Half the team have spent this week in Jordan to launch the “National Campaign for Public Awareness on the Drivers of Change”. The patron of the campaign is His Majesty King Abdullah II and our client is HRH Princess Sumaya bint El Hassan, President of EHSC.

Royal Scientific Society’s Science Week was themed around “change”

We are advising El Hassan Science City (EHSC) on the design and implementation of the campaign which is going to be delivered by an all Jordanian team. This has been very interesting for us on many levels (the politics, the protocols, the language…) but has also meant that we are developing a process to support the running of Drivers of Change workshops by others. The plan is to run 50-100 workshops with local communities across all levels of Jordanian society from Amman to remote villages in the regions. The objective of this first phase of the campaign is to understand what is driving change in Jordan, what the implications are, and what the government and local communities can do about it – to build a sustainable, positive future for the country.

FB choreographing workshop through translator booth.

As part of the official launch of the campaign we hosted a series of workshops during the Royal Scientific Society’s Science Week to engage key stakeholders, train the campaign team, and trial design elements of the workshops before taking them out into the various communities of Jordan. The four workshops were attended by community partners, ministers, academics and and members of the Royal Scientific Society. Next step will be to deliver the mechanisms for collecting all the data generated in the community engagements, process it, and make it available to the participants and the people of Jordan. There are some really interesting opportunities here for an “open data” project.

Delegates using iPad during coffee breaks.

We also had a really interesting iPad application at the conference to solicit feedback from delegates on what they thought was driving change. The app used the eight sets of DoC cards. We collected over 400 responses with the themes of Water, Energy and Poverty emerging as the primary categories. Next up we will be delving into the data further to identify the specific issues which came out on top.

Screen shots of the iPad application.

The iPad certainly attracted some attention and helped in getting people to play with the voting application but the Jordanian students who were doing the polling did a fantastic job asking delegates for their input. The iPads also ended up on the stage during the opening ceremony with two students presenting HRH with a screen with a “large red button” to start a countdown clock to mark the start of the project.

The launch of the campaign – the countdown clock starts.

More photos on flickr

Press coverage – ‘The 18-month campaign launched yesterday entails holding workshops for citizens from all sectors across the Kingdom including universities, business, banking, civil society, academia, the Jordan Armed Forces, ministries and public agencies among others. “The campaign seeks to increase the involvement of citizens in the decision-making process and start a nationwide debate on issues of top priority to the Kingdom,” Bashir said.’