Step 1: Facts

• There is a disease-causing pathogen only found in a small region of Lesotho. 
• The testing is simple, but the trip/equipment will cost money, and community assistance is required.
  • We are studying the life cycle/characteristics of a certain pathogen.
• The people in Lesotho know where (all?) the water sources are. 
• We are expected to write some publications on what we find from our research.
• Characterizing pathogens can help further research into how to make water safer to drink.
• Assumption: The pathogen is present in the community water sources. 
• Assumption: We know that there is no risk of further water contamination from the studies we are conducting.
• Assumption: We got IRB approval, and approval from Lesotho to do research there.

 

Ethical Issue: 

• Is this study just an example of hit and run research or does this research actually help the people of Lesotho or have social value in general?
• Balance between ethics and rigor, not doing study rigorously enough is an ethical issue too.

 

Step 2: Stakeholders

• Researchers (academics)
• The University of the academics
• Funders of the research/Government Agency
• Villagers of Lesotho
• Healthcare System/Providers (secondary/tertiary)
• Academic Journal

Step 3: Motivations

• Researchers -> academic prestige, maintain jobs, create positive impact through their research/findings.
• The University of the academics -> maintain their reputation globally, advancing knowledge & delivering value to society.
• Villagers -> obtain clean water supply, stay healthy, not have their lifestyle completely disrupted, lower risk of contracting disease, building connections and relationships, possible economic development with cleaner water in tourism and exporting water to South Africa.
• Funders/Government Agency -> stake in developing an additive or water cleaning system, obtain more grants for future work, research might help their projects and development, creates a positive image of corporate social responsibility, develop their brand in this area.
• Healthcare system/providers in Lesotho -> less burden from waterborne diseases, more resources to devote to other conditions.
• Academic Journal -> acquire new research (groundbreaking) that adds to general knowledge of pathogens, build reputation.

Step 4: Solutions

• Conduct experiments on how the pathogen affects health. Experiments would include testing the water with pathogens on rats. 
• Select guides which are knowledgeable of water sources; typically women
• Test water from multiple sources; in villages with different socioeconomic statuses.
• Only collect the water samples in vials when doing on ground work; test the water later in labs.
• Educate the villagers of Lesotho about your findings while you are there about things they can do in their capacities & after the water has been tested, and help them towards finding a solution to any disease-causing pathogens you found
  • Sharing information and results that would benefit the people of Lesotho (+those downstream of Lesotho) after the research gets published 
  • Email the papers to the heads of communities to show that something came out of the research they assisted in 
  • Maximizing clinical value & making sure there is positive social impact/return
• Identify the source or the pathogen. Where/how is it contaminating the lake.
• Conduct simple examinations on locals to identify symptoms and effects from drinking the lake’s water. 
• Attempt to provide a temporary cleaning solution or import purified water.
• Scan the area of the lake. Identify behaviors from the locals that could be contributing to the pathogen. 
• Request the right to access the water sources from legislation/leaders of each village and explain what you are doing/plan to do/and how you are testing, negotiating for access
  • Appeal to community health workers in Lesotho who understand what you are doing and can explain it to the community 
• Negotiations and incentives are a way of reducing what you are taking personally and providing a return which addresses the issue of beneficence
  • Also addresses the rigor of the study because you’re making sure you contact and get information from people who are educated about your research and who can provide you with accurate information
  • Ensuring that you do the study right, focus on legitimacy
• PROS: Working with community, broadening knowledge of pathogens, potentially helping them in future.
• CONS: Not reporting back to them with enough information on our findings to help them in any sense (no compensation), process of requesting access to the water in Lesotho through the government may take longer than we anticipated, we do not find anything helpful/new in our research, the community members in Lesotho have the right to turn us down (our funding sources would be mad).
• ETHICAL PRINCIPLE/CODE: These solutions and the research are mostly consequence based thinking, because it is focused on discovering more about pathogens and creating more knowledge about them globally in the hopes that some disease prevention will come out of it. However, our steps to request access to the water sources in Lesotho bring a more duty and virtue based approach because we are trying to get their approval, work with the community members, and hopefully bring back new information to them to help in the future.

