IEEE HAC Education Workshop and SIGHT Campaign was held in IEMIS 2018 at University of E&M, Kolkata, India on 25th February with 54 participants. For achieving desired outcome from a humanitarian project or even for designing a quality humanitarian project, several critical factors need to be considered. In case of many humanitarian projects, desired outcome is not achieved or even they get interrupted or totally shut down at a premature stage due to lack of apposite education, proper planning, appropriate knowledge and useful skills. Apart from technical and financial issues, in order to design and successfully implement a project related to humanitarian technology and sustainable development, several other challenges need to be addressed, such as, local demand, current practice in the community, acceptability by the local community, sustainability, scope of scaling, local involvement, capacity building, belongingness to the local community, mode of implementation, resource management, existing initiatives from other sources, social aspects, ethical issues, political influence, environmental effect and many more.
Keeping these factors in mind, IEEE HAC Education Workshop on designing projects related to humanitarian technology and sustainable development along with IEEE SIGHT Campaign was held in International Conference on Emerging Technologies in Data Mining and Information Security (IEMIS 2018) at University of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, India on 25th February during 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm. Total number of participants was 54. IEEE HAC Education Chair Dr. Shaikh Fattah served as a trainer of the workshop and Dr. Celia Shahnaz, Communication Chair of IEEE SIGHT Steering Committee conducted the IEEE SIGHT campaign.
Dr. Fattah introduced the objective and functions of IEEE HAC and presented the fundamentals of humanitarian technology and UN Sustainable Development Goals. He explained the major challenges involved in designing quality humanitarian projects and presented the funding opportunities available in IEEE HAC for projects and events.
Dr. Celia introduced IEEE SIGHT and explained in detail SIGHT activities all over the world. She elaborated the advantages of building new SIGHT groups and rules of forming a SIGHT group. Some recent SIGHT funded projects were demonstrated to encourage young participants. The SIGHT project funding deadlines are publicized. All are encouraged to visit IEEE SIGHT toolkit, IEEE SIGHT website and newsletter archive. Everybody were made aware about the IEEE SIGHT Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter.
After the event: participants, trainer Dr. Shaikh Fattah and speaker Dr. Celia Shahnaz
Finally an interactive project design session was conducted by dividing the participants in various groups and discussing with each group about their humanitarian projects.
The event was found very effective as at the end, each group came up with very potential humanitarian project proposals. Since the humanitarian projects mostly deal with local needs, by conducting such an event in various locality it is possible to concentrate on community specific topics and get feedback from the participants. IEEE HAC has taken initiatives to continue organizing such events at a regular basis in various locations and interested volunteers may contact fatta92@gmail.com.
Dr. Shaikh Fattah
Education Chair, 2018 IEEE Humanitarian Activity Committee