Dear friends,
As you may have already noticed via our social media channels, MI4People had been nominated for this year's Digital Social Award in the category "Innovation & Future". And, last 31ts of August, we actually won the 3rd place – a very great achievement for an NPO that has been existence for less than a year!!!
Therefore, we would like to thank all our volunteers, donors, and supporters! Without you, your support and commitment, MI4People would not exist!
We want to share this happy moment with you and tell you a little more about the Digital Social Award in this newsletter.
Under the motto "Shaping the positive future with digitization", the Digital Social Award puts the social potential of digitization in the spotlight. The focus is on ideas and projects with social added value that strengthen inclusion and diversity, promote disadvantaged groups, improve and simplify everyday life.
From over 100+ multifaceted submissions, the jury of the Digital Social Award selected the twelve exciting projects in four categories this year and we are incredibly happy to be on the list!
With the Digital Social Award, the initiators Siemens, Orange Business Services, Capgemini, and AfB Group are making visible smart ideas that use digital tools to bring people together , enable participation, impart knowledge and create commitment. The Stiftung Bürgermut supports this initiative as a coordinator and the German Foundation for Engagement and Volunteering, WHU Center for Non-Profit Management and Digital Social Impact and ZiviZ in the Stifterverband as patrons.
On 31.08.2022 an official award ceremony took place at the Siemens Mosaic Hall in Berlin which was also broadcasted in a livestream. We got to meet many interesting people and learn about their projects and organizations who are trying to make the world a better place with the help of digital technologies. We found these people very inspiring and would like to share their ideas and projects with you. Therefore, this newsletter focuses on the winners of Digital Social Award! We will present you the top 3 projects from four categories: "Education and Culture", "Sport and Health", "Inclusion and the Work Environment" and "Innovation & Future".
Enjoy reading about these wonderful initiatives! We hope that one or more of them can inspire you as well!
Your MI4People-Team
Category Education and Culture
1st Place: Technovation Girls Germany
In the Technovation Girls Germany program of the Deutsche Kinder- und Jugendstiftung GmbH, schoolgirls from 10 to 18 years of age develop apps as solutions to social or ecological problems. Not only the digital skills such as coding and app design are promoted by this program, strengthening of entrepreneurial skills is also on the agenda with activities on entrepreneurship and idea pitching. The girls follow learning materials on an online platform that guides them step by step from the idea to the finished app.
2nd Place: Hacker School
The Hacker School is a non-profit organization from Hamburg that offers programming courses for children and young people throughout Germany and inspires them for IT. With the Hacker School’s @yourschool project, the team, together with committed trainees and students, conducts basic courses in programming languages at schools, modernizes the curriculum and brings the skills necessary for the 21st century closer to young people from the 5th to the 10th grade.
3rd Place: Virtual Makerspace
Silicon Vilstal's Virtual Makerspace is a digital STEM (Science, Technology, Enginnering, and Math) education platform. In their workshops, children can create creative designs and products. These products can then be physically produced via data interfaces with the already existing machines in various regional companies. With this innovative approach, a broad network of supporting companies is used. In this way, regional STEM offers can be built up with little investment, especially in structurally weak regions. The nationwide scaling process is on-going.
Category Sport and Health
1st Place: Inclusive Digital Sports Festival
At the inclusive digital sports festival, people with and without disabilities get moving together. The positive experience also provides playful training in dealing with digital media. The approximately 3-hour program is advertised in easy-to-understand language. With sign language and text interpretations, the program is just as accessible for standing and sitting people through simple sports exercises from various sports. The inclusive sports festival was founded by the sports pilot Linda Bull.
2nd Place: Look Good Feel better: Online cosmetic seminars for cancer patients
In this project of DKMS LIFE gGmbH , cancer patients can participate in digital cosmetic seminars. Every year, around 230,000 girls and women are newly diagnosed with cancer. In addition to the worries that the disease itself brings, consequences such as hair loss, loss of eyelashes or eyebrows or strong skin irritations lead to declining self-esteem. In the seminars, patients receive tips on how to deal with these phenomena cosmetically. The digital offer now takes place several times a day.
3rd Place: Libati
With Libati, chronically ill people can discover new places more freely and independently. In the community-based platform, places can be shared that, e.g., reliably label ingredients, are animal-hair-free, offer gluten-free dishes or are barrier-free to use. With a search filter that responds to all personal needs, you can display suitable places in your surroundings that are labeled by the traffic light ranking system and rate them, comment on them and make them clearer with photos.
Category Inclusion and The World of Work
1st Place: Azubi Digital Academy
The Azubi Digital Akademieis a peer-to-peer learning platform that aims to promote (future) trainees in the field of digital skills - especially those who are socially disadvantaged. They can choose between digital training support or a four-week IT boot camp, in which the topics of New Work, Gamification and New Learning play a central role. In this way, the academy improves the entry and development opportunities of young people, especially in the IT sector.
2nd Place: KulturLeben Berlin
The association is committed to ensuring that people with low incomes or disabilities can also participate in cultural life. In the new project from KulturLeben Berlin - Schlüssel zur Kultur e.V. the focus is on hearing impaired and deaf people who are interested in culture. To this end, already member deaf and hearing-impaired volunteers/mediators are searching and motivating new deaf and hearing-impaired to participate in cultural life. With the relocation of mediation programs to video conferences, completely new target groups can be reached here.
3rd Place: Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik
With the Lunes app, Tür an Tür - Digitalfabrik gGmbH has developed a program that supports the learning of job-related vocabulary. The app is aimed at people with German as a second language and trains core vocabulary in currently 30 professional fields. With illustrated specialist vocabulary and a read-aloud function, this program simplifies participation in the world of work for immigrants, helps ensure equal opportunities, and supports integration processes in companies.
Category Innovation and Future
1st Place: FragLovis
FragLovis | LOVIS gGmbH is in the process of digitizing sex education for young people and creating a safe space for them online around topics like sexual issues and professional sexual knowledge. Young people are provided with the AI-supported chatbot "Lovis" (website and app), as well as a knowledge platform for clarifying sexual issues. This enables a professional, location-independent real-time answers to questions related to sex education and ensures anonymity of young users.
2nd Place: WirHelfen.eu
WirHelfen.eu is a central online platform for free assistance in times of crisis and beyond. Using a matching principle, people seeking and offering help are digitally brought together locally in the neighborhood or throughout Germany. The platform offers acute help, e.g., in the corona time, flood or the ongoing Ukraine crisis. Typical requests for help revolve around clean-up work, transportation or purchases and are presented on an interactive map nationwide.
3rd Place: MI4People
And of course, we – the MI4People 😊 We are a non-profit organization that aims to strengthen the Public Good ideas and initiatives with Machine Intelligence (MI). In our approach, real problems are solved in a data-driven manner with the help of modern technologies and algorithms such as data science, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning, robotic process mining (RPA) and process mining. With volunteer MI experts from industry, students and other non-profit organizations, we research and develop open-source applications for the Public Good.
Closing remarks
As the Digital Social Award has shown, there are many interesting initiatives in Germany alone that use modern digital technologies to make the world a better place. And these are not just the 12 winners, but over 100 projects that had applied for the Digital Social Award. We hope that these examples will inspire you to want to improve the world with technology.
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