Step 5: Additional

• NSPE Code of Ethics: This legislature enforces that engineers “hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public” in their work. Hence, an engineer need note this when debating the ethics of this study.
• Who has approved the study? The university? Has it received IRB approval?
  • IRB Ethics:
    • Social or Scientific Value
    • Scientific Validity
    • Fair Subject Selection
    • Favorable Risk – Benefit
    • Independent Review
    • Informed Consent
    • Respect for Potential and Enrolled Subjects
• Belmont Report -> beneficence, respect for persons, justice
  • Are you protecting the anonymity of the volunteers if they wish for it?

 

Step 6: Best Action

• To start: request the right to access the water sources from legislation/leaders of each village and explain what you are doing/plan to do/and how you are testing, negotiating for access (the meeting will be in a culturally sensitive location and adhere to their standards).
  • Appeal to community health workers in Lesotho who understand what you are doing and can explain it to the community 
• To compensate the community members that help us during our study, we will drive them to the water sources, and when we are testing the water, explain our process and what our intended outcome is. In a sense, educating them on pathogens and disease preventions in water.
  • Long term compensation would be to report back to them about our findings. Give the heads of the community our publications, and educate them on potential solutions to rid of any disease-causing pathogens we find.
• To make the study as just as possible, we will test water from multiple sources; in villages with different socioeconomic statuses. We will also ask those who are most educated on the water sources (women?).
• When testing, we will only collect the water samples in vials when actually at the location, and test the water later in labs. That way we are disrupting villagers as little as possible. 
• Potential downsides to this plan are that the community members/government of Lesotho may want more say in the study and want to play a bigger role, may not allow us into their country in the first place if they do not believe our study will help them, or may want more immediate compensation.

 

Step 7: Venture Implications

• Improve community health.
• Opportunity to market water treatment/cleaning solution.
• Adding to knowledge of waterborne pathogens.
  • Enhance knowledge through publications and education.
• Potential positive or negative environmental implications if the water treatment solution is derived from this research and introduced to the community.
• Potential employment/volunteering of locals into protecting the lake and working with our venture apply our solutions. 

Ethical Decision-Making Methodology

 

Step 1: Facts

• I am the designer
• I am trying to make a syringe to help save people in a developing country
• Adding the auto-disable makes the syringe more expensive and less accessible to hospitals and clinics, therefore reaching and helping less people
• Without the safety of the auto-disable the syringe could potentially spread other diseases
• I need to choose how to design the syringe

Step 2: Stakeholders

• Patients
• Doctors and nurses
• Hospitals
• Developer/designer 

Step 3: Motivations

• Patients -> quality care that is affordable, safety and assurance.
• Doctors & Nurses -> to keep their patients safe, to help cure as many people as possible, to stay safe themselves.
• Hospitals -> to be one of the best hospitals in the area and have patients feel safe and comfortable coming there, keep the cost of supplies low, to cure most patients that come into the hospital, to make money.
• Developer/designer -> create an effective and safe product, to have my product sell as much as possible, keep my job/get possible promotion.

Step 4: Solutions

1. Create all syringes without the auto-disable feature which will allow the syringe to reach the most hospitals and people with the possible repercussion of spreading other diseases
   1. Consequence-based thinking. This solution will be able to reach the most people and cure the max number of patients, helping the country as a whole.
   2. Pros: More hospitals will be able to purchase it, will be able to reach the max number of patients in need of the cure (and save the most people), they syringe will be cheaper for us to produce, easier design, faster to make.
   3. Cons: unsafe (possibly dangerous to nurses/doctors and patients), creates possibly another problem of spreading other diseases, syringe isn’t as effective as it could be, people could suffer/die because of it not having the auto-disable.
2. Create all syringes with the auto-disable feature which will make it more expensive. Less hospitals will be able to buy it, it will reach less patients, but we know it is safe and will not cause other diseases or issues (because of the design of the product).
   1. Duty-based thinking/ Virtue-based thinking. This solution is ethically right because we would know as the designer that we would not be creating another issue (allowing other diseases to spread to the patient) due to our design. We are creating the best and safest possible syringe we can.
   2. Pros: We will not create another problem by spreading other diseases because of our design, every patient that receives this vaccine will be sure that it is safe, doctors and nurses will be able to use the syringes properly and safely.
   3. Cons: Less hospitals will be able to afford it and it will be accessible to less people; therefore curing less people than possible, more expensive production, longer to develop.
3. Make some syringes with the auto-disable for the hospitals that can afford it, and then make some without the auto-disable for the hospitals that cannot afford it. But for the hospitals that will be using the syringes without the auto-disable feature the developer will send an educational plan (written out or on video) on how to properly use the syringes in the safest possible way. Keeping their patients as safe as possible.
   1. Consequence-based thinking/duty based. We will not be giving the unsafe syringes (without the auto-disable) to the hospitals that can afford the safer one. Most of the population will receive the best possible care, and all the population will receive some care (just some with the chance of getting another disease) with limited risk (because of the educational plan that comes with the less safe syringes).
   2. Pros: The hospitals that can afford the safer syringes will have access to them, meaning that some of the population will be receiving the best possible care, will be cured, and will not have to worry about potentially contracting other diseases. The hospitals that can’t afford the syringes will still be able to help their patients with the main issue, and they will be taught on the extra precautions to use to minimize other safety issues that may arise.
   3. Cons: The population will be disproportionately helped depending on wealth (unfair); some people will be given the best care (the people who are most likely less affected), while others will be given mediocre care because they cannot afford better or are in a bad location (meaning they are probably the ones who need the better care in the first place). Nurses may not adhere to the safety plan for the syringes without the auto-disable feature. Other diseases may still spread. 

