By Anthony, Sonum, Ellen, Jesse, and Maxine | DSO Team
As we wrap up the academic year and along with it most of our projects, we are excited to share with you our recent growth, as well as our plans for the summer. In addition to the Pittsburgh team’s Kiva project mentioned in our last report, the San Francisco team is wrapping up several projects, including Girls Helping Girls, a non profit that empowers underprivileged girls to go to school and Gooru, a group that uses their online platform, to help teachers create customized and personalized learning experiences for their students and More than Me, a non-profit that uses education as a catalyst for transformative social change for Girls in Liberia.
This summer, we will prepare for the fall academic semester with new projects and team members. We will continue to grow the Los Angeles and San Francisco Tech hubs and improve on the great work in our other Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Washington DC hubs. Stay tuned for future expansion plans!
In this report, we will feature our project with the Disrupt Team of Derek Caelin and Giselle Lopez from the US Institute of Peace’s PeaceTech Lab. This project was completed with our Washington DC DSO team. As we mentioned in a past report, this partnership came as a result of last September’s Peacehack DC (video).
Featured Project
The mission was to help our clients create a game that incentivizes online disruption of pro-Islamic State messaging and propaganda through the generation of pro-peace content. Our student team of Ellen, Jesse, Maxine were led by professionals Anthony and Sonum in helping the Disrupt team with market research for the game in the Middle East/North Africa (MENA) region. This included reviewing the potential player and game demographics, potential revenue models, marketing and social media, and current ISIS messaging along with counter extremism efforts.
A Testimonial from Disrupt
DSO was wonderful to work with. The team helped us to refine our project concept - using game design and social media listening to incentivize online disruption of extremist messaging and amplify pro-peace narratives.
To better understand our audience and the market, DSO conducted research on internet and mobile penetration, social media use, and the gaming industry across our region of interest. They also worked with us to identify key behaviors and trends that we would want to take into account. Their support was definitely beneficial to our efforts and we would be happy to work with them again!
– Derek and Giselle, Team Leads, Disrupt
Join Us
Join us in tackling the world’s challenges, enabling each other to achieve our professional and personal development goals, and boldly pursuing meaningful social impact outside of our day jobs. In particular, we are recruiting students for the Los Angeles hub as well as Engagement Leads for all hubs.
Your impact potential as a DSO Engagement Lead could include:
For more information see http://www.dsoglobal.org
If you are interested in joining any of our international development hubs, and/or have any questions about any of the open positions contact Amy at amy.badiani@dsoglobal.org.
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