As part of the Chevening 30th Anniversary Scholar Conference on "Leadership and Change in the 21st Century" held at Durham University on April 25, 2014, my presentation is titled "PowerLife Mobile Application".
Abstract
PowerLife is an idea for a mobile application designed for the
Information Systems course “IT and Service Innovation” at LSE by a group of 5
students. The application seeks to draw attention to energy issues that
government might not publish by collecting samples and engaging citizens to be
proactive in this data collection.
PowerLife helps citizens to have their say on the energy problems
they face and be proactive in pushing their governments to take action. It also
aims to assist relevant NGOs in their work to campaign for the ultimate
solution of these issues. The platform is meant to give a voice to citizens and
empower them. It also gives citizens a space to promote favourable behaviours
that help save energy. We consider infrastructure to be a basic right for
citizens of any country and we seek to fill the gaps that the public, private,
and third sectors sometimes fail to address. The application seeks to show
geographic distribution of energy outages and trends in times of day/year when
electricity is most vulnerable. It will be targeted towards regions where
energy issues are common and interrupt daily life.
PowerLife could fill a need in the ICT for development sphere,
especially as the popularity of Ushahidi - which we will be basing the
application on - continues to grow. Crowdsourcing can be used to report and
view data, which is normally difficult to source or find, related to violence,
sexual assault, crime, riots, displacement, traffic and, now, infrastructure.
It puts citizens at the front and center of the issues their communities
are facing directly. We hope that, through this visibility, local, national,
and international attention can be drawn to persistent, meaningful problems
and, ultimately, that solutions can be enacted.
