TIPS/WHAT IS AN ADVOCACY?
● Advocacy is active promotion of a cause or principle
● Advocacy involves actions that lead to a selected goal
● Advocacy is one of many possible strategies, or ways to approach a problem
● Advocacy can be used as part of a community initiative, nested in with other
components.
● Advocacy is not direct service
● Advocacy does not necessarily involve confrontation or conflict
Some examples may help clarify just what advocacy is:
● You join a group that helps build houses for the poor--that's wonderful, but it's not
advocacy (it's a service)
● You organize and agitate to get a proportion of apartments in a new development
designated as low to moderate income housing - that's advocacy
● You spend your Saturdays helping sort out goods at the recycling center - that's not
advocacy (it's a service)
● You hear that land used for the recycling center is going to be closed down and you
band together with many others to get the city to preserve this site, or find you a new
one. Some of you even think about blocking the bulldozers, if necessary - that's
advocacy
Advocacy usually involves getting government, business, schools, or some other large
institution (also known as Goliath) to correct an unfair or harmful situation affecting people in
the community (also known as David, and friends). The situation may be resolved through
persuasion, by forcing Goliath to buckle under pressure, by compromise, or through political or
legal action.
How to work with peers and external publics/ partners for the development of an
ICT project that advocates or mobilizes for a specific Social Change or Cause
GOAL: At the end of the 4-week period, you will collaboratively participate actively in the
creation and development of an ICT Project for Social Change relating to an issue relevant to
your professional track.
CHALLENGE QUESTION: Have you done community service? Can you combine service and
formal learning?
Read through the following references and discover how ICT can enable collaboration that
cuts across geographic and institutional borders to forge solutions and new business models.
Source:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2016/2/8/tech-start-ups-promise-to-empower-workers-through-
automation.ht
ml
Take a look at the image below. Between identifying a problem to crafting a solution, you will
notice that the tools that provide the solution do not operate in a vacuum. They evolve within
the boundaries of system’s context through to the constraints and resources.
Image Source:
ACTIVITY:
Developing a common ICT Project for Social Change covering the following steps:
1. Planning and conceptualizing an ICT Project for Social Change
2. Research for ICT Projects, Audience profiling, (demographics and psychographics)
3. Designing and copywriting, i.e. writing textual content for ICT Projects
4. Developing and constructing the ICT project around an advocacy such as any of the following:
a. Anti-drug campaigns
b. Youth election volunteer mobilization
c. Animal welfare and rights
d. Environmental conservation and action
e. Contemporary ICT issues like cyber-bullying, copyright infringement, green
technology, and Internet addiction
Please note that there are many more causes. Some causes are more specific or relevant to
your locality.
NOTE: THIS IS COLLABORATIVE CONTENT,
Please follow the links below which point to articles that could serve as models for advocacy:
● http://www.appropedia.org/Service_learning
● http://inhabitat.com/19-year-old-student-develops-ocean-cleanup-array-that-could-re
move-7250000-tons-of-plastic-from-the-worlds-oceans/
● http://www.smh.com.au/environment/boyan-slats-high-school-project-raises-millions-t
o-clean-up-worlds-oceans-20160201-gmj8dq.html
● http://www.philstar.com/business/2015/10/18/1511826/ali-edc-petron-top-sustainabili
ty-csr-firms
1. Identify a local or regional cause or issue for Social Change related to your specific
professional tracks that can be addressed or tackled using an ICT Project for Social Change.
For your pre-work, make sure you do a search on the example advocacies discussed earlier.
2. Analyze how target users and audiences are expected to respond to the proposed ICT Project
for Social Change on the basis of content, value, and user experience.
Part of your collaborative work entails creating a survey on how participants respond to a call
to action in social networks, like Facebook.
3. Integrate rich multimedia content in design and development to best enhance the user
experience and deliver content of an ICT Project for Social Change
Ask yourself: What kind of content would encourage or motivate you to participate in a call to
action.
4. Develop a working prototype of an ICT Project for Social Change. The prototype could take
the form of a printed infographic or even hand-drawn on a poster-sized material.
Reflecting on the nature of ICT and the manner by which the learning process has
changed your worldview.
GOALS: By the end of this final week, you will independently reflect on the ICT learning process
and how your worldview has evolved over the past semester.
Have you started co-creating impact around you? In what area or areas? You may refer
to the list on http://appropedia.org via this link:
ACTIVITY:
1. Create an account on http://appropedia.org and write an article to help collaboratively build
Appropedia.
To create an account, go to this site:
http://www.appropedia.org/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&returnto=Appropedia%27s+offl
ine+content+bundle&type=signup
To ensure confirmation of creation of the Appropedia account, make sure you possess a
personal email address that you can access and use regularly.
2. Write a reflexive piece or output using an ICT tool, platform, or application of choice on the
learning experiences undergone during the semester. You have the option to use any of the
following forms:
● 1. Video blog
● 2. Presentation or image gallerY
● 3. WebsitE
● 4. Illustrated documen
● 5. Podcast or webcast
Online collaborative tools that may be used currently include, but are not limited to:
1. Google Docs/ MS Office 365
2. Prezi
3. Google Chat/ Hangouts
4. Skype/ Viber/ Kakao Talk/ WeChat/ Line
TIPS/SOME ONLINE PLATFORMS
Platforms that may be currently used to host newsletters and similar ICT content include but
are not limited to:
1. Presentation/ visualization - Prezi ( https://prezi.com/ ), Zoho
( https://www.zoho.com/docs/show.html ), Slideshare ( http://www.slideshare.net/ ),
Mindmeister ( https://www.mindmeister.com/ )
2. Cloud computing, e.g. Google Apps ( https://cloud.google.com/ )
22 Role of communication in shared understanding among teams using wiki
23 https://evernote.com/upgrade/?var=1&tier=basic&offer=www_pricing
3. Social Media - Facebook Pages ( https://www.facebook.com/business/products/pages ),
Tumblr ( https://www.tumblr.com/ ), Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/ ), Pinterest
( https://www.pinterest.com/ )
4. Web Page Creation - Wix ( http://www.wix.com/ ), Weebly ( http://www.weebly.com/ ) ,
Google Sites, e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/phpeacebuilding/ )
5. Blog or Publisher sites - Blogger ( http://blogger.com ), Wordpress ( https://wordpress.com/
),
Livejournal ( http://www.livejournal.com/ ), Issuu
( https://issuu.com/signup/onboarding?plan=free&funnel=freeplan )
Google Sites, https://www.google.com/sites/overview.html
Below is a sample screenshot of a collaborative tool:
Sample Screenshot of Collaborative tool, Source: https://helpx.adobe.com/creative-cloud/
