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[edit] About UNIWIKI

"How do we connect children who have no access to computers or the internet to children who do? How do we allow for some of the same faculties and functions that young people in highly connected environments are used to, when all that is available is a mobile phone or a radio?"

UNIWIKI is way of thinking that looks for ways to connect as many people as possible. Much of this work comes out of the Innovations and Development team of the Youth Section, in UNICEF's Division and Communication, and the rest through exciting connections with global partners. More

[edit] UNIWIKI Projects - Underway and Planned

Youth Journalist Portal: The Youth Journalist Portal projects draws from DOC's Youth Section's collaboration with the Art Center of Pasadena (www.artcenter.edu), and the video sharing platform mDialog (www.mdialog.com). This process led to the design of a collaborative platform for youth journalist groups, based on consultations with youth journalist groups in the Philippines, Guyana and Suriname.

The World Congress III Against Sexual Exploitation of Children and Adolescents UNICEF's Youth Section is currently engaged in designing and building an online portal to facilitate youth communication around The World Congress III in Brazil.

Our Stories: Our Stories seeks to collect, preserve, and share online the stories of the world's people and their cultures and communities. Launched in December 2007, Our Stories is a collaboration between Google, OLPC / 100$ Laptop and UNICEF. OLPC Laptops, mobile phones and internet cafes, and putting all those stories on a Google Maps-like site.

Connecting Classrooms: Connecting Classrooms started with the German National Committee in January of 2008, and focuses on using innovative web- and mobile-based technologies to connect schools in Uganda, Ethiopia, the US, and Germany. Ultimately, the classrooms will work together to create a youth-produced version of the State of the World's Children.

iAIDS.org: In collaboration with TakingITGlobal and GYCA, UNICEF's Youth Section is working to meet the needs of youth AIDS activists worldwide by creating a collaborative workspace around which to share relevant information, stories, best practices, etc. This wiki space will be accessible via mobile phones and landlines.

J8 Workspace: The J8 Summit is a youth version of the yearly G8 event. Using UNIWIKI tools, participants are able to talk with each other before and after the event, and collaborate on creating documents during the event. Launching in May, the new J8 site will allow people who can't go to the conference in Japan to give their views and opinions to the larger community.

Younicef.de Clubs for German Youth: building collaborative online spaces for German youth interested in international development issues and connecting them with young people around the world, funded by the German National Committee for UNICEF.

Youth Reporters in the Philippines: KNN in the Philippines is youth-produced video content around issues that young people have identified as important. We are connecting with mDialog to give a 24x7 presence to these video products on the Apple ecosystem (iPod, iPhone, iTunes etc.) and build communities of discussion around the videos.

Speak Africa: a site for African youth to share their media creations. In combination with Year of the African Child, and the Cairo+5 event, Speak Africa is a movement that combines youth and media.

World Fit For Children+5: A communal UNIwiki-space to discuss the pressing issues facing youth, as discussed at WFFC+5 Children's Forum and the Pan-African Forum on Children and Youth

Health MDGs in Africa: African country offices are using wiki and other collaborative tools to build a common set of indicators towards the MDGs - this includes tracking usage, easy evaluation of work, and the ability to talk using VOIP while logged into the wiki.

Monitoring and Evaluation in Uganda: Using DevInfo's bespoke SMS data collection tools, in addition to their PDA-based tools Uganda Country Office will be collecting data about Child Friendly schools and health center stock reports. Youth Section / Innovation Team members will be going in mid-February to set up the reference implementation.

The BEE is a portable solar-powered communications hub for use in emergencies, education and community support.

MDialogue and Art Centre Here's a summary of our collaboration with MDialogue and the Art Center College of Design.

[edit] UNIWIKI Technology

All of the software and tools produced by the Youth Section are open source. Please feel free to take what you want, customize it, and localize it to fit your needs (just let us know, so we can add it to our repositories).

RapidSMS: RapidSMS is an open-source tool that allows you to build forms, capture data, and take the pulse of a community through text messages. All data gathered is collected on the internet, and can be used by health workers, communities, and country offices.

Rosco Radio Station on the Go: Rosco is a program that can transform a computer into a radio station. When you plug a USB stick with Rosco on it into a computer, the computer becomes a radio mixing board. Connect it to a transmitter, and it is a radio station which can push and pull content to the greater UNIWiki content repositories.

MobilED: Accessing and participating on the Internet by cellphone. Text a question in, the system calls you back and reads to you out-loud from a web page. Text data in and it is graphed and aggregated.

Community Mapping: Use computers and PDAs to quickly gather data about communities. People can click and add items (houses, schools, etc) to a map which is sent by SMS or internet to a server. These maps can be aggregated to show progress over time, annotated, shared and processed in a variety of ways.

Mediawiki and wikiHow: The Youth Section is currently working to customize open source wiki technology in a number of ways, with the ultimate goals of making it child-friendly, usable in low-bandwidth situations, and cell-phone accessible.

Mapping UNICEF videos on Google Maps: UNICEF is very excited to be using Google technologies to help visualize and present data.

Mizizi: Mzizi provides easy way to record and collect stories using personal computers in conjunction with the Our Stories project. Using Mizizi, young people can record stories from people in their communities, and then upload them to a central database where they are then organized and accessible to anyone with access to the internet.

DevInfo: SMS entry into DevInfo database allowing UNICEF staff to collect data, particularly relating to the MDGs.

Testing Centers: We are very interested in the different ways that cultures and people interact with the internet, and tools that we create. We at headquarters, in NY, cannot develop products without their guidance and input. Testing centers allow us to gather that data.

Mobile Study: Mobilestudy.org allows lecturers, teachers and students from around the world to create quizzes that can be downloaded onto a mobile phone. Once on the phone these quizzes can be sat anywhere, anytime without a network connection Works well in conjunction with a lesson recorded on Mp3

[edit] UNIWIKI Academia

Wiki for the Children's Mobile Technology Workshop: The Youth Section has recently launched a wiki for the University of Maryland, NSF sponsored workshop on Children's Mobile Technology. The workshop is taking place on the 21st and 22nd February 2008...

Columbia University: UNICEF's Youth Section collaboration and discussion with professors and students at Columbia University.

[edit] Partners

UNICEF's Youth Section works with a variety of partners in the academic, non-profit, and private sectors around child-based projects and goals. UNICEF is hardware-agnostic. Decisions about what hardware to use are made within the framework of complex government / supply relationships.

One Laptop Per Child

Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS