About the Project
Date:
April 2009 - May 2012
Location:
Buenos Aires, Argentina + Lima, Peru
Team:
Robert Benedict
Jon Camfield
Chris Heald
Eduardo Marisca
Rares Pamfil
Leland Smith
Changemakers is an online platform for sourcing and supporting social innovation, launched in 2006 by Ashoka, a global network of high-impact social entrepreneurs. While I was part of the Changemakers team, their model was focused on running online innovation competitions, where people from around the world could pitch their ideas around social challenges and gain access to funding, connections and exposure to media and partners.
Working as Site Admin and Community Liaison with the technology team at Changemakers, I worked on creating and managing site content and designing new platform features for the Latin American team, working out of Lima, Peru and then moving to the Changemakers hub in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This gave me the opportunity to connect and engage to social innovators in various areas across Latin America, identifying common needs and trying to design products and features that could help them increase and accelerate their impact.
As liaison to the Latin American team, I was also responsible for keeping our user experience consistent and high-quality across non-English languages — at the time, Spanish, Portuguese, and French — while also feeding back the needs from our Latin American community to our development pipeline. It was a great opportunity to learn a lot about software localisation and cross-cultural design, as well as understanding a lot more about UX and product design and development.
