:00:04Z

I just now started working myself through the latest issuse of IJB Thinks which contains a ton of fantastic articles, many dealing with the Copenhagen conference. Personally I found Clemzi's points most interesting, which he nails with the folling quote:

If climate change and natural resources depletion cause or aggravate conflict and war around the planet, then are we really working towards peace by continuously traveling on planes?

He goes on and draws the conclusion that we should focus on local programmes instead, which of course is the most logical solution.

I had plans to discuss the Carbon question of CISV here at FTB, which I won't, because Clemzi already did all the maths and brought most of the arguments. Just two points, I'd like to add:

The IPP committee proposed to offset all of CISV flights through a motion in 2008. It was defeated for pretty lame reasons (my opinion), that were that a non-profit organisation can't donate to another organisation. And that we can't trust another organisation to use that money well.
As far as I'm informed Carbon offset (check Wikipedia) goes beyond planting trees: You can also use the money to save CO2-emission by for example using the money to replace a coal-powered power plant through a wind mill. (I'm sure Clemzi is aware of this, but the article makes you think, planting trees is the only way...)

"Peace with the Planet" is one of our core values - says the Mosquito Tactics book, but
how to save the planet, and what CISV can do about it is a topic that I regard as underrepresented in all levels of our organisation, so I'm glad the latest issue of IJB Thinks brought us this fantastic input.

Twitter Widgets.

2010-02-07T13:54:14Z

How to easily create a multiple users news area for your CISV website.

Some, maybe even all CISV websites are pretty static. Really, content changes most of the time only when a new design is applied to the site. A number of NAs have adopted the OpenCMS system - which is a "content management system" enabling CISVers without in-depth knowledge of HTML to make changes to the website. But even those websites really only rarely make an up-to-date appearance. Now here's a suggestion to make your website even more interesting using Twitter:

Twitter provides users with a detailed intstruction to create a Twitter widget. What's that, you say? Scroll down this page and you will find a new Twitter Widget in the right column - I chose to display all Tweets that contain the word "cisv". I'm not 100% happy with the layout - for some reason it's very long but narrow, even if I specified otherwise. But it does display the tweets fine.

I could imagine using a Twitter widget to rapidly make news updates to your CISV website. The good thing, is that 1. setting up a Twitter account and posting is really easy, 2. you can collaborate in adding news posts and 3. you can use all of Twitter's functionality like posting by e-mail or phone.

On Online Social Networks.

2010-02-03T10:18:20Z

I know I'm preaching to the choir here on this issue, but the extraordinary interesting special report on social networking in the latest issue of The Economist ends with the following paragraph (after dealing with privacy and "waste-of-time" concerns):

But arguably the most important contribution that the sites have made is to offer a free and immensely powerful set of communication and collaboration tools to everyone on Earth who has access to a broadband internet connection. This democratisation of technology is driving the socialisation of the web and fundamentally changing the way that people interact with one another, as well as with businesses and governments.
It has also made it easy for anyone to form a globe-spanning discussion group of their own with just a few clicks of a mouse. Not so long ago that would have been the preserve of an elite group of companies and institutions which had the necessary financial and technical clout to perform such feats. Now, thanks to the technology created by Facebook and its peers, millions of these conversations can take place simultaneously with the greatest of ease. The world is better off for it.

I believe CISV is profitting increadibly from these technological developments. People who share the same area code with most of their friends and co-workers might never grasp this.

(My post on Google Wave goes in a similar direction...)