Coaching Program

Open Seventeen Spring 2019

Open Seventeen is a prize-backed challenge to reward and invest in those developing innovative and implementable projects that leverage OPEN DATA and CROWDSOURCING to tackle the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This challenge targets “SDG #4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all”. This edition of O17 is inspired by the Geneva Trialogue, organized by University of Geneva, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and XuetangX, China’s leading MOOC platform.

Application Deadline

starts the week of

March 30, 2018

Course Ends on

April 26, 2018

Course Description

The coaching program is designed to help you take a project from idea to implementation and to scale. It is a hands-on, learning and mentoring program to help you design and implement solutions to a public interest problem using civic technology. At the ends of the program you should have a:

Clear understanding of the problem you are trying to solve and its underlying causes; Compelling theory of change and a solution narrowly tailored to fit the problem; Strategy to engage with people and data; Prototype of your solution and the roadmap to user-test it; Clear and persuading pitch of your project.

Course Format

5 2-hour long online sessions and offline one-on-one coaching sessions with each team

Faculty Members

Francois Grey

Francois Grey is a physicist by training, with a background in nanotechnology and a passion for citizen science. Since September 2014, he is Invited Professor at the University of Geneva and Manager of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre, a partnership between CERN, the United Nations Institute of Training and Research and...

Dinorah Cantú-Pedraza

Dinorah Cantu coordinates the GovLab Academy, an online institute aimed at helping government and social innovators take innovative projects from idea to implementation. Under her direction, the Academy has worked with over five hundred innovators from more than 30 countries online and off over the last two years.

Anirudh Dinesh

Anirudh Dinesh conducts research on governance innovation. He is a member of the team designing and piloting experiments for new models of public engagement, what the GovLab calls people-led innovation, to improve the legitimacy and effectiveness of policy making and solve urgent problems.

Rosy Mondardini

Ms Rosy Mondardini, managing director of the ETH/UZH Citizen Science Center, focused her intervention on the data generated by citizens and how this kind of data can play a role for the SDGs. She explained that citizen science describes the collaboration between citizens and scientists on scientific research.

Andrew Moss

Andrew Moss is a seasoned technology executive/entrepreneur who has spent his career innovating, launching and managing a range of technology-based businesses. In 2014, he joined the NYU Entrepreneurial Institute as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence to advise and mentor aspiring entrepreneurs from within the NYU ecosystem. In 2015 he was named Director Blackstone LaunchPad at NYU to implement and manage the initiative.