Step 5: Additional

• The WHO stated that reused syringes can cause HIV, HBV, HCV, and bacterial infections (to name a few). A study in 2000 showed that injections that were given with reused syringes, there were 21 million new HBV cases, 2 million new HCV cases, and 260k new HIV cases (WHO guideline on the use of safety-engineered syringes … – BDwww.bd.com › corporate › CO_WHO_Injection_SM_TR).
• The WHO provides strong guidelines and recommendations for all syringes to have the auto-disable function for fixed-dose immunizations.

Step 6: Best Action

The best solution would be to make some of the syringes with the auto-disable for the hospitals that can afford it and make the rest without it for the hospitals that cannot. This is the best solution because everyone will receive some care. Some will receive the safest and optimal care, while the others will still receive care with minimized risk because of the nurses/doctors administering the syringe being taught how to make it the safest they can without the auto-disable feature. Consequently it will provide care to the max amount of people, and duty wise, we will be providing the safest care to the most people that we can and trying to make it safer for the ones who cannot afford the best option. It is the choice that satisfies both ends.

 

Step 7: Venture Implications

• We will not make as much money as we would have by selling ALL syringes with the auto-disable features, but we are making more than we would have selling only the ones without it, or selling the syringes with it to only a small number of hospitals. As a designer I will be able to make both types of syringes. We may spend more money making two different kinds and having to develop the educational plan, but the country will benefit greatly from it. Our company should do well and sell to all hospitals. 

 

 1.Refine the detailed income statement for your venture for two years (at six month intervals) or a more appropriate time scale. Explicitly state the assumptions that underlie your financial model.

 

2.Refine the Business Model for your venture based on your revenue model. You may use the Osterwalder BMC to refine your business model but prepare one or more visuals that explain how your venture will work and accomplish your BHAG.

BHAG: reach 28 schools (Almaty, Nursultan, and Nazarbayev schools)

3. Develop an M&E plan for your venture.

Clearly list all assumptions.

Identify short-term and long-term success metrics.

Identify specific methods to measure the metrics.

 

Assumptions: 

• App is successfully developed and accepted by schools
• Cooperation between our venture and teachers.
• Students respond to incentives and are willing to cooperate
• Availability of recyclable material
• Schools find benefits behind supporting our venture 
  • In terms of offering help to manage logistics in the area

Short Term Success Metrics:	Methods to measure metrics
# of Schools w/ app integrated	N/A
# of students that have downloaded the app	-Usage data
# of students actively using the app every month	-Usage data -# of students who have completed each cycle of levels
Participation of small businesses	# of available incentives
Long Term Success Metrics:
Liters of material available for recycling	-General estimate based on consumption of goods in Almaty. This will be done through analysis of behavior and based on current recycle rates.
Liters of material recycled	-Collect data from app based on pictures of recycled material. This way we can have a close estimate of the amount of recycled material -Categorized system
Percentage of people recycling	-Collect data from app based on pictures of recycled material. Number of people that are new to recycling and are now recycling.
Growth/Proficiency in education on sustainability	-Have a pre-test to measure knowledge on importance of sustainable and compare with later tests in the app -# of quizzes completed -Scores on quizzes
Household water consumption	-Collect data (through government?) on how much water was being consumed on average before and after our app implementation in households with those students
Household energy consumption	-Collect data (through government?) on how much energy was being consumed on average before and after our app implementation in households with those students
Increase in biking	-Collect app data based on people riding bikes as sustainable actions -Compare previous data with new projections

 

1. Develop a detailed income statement for your venture for two years (at six month intervals). Explicitly state the assumptions that underlie your financial model:

In the first 6 months after our app launch, we won’t be making much money from advertisements and partnerships, but as we expand the app use to more schools, our revenue will increase significantly. We won’t need a school manager, we will need to upgrade the app more often, and we will need to spend more on marketing to help build our brand. Travelling costs remain the same throughout.

