The Independent View: UN Conference: Millennial Generation Factivism

I attended this conference called Millennial Generation Factivism: People-Powered, Technology-Facilitated Activism at the United Nations with an invitation from the ONE organization. I have been a member of ONE since 2004.

The conference was sponsored by:

Factivism - Fact-Based Activism

A commitment to fighting extreme poverty through well-tested policies and programs inspired by concrete evidence and driven by technology; an approach marrying information with passion; a rejection of purely ideological or emotional approaches to advocacy in favor of seeking contrary evidence in order to check a policy's assumptions and impact.

Conference 2 and 3 have the same layout.
Moderator

Femi Oke is an Al Jazeera journalist, social media curator, moderator, and television and radio correspondent. Femi is currently based in Washington D.C. where she hosts “The Stream”, Al Jazeera English’s hit social media and interactive current affairs show. Femi also writes for the social media platform Upworthy. Femi was also named Nigerian media personality of the year in 2007 and picked up the Interaction media award in 2008 for her commitment to broadcasting the complex issues of Africa.

Panelists

Boniface Mwangi is a Kenyan activist who uses traditional and new technologies to drive social change in his country. Boniface organized the “Occupy Parliament” campaign in Kenya to protest pay rises for parliament.

Japheth Omojuwa is a Nigerian social activist and blogger on socio-economic and political issues such as governance and corruption. Japheth is also the Editor of AfricanLiberty.org and the founder and curator of www.omojuwa.com, one of the most popular web pages in Nigeria. With a large Twitter following, he is one of the most influential Nigerians on social media and a thought leader among his peers. Japheth was also voted the Best Nigerian Political Blogger in 2011.

Tarik Nesh-Nash is a Moroccan social activist and hi-tech CEO who uses online tools to bridge the gap between citizens and government. Tarik launched the Arab world’s first online crowdsourcing platform to solicit recommendations for the new Moroccan constitution and is now focusing on creating more tools for citizens to engage in the country’s political process. Tarik helps average citizens move beyond simply voicing long-held frustrations to actually taking part in the political decision-making process.

Taiye Selasi is a writer and photographer of Nigerian and Ghanaian origin. She is producing a documentary film that aims to bring more African voices into the development process and ensure that they are active in shaping the next development agenda. She coined “Afropolitans”, combining African and cosmopolitan to describe a contemporary generation of Africans, popularized in her essay, “Bye-Bye, Babar (Or: What is an Afropolitan?)” In 2013, she released her critically acclaimed novel, Ghana Must Go.

Juan Elias Chebly is PHD Candidate in Sustainable Development at Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela. He currently works for the United Nations Millennium Campaign as a Global Youth Advocate fighting against poverty. In 2009 he founded Voipebox.com, a telecom start-up introducing innovative and pioneering VOIP telephony solutions in South America and the US. He also helped create:

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Bright Simons is president of the mPedigree Network, a system that empowers consumers to instantly verify with a free text message whether their medicines are safe and not counterfeit. He is the former Director of Research at the IMANI Centre for Policy and Education in Ghana, where he helped steer the organization’s award winning research activities. Bright is a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Network of Global Agenda Councils and Technology Pioneers.

Gbenga Akinnagbe is an actor best known for his roles on HBO’s The Wire and USA’s Graceland. He has contributed to both the New York Times and Huffington Post Live. Gbenga is a global activist and founder of Liberated People, an apparel company aimed at inspiring action for social change.

We discussed how to use open-source technology and social media networking to make a real difference in peoples' lives and extreme world poverty. How to develop the needs and use crowd-sourcing to pay for the results. The need for governments to have better transparency and accountability.

My questions: How to take technology solutions to local communities and convert them to the available ways to distribute them? Everyone has their own facts, how do we validate and then combined them before they are distributed?