Seminars
Upcoming Seminars
Seminar #10, March 17th, 7pm CAT
Code-Forward, Culture-Back: Analyzing the Gap Between Silicon Valley Ambitions and Our Lived Reality
Silicon Valley promised a shimmering, frictionless future; instead, we have arrived at a sort of "Digital Edwardianism." We possess the world's most sophisticated code, yet we are using it to dress up 20th-century habits and "retro" hierarchies. Why is the future so much harder to imagine than the past?
Step away from the breathless headlines for a critical exploration of the Al bubble. This is not a roadmap to adoption, but a toolkit for interpretation; leaving you with the essential questions to navigate the "Optimism Era" with your agency intact.
About the Speaker
Wigdan Seedahmed is a Sudanese analytics expert and entrepreneur working at the intersection of conflict analysis, business strategy, and humanitarian, development, and security systems. With experience across the United Nations, international organisations, civil society, and the private sector, she develops data-driven tools and research that examine how geopolitics, markets, and conflict shape decision-making in fragile contexts.
Her work also engages with localisation, exploring how data, programme, institutions, stakeholders and local actors can strengthen leadership in humanitarian and development responses. She focuses particularly on emerging markets, translating complex dynamics into practical insight for policy, humanitarian action, and business.
Wigdan is a former humanitarian engineer who has worked in Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Kenya, Somalia, Egypt, Eritrea and across Europe and the Middle East. She holds a BSc (Hons) in Chemical Engineering from the University of Science and Technology in Sudan and an MA in International Relations from Sciences Po Paris.
(find 7 PM CAT in your local time)
Join this seminar at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85265943459?pwd=1vhL03EFkcIwZ8JsfXfabtA0La76KV.1
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Seminar #7: Appropriate Technology by Another Name — AT and the Civic Tech Movement, May 2024
Appropriate Technology (AT) is a guiding framework for building technology that addresses the basic needs of individuals while respecting cultural, ecological, and economic constraints. The Civic Technology (Civic Tech) movement has evolved to bring private-sector technological practices into the public domain, aiming to modernize government services while navigating bureaucratic constraints. Both AT and Civic Tech share a common philosophy: empowering communities through technology that is sustainable, culturally sensitive, and stakeholder-oriented. This talk explores the connections between AT and Civic Tech, illustrating how their shared goals can be harnessed to foster cross-movement collaboration. We'll discuss how terminological changes can mask the continuity of the projects. By examining the parallels between AT and Civic Tech, we aim to inspire a broader understanding of how these frameworks can inform each other and offer new strategies for solving complex social and technological challenges.
(Recording coming soon)