inaglobe faqing: our first few drafts

Over the past few weeks, as part of the new phase that inaglobe is going through, I have been working on a communication dossier that can be shared with donors and stakeholders a like. Amongst the pieces that make up this dossier there is a set of FAQs. Over the past few years, I have responded to countless different questions about inaglobe, covering aspects from our vision, stance, and operation, for example. We have been scratching our heads to come up with the most relevant important questions that have come our way, and many of which put is in a significantly uncomfortable situation. Our approach is that the harder the question is to answer the more reason we should be addressing it. In this piece I wanted to share a selection of the most important FAQs we have been working on. These are not yet live, and there is a very good reason to share them here in a draft version: I want your feedback, and I want you to challenge them (you can email me at jaime@inaglobe.org). In addition to this, please do feel free to drop me an email with any further questions you would like to see answered.

What is inaglobe?

Inaglobe is a charity* that seeks to provide holistic and collaborative humanitarian innovation in higher education institutions. We work closely with humanitarian partners to identify challenges on the ground, and then connect them with academics and STEM students who work on solving these. We enable a relationship between both players and involve humanitarian partners across the whole innovation cycle. We follow a sustainable, human-centred and systemic approach to the work that we do. There are two dimensions to our work: the educational experience and the technological innovation we enable.

* application ongoing

Who is behind inaglobe?

Inaglobe, originally InAGlobe Education, was founded in the summer of 2017 by Jaime, Alberto, and Xavi, at the time students at Imperial College London. Since, many people have gotten involved as volunteers with varying degrees of involvement. Currently we are a team of 8 with backgrounds in Engineering, History, Law, Anthropology and many more domains! In addition, there are people that provide us advice and counsel on a regular basis that are highly experienced and accomplished professionals and academics. We have built a very diverse and hands-on team, willing to strive for our North Star of equipping future professionals with the tools to innovate at a global scale, priming access, and inclusion, as well as sustainability.

How do you ensure success?

We are constantly learning and redefining the way we do things. We rely on brutal transparency, on ever-present humility and a very specific methodology that ensures stakeholders are represented and have a voice, and that technological challenges are approached with a system’s approach. Our work is only starting, and so we keep a close contact with all the stakeholders involved on the platform and in our offerings. We seek alignment of objectives between the stakeholders such that real impact can be achieved, and representation of those poised to benefit is guaranteed and their context designed for.

Where does inaglobe’s responsibility end?

Inaglobe is an enabler, we take care of establishing healthy and productive relationships, and giving the tools for participating successfully on the platform. We support humanitarian partners in defining the project opportunities using human-centred design and systems thinking approaches, but ultimately the key stakeholders need to approve a project before we can share it on our platform and with our academic network. We aid with outreach in placing the projects into the academic curriculum.

We are working to expand our operations, and we are trialling implementation support, whether it is from advisory services, financial support, or access to human capital. These aren’t yet part of our core offering because we see ourselves as brokers rather than owners: our stakeholders are the owners. We do, however, understand we have a responsibility to ensure the success of the projects and our stakeholders, as it will reflect the success of the platform and the ecosystem we are building.

What if a project fails? How do you manage that?

It is common for projects to fail, many of the problems we are tackling are extremely difficult problems to solve, and so we live with unsuccessful projects daily, and as a core aspect of our learning. Understanding the complexity that these projects have is part of our key-learning proposition to our students and academics. We want to educate on the fact that these challenges are unlikely to be solved in an iteration or two of technological innovation. This will make students across STEM witnesses of the need for more humanitarian innovators amongst those that graduate from technical streams. We have a collective responsibility in tackling these challenges.

In practical terms, we assess projects on an ongoing basis, at key milestones, and assess the optimal direction for a project to take. Our track record shows a lot of good work and indispensable learnings. Our discovery journey is full of rectifications and errors that will teach us how best to achieve our North Star. When we have gotten the problem definition wrong, we embark into a new research exercise to try to better understand the problem; when the technology is not coming along we seek to identify why and respond through a second iteration in the same or different domain; and lastly, if a project is failing at a later stage, we conduct a post-mortem and see where we might have gotten things wrong and how to improve. We are iterating in our process, but we are doing so with the humility that these projects require — we do not want projects to succeed at any expense, we want them to succeed because we all got things right.

How do you manage situations where partnerships end without notice?

Unfortunately, no one is obliged to remain within the platform if it is at the expense of their primary objective as a humanitarian or academic institution; however, we do promote a culture of responsibility and ownership, such that remaining in partnership will almost always seem more beneficial. Now in the case when a partnership ends and a project is left orphaned, we will do our best efforts to find an alternative owner to the project in the same context from where it was sourced. There are occasions where projects replicate across geographies and stakeholders, and so sometimes we find having multiple potential owners of a project.

In conclusion…

These are just a few of the questions we find ourselves answering, but our FAQ will be far longer than these 2 pages worth of writing I have collectively put together with the other inaglobe team members. I do insist that for anyone and everyone remotely interested in the work that we do or care about our objectives as an organisation, do reach out to us, challenge us, and help us make inaglobe more aligned with the needs of those we work for and with.