Techies in Residence: Bootcamp at CultureTECH and Ten Weeks with AWARE

Notes from the Techies in Residence bootcamp in Derry, and the brief for ten weeks embedded with Northern Ireland’s depression charity.

Published on September 22, 2015

Last Wednesday I was in Derry for the Techies in Residence bootcamp at CultureTECH, and I’ve been meaning to write this since I got off the train.

What Techies in Residence is

Techies in Residence is a new programme from the Building Change Trust, managed by CultureTECH. The idea is simple and, as far as I know, new to Northern Ireland: take a small tech company and embed it inside a voluntary or community organisation for ten weeks, full time, to build something the organisation actually needs. Not a website brief handed over a desk. A residency.

Techies in Residence website homepage in autumn 2015, showing the Lottery Funded and Building Change Trust logos — The programme’s home on the web, techinres.com.

Around forty organisations applied over the summer. Six projects were chosen in July, and each has now been paired with a techie. The other pairs are Colin Glen Trust with StoryFX, NICVA with Kainos, NOW Group with Creative Metrics, TAMHI with GetInvited, and Place and DTNI with Kevin Curran from Ulster University. Good company.

Building Change Trust blog post from 30 July 2015 announcing the six Techies in Residence projects, including Aware Defeat Depression — The Building Change Trust’s announcement of the six projects, 30 July.

Invisible Building has been paired with AWARE (Aware Defeat Depression), Northern Ireland’s depression charity.

Why I applied

Honestly, because it was run by CultureTECH. I lived in Derry for a few years and watched the festival grow from a good idea into the biggest digital festival in Northern Ireland. When I saw they were behind this, I trusted it would be done properly.

The other reason is that I’ve been trading as Invisible Building since not long after I graduated from Ulster University in 2011, doing web design, design thinking and branding for businesses and creative projects, and I wanted to point that at something that mattered. AWARE was top of my list when the projects were announced.

The bootcamp

The day was a mix of talks and workshops. David Bull from NPC on what charities actually need from technology (less than you think, and different from what they ask for). Freddie Norton from Apps for Good on building things with young people rather than for them, which is going to be very relevant to us. Cat Cochrane from Tech for Good TV on the projects across Britain and Ireland that have got this right.

Building Change Trust write-up of the Techies in Residence bootcamp at CultureTECH in Derry, 22 September 2015 — The Building Change Trust’s write-up of the bootcamp.

The best part, for me, was the design-thinking day. Getting the whole cohort, techies and charities together, to work through a problem with sticky notes and sketches rather than laptops set the tone for how the residencies should run. I came away with more ideas for AWARE than I can possibly build in ten weeks, which is exactly the right problem to have in week one.

The brief, as I understand it so far

AWARE run a programme in schools called Mood Matters. A facilitator spends an hour and a half with a class of 14–18 year olds: what depression and anxiety look like, how thoughts, feelings and behaviour feed each other, and Take 5, the five steps to wellbeing. It has been running since 2000 and it works.

AWARE’s Mood Matters for Young People programme page in 2015, a mental health programme for 14 to 18 year olds — Mood Matters for Young People, as AWARE describe it on their own site.

The question is what happens afterwards. The session ends, the workbook goes in a bag, and the young person goes back to their life. Is there something that could live on their phone that keeps the programme going? That is what we’re going to spend the next ten weeks finding out.

I’ll write more as it goes. If you work with young people and mental health, or you’ve built something in this space, I would genuinely like to hear from you.