ARLINGTON, Va., October 18, 2019 — Innovation for Change (I4C) announced the opening of its online Global Innovations Gallery, a first-of-its-kind incubator and experiential showcase for cutting-edge ideas and projects that will shape the future of how civil society responds to civic space challenges.
The Gallery, a showcase of close to 100 innovations brings together all elements of I4C’s social and civic innovation, is now publicly available at I4C’s website. It is an online space where innovators, civil society leaders, civic tech tinkerers, design experts, on-the-ground changemakers, and others can showcase new projects and solutions from the I4C community and the rest of the world.
Located in seven regional hubs of the world, the I4C network is growing in both physical and online spaces across Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Pacific, and South Asia.
The award-winning network uses it Gallery to showcase a variety of technologies, processes, tools, and strategies, ranging from platforms for transparency, policy influencing applications, ground-breaking research on digital currencies, project-writing wizards, and more. The innovations on display have been recently launched or are under testing, with many developed through I4C’s partnerships with both the public and private sector, including companies in various industries, such as Ashoka, Banco Davivienda, the Inter-American Bank, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Young & Rubicam marketing company, and the municipalities of Guatemala City and San Salvador.
The Gallery makes it possible to search the top innovations from seven regions of the world – browsing and experiencing the different ideas, tools, and processes by region, topic, keywords, funder, and organization.
“We wanted to provide a state-of-the-art experience for anyone who is looking for ideas or ways to address civic space problems to be able to browse and find potential solutions and people doing them in their region,” said Noel Dickover, I4C’s project director. The Gallery makes it possible for the network’s members to upload innovations and select relevant ones to create portfolios of projects that can then be shared locally in their region or more widely.
“Innovation has been at the heart of our project from day one when we launched more than three years ago,” said Dickover. “Today, we honor our legacy of innovation with the opening of the Innovation Gallery – a space for us to incubate, test, scale, and showcase the products and processes we’re creating to help civil society collectively innovate to protect civic space and redesign how civil society does its work.”
The Innovation Experience
I4C has created a social experience in the innovation area of the website. Upon entering the home page, visitors can make their way through three experiences which include:
The Gallery: A project showcase that enables saving and discovery of information on the I4C website, using images, videos, and quick write-ups on the problem and the tried solution, using technologies and cutting-edge ideas and materials throughout. The Gallery can be accessed here.
Share an Innovation: This area offers an opportunity to experience and showcase the latest concepts and projects at various stages of implementation developed by the I4C network members, along with technologies to implement those ideas. The share area can be accessed here.
Portfolio List: A dedicated space for users to save and share favorited innovations from the gallery. For I4C members, this area also makes it possible to create a unique portfolio dedicated to showing cutting-edge projects and their technologies that have the potential to yield better quality and to increase their sustainability by attracting potential supporters. The share area can be accessed here.
I4C designed the innovation area, Gallery, and other spaces to showcase the network’s culture of creativity and continuous drive to employ meaningful innovations that address civic space challenges using a locally-tested approach, from smartphone capabilities such as environmental monitoring applications to open data sets for LGBT activism to civic innovation indexes.
Contact: Kara Andrade @ kara@innovationforchange.net
About Innovation for Change (I4C)
I4C is a global network of people and organizations who want to connect, partner and learn together to overcome barriers to closing civic space and restrictions to basic freedoms of assembly, association and speech. I4C is a community-led network inspired by ideas, methods, and technologies from across different sectors. There are seven regional hubs in the network who are growing in both physical and online spaces across Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the Pacific, and South Asia.
Each region within the I4C network creates effective approaches to address the civic space challenges. These approaches include an assessment of the problems and challenges in their region, an agenda to overcome those challenges, implemented by programmatic activities which include innovations, tools, processes, and activities, and a governance structure to oversee the efforts. The outputs of their approaches can then be shared across the network, to better inform the decision-making and strategies within the network.
