We have been busy with various tasks in the past few months and below is an update of some of our activities.

Workshop with HIVOS' partners in India

Tactical Tech's three-day workshop on the Strategic use of Information, Communication and Digital Technologies in Advocacy was a productive one for the 10 organisations that attended it at Fireflies, Bangalore last month.

The workshop, which was held from January 27 to 29, was conducted for the HIVOS-funded organisations in India who mainly worked on issues of gender and sexuality.

Some key sessions were: identifying the target audience, choosing appropriate tools AND TACTICS, how to use these tools and zeroing in on the message of the campaign. Sessions on how to make creative use of Information Design in campaigns saw the participants show a keen interest.

Training of Trainers (TOT) workshop

Tactical Tech faciliated a workshop titled Training of Trainers (TOT) on computer related skills and use, in Thailand from January 19 to 23. The trainers would in turn train people from their own organisations or other advocacy groups. Four facilitators from Tactical Tech conducted sessions on effective training skills for 16 participants.

Group discussions, interactive activities and short presentations formed part of the workshop. The participants were asked to do a 20-minute training session on the final day to put into practice what they learned at the sessions.

Participants came from a variety of organisations. Some of them dealt with human rights issues and youth while others were from organisations that provided computer support and training to other advocacy groups.

Sex workers project

Tactical Tech is planning a new project for sex workers. This will be an intensive, long-term research project and will focus on getting sex-workers voices heard in policy making in Asia. Our aim in this venture will be to help sex workers advocates make the best use of information, communication and digital technologies in their campaign for sex worker rights. The pre-project phase is already underway with our team engaging in productive discussions with sex worker groups from our target audience.

A two-day meeting, in November, with representatives from about six organisations yielded valuable insights into the use of information, communication and digital technologies among sex workers. More such pre-project activities have been planned for the coming months.

We have previously published a report on sex worker health and rights advocates' use of information, communication and digital technologies as well as conducted workshops and trainings with a few regional networks of sex workers.

Info-Activism camp

The pace is picking up for the Info-Activism camp in February and we have accomplished some key tasks since we received the last bunch of applications in November. Applications have been reviewed, the final participants have been selected, the venue has been surveyed and an optimal agenda structure for the camp decided.

The outline of the camp agenda emerged from a three-day intensive session where we were helped by a panel of experts. Allen Gunn (Aspirationtech), David Taylor (Radical Designs), Petra Timmermams (ICRS) and Himanshu Khatri (MediaShala) provided valuable inputs for the sessions. We are now in the process of building on the basic structure along with inputs from the camp participants.

Frederick Noronha, an independent journalist from Goa, has joined us to help promote the camp. Fred has started interviewing all participants of the camp and will also run the camp blog before and during the event.

New venture

Our latest tie-up is with MediaShala, an Ahmedabad-based media and visualisation company. Our first project together was at the Communicating for Influence workshop in Hyderabad, in November, for International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and their key partners. Tactical Tech and MediaShala took part and facilitated sessions on Information Design. Tactical Tech also worked with other organisations at the workshop including RAPID (ODI), RELAY (PANOS London), Strategic Communications (IDRC Comms department), Using TV and Media (TVE AP).

Tactical Tech and MediaShala will be working together on projects on information and data visualisation for advocacy. We are also working on developing training curricula on these subjects.

Reaching out

Tactical Tech was involved in active knowledge-sharing exercises in the latter half of last year. We worked on the prototype for the Freedom Fone which was launched by Kubatana, a Zimbabwe-based online activist group, in December last year. The launch took place at the Association for Women's Rights in Development Forum in Cape Town. The Freedom Fone is a new idea that uses the mobile phone to enable citizen radio programming.

Tactical Tech also shared their expertise at a Security Training programme conducted by Centre for Safety and Development (CSD), a Netherlands-based NGO. We gave a lecture on information security.

We have also been involved with the ICT4D Collective of University of London. We shared our experience of developing the mobiles in-a-box toolkit at the Communication and Communities' workshop they organised.