In the second period after our app launch, our revenue from schools will increase, given our expansion to at least 2 more schools. We will have a built brand name, thus our income from advertisements and partnerships will increase. In terms of cost, we will begin hiring individuals (2) to help us with maintaining the business in terms of business development and general management. We won’t need to spend as much on marketing because our brand name will grow with the number of schools we have in our arsenal.

These trends will continue in the third and fourth periods.

 

2. Identify two SPECIFIC funding sources for the design phase of your project and two SPECIFIC funding sources for the dissemination (implementation / distribution / commercialization) phase of your project. For each funding source, explain why this is a good fit for your project, and what SPECIFIC aspect of your project might the funding source support.

1. 1. Design phase:
      1. GreenFund Grant through Lehigh awarded to facilitate green projects. Our project’s end goal is to make Almaty a greener city. We could use the $2,000 to create a wireframe of our app and even create our first version. The money could be used to hire a team to code the app if we need.
      2. Experiential Learning in Health (GELH) Grant through Lehigh. Up to $4,000 for projects/research focused on health, but has a wide definition of it. Our goal is to improve the health of citizens of Almaty by decreasing pollution and making the city more sustainable. We could use the funding to again help develop our app, but also to do more research on the roots of the pollution if/when we do fieldwork in Almaty, to help our app be more impactful with the sustainable actions we choose to incorporate.
   2. Dissemination phase:
      1. Development in Venture grant from USAID under the Environment and Global Climate Change category. This is a good fit because the goal of our app is to make Almaty a more environmentally sustainable city and teach the citizens there how they can help the environment. The money from this source might be able to help us research better ways to combat pollution in Almaty specifically, help us implement more recycling institutions, and possibly help us find ways to quantify our progress in Almaty.
      2. If the app takes well in Almaty schools, and teachers see a value in using our app to teach sustainability, the schools themselves could possibly be a source of funding for us. If schools pay for the use of our app as a teaching tool in their curriculum, that could help fund us to sustain the app (to make sure it functions well and make updates) and make improvements and expand the app. 

 

3. Identify five specific partnerships that you need to forge to advance your project forward with the ultimate goal of positively impacting at least one million people. Describe exactly how that partnership might help you achieve scale and why that entity might be willing to work with you.

1. 1. Schools in Kazakhstan. This is possibly our most important partnership. In partnering with them our app will be used by their students to receive incentives on acts of sustainability they perform. When schools embed our app into their curriculum it will establish a much more interactive approach to teaching and exciting students about recycling and sustainability, leading to a greater impact on the greater picture of Almaty and Kazakhstan.
   2.  Students in Kazakhstan. Students are our ultimate target audience. With the students using our app on a daily basis to complete acts of sustainability, our venture will grow and a brand name will be established inside households. We will also have ambassadors among the students whom we will have as a medium between us and the school(s) to discuss feedback, usage, and logistical matters to do with the app.
   3. Teachers in Kazakhstan. Teachers will have a major role as they will be the ones giving the students their incentives for the sustainable acts. Teachers will also have to have a good understanding of how the app works to provide help for students when asked. The teachers will also provide key insights on the performance and perception of the app.
   4. WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature), World Resources Institute (emphasizes sustainable cities), The Nature Conservatory (again emphasizes healthy cities and preserving land and species). In partnering with these three environmental NGOs, we will make our app and our venture more credible. If we can get these NGOs to support us even just enough to allow us to use their logos in our app, we will be able to reach a lot more people. Kazakh schools may be more inclined to take our app and use it as a teaching tool in their schools. In addition, if these NGOs “tweet” about our app, or advertise about us in any way, that will also expand our outreach.
   5. Partner with local stores in Almaty. If we partner with them, we can ask them to provide a real voucher or prize to their store when the students achieve a certain goal in the app. In doing so, people will be more motivated to do more in the app, and they will also be more connected with their local community. We also may be able to educate the stores also and convince them to be more environmentally sustainable as well. 

