Goa Sprint January2024
Just back from a weeklong sprint in Goa. It has been an eventful week with NGO meets, Data Catalyst Program(DCP), Glific Sprint all happening alongside. We began the Sprint with our quarterly reviews followed by Chai pe charcha(Goa NGOs meet) and then the Glific/DCP cohort. There was also some room for fun with the Techie for dev awards and team building activity and the morning walks.
The DCP cohort1 began in the last Sprint in Kochi in October 2023, where the 12 participant NGOs decided on their problem statement and the 3 month action plan. During the last Sprint, teams spent a lot of time finalising their problem statement, going back and forth. It seemed a bit skeptic that they would be able to action out the plan but I was pleasantly surprised with the progress made between the two sprints by most of them.
I was the (S)POC for Ummeed and they zeroed in on measuring the intensity of engagement with every child registered with their organisation. This exercise was a step towards measuring impact on each child, connections they built, to ensure they are socially compatible. While the team (Pervez, Amolika, Vinodhini) had debates on the formulation of the problem statement, they were swift in actioning it out, working with the internal stakeholders on validating it and then identifying a cohort of 100 children for their study. During this exercise, they were able to identify the data quality needs and tools needed for consolidation of the necessary data points to carry forward their analysis.
We also had a few sessions planned for the audience by Dasra, Goalkeep and Tech4Dev teams. I was a co-presenter along with my colleague Rohit Chatterjee for a couple of sessions on Data Governance and Data explorations using AI. Since we started working on these sessions pretty late in the cycle, we had to spend time in finalising our charts and reviews during the initial days of the Sprint, missing out on the Sunday beach trip 🙁
For the Governance session, we chose the topic of data sharing within and external to the org. There were some role plays that we decided on, and there were interesting set of discussions/questions across the room. Data exploration session was very well taken by all. For this we decided to explore Julius AI along with a couple of datasets, namely, covid and diabetes. All teams enthusiastically explored the data analysis, carefully drafting their prompts, trying to play around with the complexity and some even tried getting deep into the code. And we had discussions on their findings.
The room was a mix of tech, M&E, founders, leaders and each of them brought in a different perspective to the discussions in general. The M&E or the tech teams within the NGOs have a limited headcount and hence do not get opportunities for discussions on the topic of their interest or expertise within their org. And they are short of bandwidth when comes to exploring new tools, technologies etc. Programs like DCP give them an opportunity to be a part of the wider ecosystem, where they get to share, discuss, question and broaden their reach. Also, the NGO presentations were an excellent example of how DCP could accelerate some of the long standing investigations or analysis that could have otherwise been on the back burner.
We definitely need to continue these ecosystem building programs and continue the journey with them, for them. Together we succeed in bringing the change.
