Participants are arriving from all over to spend the next three days talking about innovations in using mobiles for data collection for social action. Members of the UNICEF Iraq and Innovation teams (who’ve sponsored the gathering) are working with representatives of the agency’s five Iraqi ministerial government counterparts to explore how mobile data collection can help better protect children’s rights in Iraq. The UNICEF team also includes two graduate students from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University in New York. The students will participate as part of a capstone (consulting) project with UNICEF to determine how these technologies, the data they generate, and resulting analyses can be used for advocacy and to inform policymaking.

Follow all the activities over the next three days on http://bit.ly/oss-mobdata. Tomorrow around noon Amman time (+2GMT) several of the participants will present IGNITE talks about their areas of expertise and investigation. If you can’t make it then, they’ll be archived later on Mobile Active’s YouTube channel.