1. Refine your Business Model Canvas:
   1. Include a visual canvas
   2. Extremely specific notes for each block
   3. Explain how exactly you will deliver an end-to-end solution

1. Ten practical lessons from the business (revenue) models of ventures we reviewed today (or others you research) as they relate to your venture.

1. There can be two levels to models. Barefoot doesn’t directly make a profit, they get the money to train people through grants and contracts. But once they train people, those people bring it back to their communities and are able to sell and make a sustainable profit there. In other words: value creating is self-sustaining.
2. It can take a long time to see revenue or to see your business finally get off the ground, Barefoot took 40 years.
3. Reel Gardening donates their product when a customer buys from them. That is a way that they are making revenue, but also maintaining their social enterprise aspect.
4. Greystone partnered with Ben & Jerry’s, which not only boosted their credibility and “popularity,” but also increased their revenue.
5. Practically all these enterprises gain their revenue through various aspects, not confined to one item/product. Barefoot, for example, have campuses that sustain themselves, campuses that bring profit, donations, and other minor sources of income.
6. In all of these social enterprises, while revenue is a major aspect, I feel like they focus more on their social impact than just getting the most money.
7. It is important to be flexible and change your business as the market changes to keep revenue flowing.
8. Appeal to emotion plays a significant role in attracting customers. Greystone are not innovating in their product (they’re just brownies), but their hiring policy plays a big role in attracting consumers that view discrimination against inmates as a problem.
9. Envirofit focused on producing a product that is very simple to use and distribute, leading a wider range of potential customers. This can be applied to our venture (smart cities) by ensuring that our app is easy to use among the children in schools.
10. Scale at the right pace to maximize impact. Envirofit invested in education programs before they launched their product and that led to the demand for clean stoves rising, thus before launch, they knew it was a success.

1. List five compelling take-aways from the Art of the Start.
   1. It is important to have a mantra for an enterprise rather than a mission statement. Mission statements are long and meaningless to workers. Mantras drive and motivate employees to work for a specific goal. 
   2. It is important to have a product that is unique but also valuable to customers. If it is unique but not valuable to customers, you are an “idiot”, if it is not unique and not valuable, you joined the “dotcom” issue, and if it isn’t unique but it is valuable, you are now only competing on “price.”
   3. Once your enterprise/product is out in the market, the market you thought would buy your product might not be, but another market is. That is OK! Do not try to fix it/advertise differently. Instead, work with this new market.
   4. Flattening the learning curve. Don’t ask people to do something you wouldn’t do. Make everything simple and intuitive and “embrace your evangelist.”
   5. Break the barriers. Gather feedback and make sure to act on it. Ask the correct people for feedback, “find the influencer.” Guy gave an example of talking to customer support to understand the environment and culture, likewise should be applied for the product/solution.

2. Articulate your value propositions for your diverse customer segments. 

• Help citizens of Almaty become more environmentally conscious and sustainable by creating an app that is informative and engaging to users.

3. Discuss your Total Available Market and Total Addressable Market. List all your assumptions and hypothesis.

• Available Market: All the citizens of Almaty (1.77million) with access to smart devices (particularly smartphones/tablets 
• Addressable Market: Elementary/middle school students and teachers (classes). Start with one school, and expand from there. Assuming it catches on well, expand to other schools and even possibly create a different version of the app for older citizens.  

1. Summarize and report out on the results of the SKS exercise. 

We all agreed that we wanted to start having better communication within our team. This includes more frequent check-ins over text to make sure we are all getting done what needs to be done. We also want to start having a meeting with just us (our group), in addition to the meeting with Khanjan, so that we can talk in person to check-in. By meeting, we can assign roles and start looking deeper and at different sectors of Smart Cities in our research. But most importantly, we want to start communicating with our partners in Kazakhstan over the Whatsapp that was created. We will start to get a better understanding of Almaty if we all respond effectively to their texts.

At this point in our project, we want to keep working on our mid-semester presentations, dividing work/delegating work well, learning what we can about Kazakhstan and current smart innovations, and keeping our contact with the KazNU students and continuing to ask them lots of questions. At this time, we especially want to focus on continuing to put in a lot of time into our Engineering for Change articles and our other publications to make them as good as possible. We can do this by helping our other team members by editing and offering suggestions.

