- As the software developer, in New York, I haven't really
had as much interaction with the stakeholders
as I would have liked to.
And you're in a governmental organization.
You know, a lot happens when you get to meet
the stakeholders for the first time and get an impression
of who they are, and what their knowledge is, and how easily
they look at something that I've done and understand
what it can do.
(upbeat music)
- Well, the team is here in Bogotá, Colombia, to meet
with UNICEF Bogotá stakeholders, as well as members
of the Colombian government, to understand more about
their data usage and needs surrounding children, poverty,
socioeconomic data, and risk factors.
- We have recurrent meetings with our main stakeholders,
but it's never the same thing through phone,
and that really being physically there.
And then we are also trying to understand what could
be the next steps.
There is a lot of interest on using data, and sharing data,
and combining it, so I think that it can be
a really useful platform.
- The first or biggest challenge, it's been
the technology piece itself, because we decided to try
to bring together developers and other scientists
and use Jupyter Notebooks to do that.
This is a new technology for many people.
- We all had to learn new tooling.
The data scientists did not, they had an advantage, but Mike
had to and so did I, frankly, around Jupyter Notebooks.
Mike also, now that I'm showing him what OpenShift
is capable of, he's super excited.
He basically says no, no, no, I need to know this.
- That's been very cool, getting up to speed on
Jupyter Notebooks, on OpenShift, on OpenStack,
although I've only really been using the OpenShift part.
The OpenStack is, I guess, kind of abstracted out of it.
We've also produced some material, some stuff that we could
show to the stakeholders in Colombia.
- It's always awkward when you are, sort of, trying to merge
two entities or two teams.
I think now, we know each other much better, you know them
sort of on a personal level, so I think even
communication-wise, we're starting to trust each other
and communicate better.
- My question is, if you could walk me through this,
through the parts that should be in-
should be a function of this platform.
- So right there, we have had lots of people
reaching out to us.
They want to work with us.
So the first step is actually talk with them.
I can meet them face to face, or over Skype, or a call.
So next thing is, we have to give them access to the sandbox.
- So what does that mean?
- It's just a Jupyter notebook server, which you can run
on Azure or AWS.
- So you want to give people access to data,
and you also want to give people access
to computer resources.
- Yes.
- Both, so not just the data?
- Yes, so they should be able to run and build models.
We're slowly moving from two separate teams into one entity.
- Part of it was just getting more confidence
in the Red Hat team, which sounds silly that I would doubt them,
but again, I didn't know who they were.
I didn't know what their backgrounds were, or what
their area of expertise was.
And who was a coder and who wasn't.
When I was talking to Matyas, who is the app architect,
I said, well, do you code?
And he kind of sighed, and he said
I have a masters in mathematics,
I have a masters in computer science,
and I've got this certification, this certification,
and this certification, and I'm thinking, oh, okay,
(laughing)
he's fine.
- Well, last week, Mike and I are sitting down.
We're running into a hurdle because one
of the open source tools that we're using does not provide
the feature that we want.
And I'm saying, look, this is not a problem,
this is really an opportunity.
I'm drawing a process diagram for him,
saying look, we were going to get here two weeks from now,
but we have this issue that we really want to solve before
we show this data, and he gets really excited,
(laughs)
which was awesome.
(street traffic)
- So we just met the stakeholders of the projects,
or the guys who will, sort of, take over once
this project is finished.
They will, sort of, take it over and implement it
in the country or just use this tool.
They're seeing this tool and then have new ideas.
How do we implement this?
Can we maybe add something else?
What about adding a new layer?
How do you actually add this layer?
That's a really good question.
And they're sort of where
the research community comes into play.
- We have initially two separate targets.
One is try to connect the school mapping work
and the other one, it's more the research sandbox.
And little by little, when you talk to the different
stakeholders, we are realizing that what we are doing,
it's more powerful if we put everything together
and try to merge both of the initiatives,
the school mapping and the Sandbox.
- My impression so far is that we have succeeded at least
with the country office.
The next few weeks we'll switch up, and that will
be much more about, okay, let's get a good workflow
and such in place, which wasn't my priority initially
for these two weeks.
(guitar music)
- So now that we're going back to New York, things we
have to, sort of, work mostly on is
How do we secure the Sandbox?
How do we, sort of, make sure that the data isn't leaked,
or it's secure, or nobody misuses it?
And also the thing is, how do we actually do the engagement?
How do we actually contact these researchers and tell them
there's a Sandbox they should use?
- I think the fact that we're working for something that
has got the opportunity to do so much good in the world,
and we've been very specific around doing work for Colombia,
but I think once we start looking at maps and we start
zooming out off of Colombia, you can see how the kind of work
we're doing can have a long-term impact on many countries
across the world.
(upbeat music)