What we need to stop doing is depending too much on Khanjan’s guidance, and just go for it instead. We believe we need to stop being told directly what to research and just start reading whatever we can to explore ideas and gain as much knowledge as we can about the topic. We also want to stray from completing things just to meet the deadline, but rather taking the time to do it completely and most effectively to better advance our project.

2. Develop a detailed Collaboration Plan for your team clearly articulating your Goals (Small g and Big G), Roles,Procedures, and Relationships.

Goals

• Project Goal: To create a smart innovation that can be efficiently used by most of the citizens in Almaty, that will make some aspect of their lives easier/better.

  • To measure the success of our project, we need to collect data on how many people use the innovation, and possibly do interviews to see how people think it has changed their lives.

• Personal Goal (Alli): To broaden my knowledge on smart innovations and gain a better understanding of the culture in Almaty and how we can use our skills to help make the city smarter.

• Personal Goal (Ugochi): To understand the in-depth process behind successful and impactful smart innovations, and leave the project with an ability to implement similar innovations in other cities.

Roles

• All of us are expected to have an Engineering for Change article published, along with another partner article published on another forum.

• Right now we are all researching innovations we think will work in Almaty, but once we decide what we are doing more specifically, then we can create subgroups.

• Right now, especially because our group is pretty small, we depend on each other in almost every aspect of our project, so we don’t have a project manager at the time.

Procedures

• For decision making, I think we should strive for consensus, but if we hit a specifically difficult topic, then it might have to be majority rules.

• Right now we have been doing a lot of communication online, and it seems like it is going to have to continue to be that way. However, as many zoom meetings, or “face-to-face” simulations we can have, the better.

• For meeting roles, it depends on the meeting, as our roles will shift. However, usually we all do a good job of each taking notes, and all keeping time in mind, and facilitating together.

• Our plan is to “meet” an additional time (aside from the one with Khanjan). As per what time works best for everyone, since we are all still getting home, we have to figure that out still (because we are in different time zones).

Relationships

• Everyone on our team has different strengths that play well into making us work effectively. We have various majors and disciplines across our team, including computer science, engineering, and international relations. This allows us to use each other’s strengths to solve any issues we may come across. We also all have different cultural backgrounds which helps us look at everything with different perspectives.

• Our team name is Smart Cities in Almaty.

 

3. Plan if we cannot do fieldwork in Kazakhstan this summer.

If we are unable to do fieldwork in Kazakhstan this summer, we will just continue to reach out to our partners in Kazakhstan more. We will have to depend on their knowledge and research of what the culture is in Almaty. If we planned to interview citizens of Almaty on how they believe they would respond to our (potential) innovation, we will just have to depend on our partners at KazNU to do that and report back to us. Of course we will be helping them the whole way too, but they will have to do the physical ground work. 

If we are unable to go this summer, we may have to have a physical prototype of the innovation we are planning for the next opportunity we get to go to Kazakhstan. In other words, we will have to be a lot farther along in the process the next time we get to go, and hope that we don’t have to go completely back to square one (that our innovation doesn’t completely fail).

 

Does your work require IRB approvals? If Yes, articulate your detailed IRB strategy. If No, explain why you don’t need IRB approval and identify situations when you might need IRB approval.

We do not believe that we will need IRB approval because we do not have the intent to use human subjects in our research. Our goal is to create a smart innovation for the city of Almaty that will enhance citizen’s lives, that could potentially be used in other cities after that. Our work therefore qualifies as research according to the IRB because we will be collecting data, and hopefully adding to generalizable knowledge by publishing our work and making presentations. However, we do not intend to manipulate people in any way or use people to gather specific data in a type of experiment. Because our plan, as of now, is to focus on something along the lines of the environment, infrastructure, heating, or transportation, the data we will be looking at is mostly on how machines or products or the system works. Not so much on people. 

We will, however, be talking to people in Kazakhstan, and citizens of Almaty. If we changed our project idea, and needed to start collecting private information from the citizens of Almaty, then we would need an IRB approval. In addition, if we decided we needed to see how people in Almaty acted differently with our innovation, and needed to collect data on their new behaviors, then we might need IRB approval because we would be using human subjects.

Develop an outline for your mid-semester presentations. What supporting evidence will you provide for each point? How will you boost your credibility every step of the way?

For our mid-semester presentations, we will start by explaining that Kazakhstan is a very resource rich country and is very developed. Their cities have been growing significantly over the years. In order to make the cities the most efficient they can be, smart city innovations should be developed to help fix infrastructural, environmental, or overcrowding issues. Coming up with a smart innovation that will effectively work in Almaty, will help make the city more efficient and hopefully be able to expand to other cities in Kazakhstan, or even around the world. Our goal is to develop a device that improves life in Almaty but can generally be applied to other cities around the world that are experiencing this surge of growth. The smart innovation will also be able to improve each citizen’s lives too. The magnitude of which will not be able to be determined until we decide on the exact innovation that will work. 

We will then explain all the research we have done on smart, digital, urban, and in use innovations on parking, pollution, short term travelers, and quality of life. We will describe, with specifics, how certain innovations have been successful in other countries, and how we see that something similar might work in Almaty. If we have been able to get our article published on Engineering for Change by this time, then we will make sure to mention that in our presentation at this point. The importance of the Engineering for Change article is to establish a brand for our project. We want to educate people about the significant roles that small but impactful smart innovations can have on developing cities and countries. 

We will continue by explaining that our project is new, so our goal as of now is to work with our partners in KazNU and AlmaU (name drop), the two major universities in Kazakhstan to figure out potential issues in Almaty that can be improved. We will work with them via Skype calls, and email/texts, to build our relationship and understanding of the city. The use of partners currently in Almaty brings credibility that our project is focussing on social and cultural integration as well as acceptance. At the end of the day our product could be great but it needs to be accepted by Almaty residents to ensure success. 

Once we understand the issues, we will begin to brainstorm solutions and potential innovations that could work. Then over the summer, when we travel to Almaty, we will use that time to prototype our products and continue to search for effective solutions. In the end our presentation will show the process in which we took to determine the reason why we want to introduce a product, what potential benefits would this product have, how will this product improve life in Almaty, and how can we use this same approach to apply our success to another developing city not only in Kazakhstan but around the world.

 

1. List ten things that make you feel human.

There are many things that make me feel human in life. Some of them include:

1. When I witness someone struggling and I feel compassion towards them
2. When I do something that helps another person (improves their day or betters their life)
3. I feel human when I am with my family and friends
4. When I am struggling with something (personal or work) and I need to ask someone else for help
5. I feel human when I make mistakes 
6. I feel human when I am running
7. I feel human when I travel to different parts of the country, or an entirely different country and see how life can be so different
8. When I am sick or injured
9. When I am working really hard on a project or assignment
10. When I am listening to music and it brings people together (unites them)

 

2. Articulate your philosophy of engagement as it pertains to your work with the GSIF / LVSIF.

I believe it is everyone’s duty to do what they can to better the lives of others around them. There will always be someone worse off than you, and there is always something you can do to help them. For our Smart Cities project in Kazakhstan, we have the technology and materials to create a useful smart innovation that can improve the lives of the citizens in Almaty. I believe that I should engage because I know I have the creativity in me to help my team, along with working with the students at KazNU, come up with an effective innovation that can better the city. I believe I should engage just like that; I should add my ideas and thoughts to the ideas and thoughts of my other team members. More importantly, we must work with the students in KazNU and the citizens of Almaty to make sure we are designing something that they see as effective and helpful as well. It is imperative to first hear from them, what their opinion is, and what they see as an issue that needs to be fixed. The innovation we end up creating will only be effective if it solves an issue that they think needs to be addressed. 

Because of this, it is important to take culture into account when creating our product. An innovation that we have researched that has worked in another country or in a different region, might not work properly in Almaty, because of climate, population, etc. It will be important for us to observe the city and the lifestyle in Almaty when we travel over the summer. We must make it our priority to fully understand what life is like in Almaty before we can begin to brainstorm how to “fix” it.

We must be patient with our project. Being a new team and entirely new project, we are starting from scratch. It will take a while to build up our relationship with the students in KazNU and the people of Almaty. It may take us longer than we expect to begin to develop and prototype innovations. We must remind ourselves that change takes time, but being patient and doing it the right way will create a sustainable change.

I hope that someday my epitaph might read “Left the world better than she found it.” I know that is a HUGE statement, but if I could just make the community around me a little better, or affect the people’s lives I am in touch with and make their lives a little bit better, that would be a major accomplishment for me.