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Profile: Miro in Slovakia

Technology for Change Slovakia: eRider Miroslav Olah

Miro Olah
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ICQ: 151123386

"The most important thing I've learned during my work with the Roma Information Project (RIP)," says Slovak eRider Miroslav Olah (Miro), "is when not to laugh." One of the first times he conducted a computer training session, a member of the NGO's staff held the mouse up to the computer screen and fingered the buttons as if it were the remote control to a television.

By Aspen Brinton

"It was a bit of surprise at first," remembers Miro, who joined the RIP team in late 2002, having recently graduated from college with a degree in engineering. "I had no idea that the organizations would be at this level with technology, and I had to quickly change tactics." He spent the whole morning teaching mouse-ing skills to the group. Like many of his eRider colleagues, Miro describes these incidents with a sense of bemusement. Yet it is also clear that he has discovered that one of the most essential parts of the job is to make his "students" at Roma NGOs-most of whom are much older than he-more comfortable with technology. This definitely includes learning when not to laugh, and offering encouragement that everyone begins their experience with computers in a similar way.

Too much technology when starting to work with NGOs is not always a good thing-as many of the eRiders have discovered. Miro is the most computer-savvy member of the RIP team, and his mind circles in that sometimes- incomprehensible realm of techie-talk. He has quickly learned, however, that technical knowledge did not instantly make him an effective eRider, and he had to become a better teacher as well as a technician.

The eRiders have learned these sorts of lessons from each other as much as from their individual experiences working with Roma NGOs. Miro has always been the center of technical expertise within the group. When the other eRiders encounter moments of technology befuddlement, they contact him. One colleague worked with him to set up a discussion list for an NGO network in Romania. His Czech colleague turned to him to help her assess the complicated technology needs of a Roma Internet radio station. His Macedonian counterpart sought him out in the face of database confusion.

But Miro has had to rely on his colleagues for tips and advice about the other side of the job - NGO management, political campaign development, and effective training. He has had to learn the psychology of strong-willed NGO directors who do not want to look foolish in the face of technology - a skill for which engineering school gave little preparation.

Slovakia's Roma: Overcoming Hurdles

Miro is working in a context where the so-called "Roma problem" has been labeled as more acute than in many other countries. The number of Roma in Slovakia is also higher than in most: an estimated 500,000 Roma throughout the country, 10 percent of the total population. Roma communities, concentrated in central and eastern Slovakia, face challenges that are not unfamiliar in the region: segregated schools, routine discrimination, and rampant poverty.

Unlike a number of countries that have endeavored to improve some of their practices toward Roma, Slovakia lags behind in many areas. The sterilization of Roma women in state hospitals remains regular practice, and the government has sought to obscure these and other incidents by systematically hiding information about the conditions in Roma communities. As a result, Slovakia's human rights record has been condemned in several international arenas. The human rights report of the US State Department is quite critical of Slovakia, and in the negotiations for NATO admission in November 2002, the country was badly embarrassed when its practices towards its minority populations - especially Roma - were condemned in an open session of the plenary.

Read Miro's article for the Tech Soup web portal about one such experience.

This high-level publicity is no accident, however, as Slovakia's Roma activists are some of the most organized and vociferous in the region - mostly out of necessity. There are approximately 200 Roma NGOs campaigning on various levels. Edward Muller is one of the leaders of this movement, and uses Miro's services. As an activist, Muller has had success in persuading international organizations and foreign governments to put pressure on intransigent Slovak officials. He led the formation of a coalition of Slovak Roma NGOs that channeled information about violations against Roma to those involved in the NATO negotiations, for example. The resulting media blitz cornered the Slovak government, forcing it to make promises and concessions about Roma policy in order to not endanger their NATO candidacy.

Muller has solicited Miro's aid to create a secure database of the information his, and other Roma NGOs, have collected on human rights violations, in the hope of replicating these successes. He likes the idea of tapping into RIP's technology services to help organize and guard the data essential to his campaigns, and he is passionate about leveraging strong NGO coalitions for political change. "Its really just not about the computers," he insists, "but about using politics to make opportunities for children who will otherwise live destitute lives." He still wants The Advocacy Project and Miro to help him find computer donations for Roma organizations, however, and knows the practical limits of his work without the proper technical tools and the sort of training RIP eRiders can provide for NGOs.

Coming together with technology:
Ivan and Erika both work with NGOs supported by Miro and the Roma Information Project.

Miro is still learning how to navigate this sort of skepticism about technology's ability to change social conditions and his own belief in its powers. The sense of deep frustration felt by Muller and others about the conditions of Roma is what drives the political mobilization of Roma in Slovakia, not technology. But a technical tool put in the right hands at the right moment can make a tremendous difference in the progress of a political campaign. This strategic use of technology has to be done carefully, and as a multinational team, the RIP eRiders are developing a model of best practices in the pursuit of their ultimate goal of furthering local, regional, and international Roma movements. None of them alone has the full spectrum of ingredients, but working together they are starting to come much closer to finding an effective recipe for success.

Roma NGOs in Slovakia: Mobilizing Community

Miro is now working with seven different Roma NGOs throughout Slovakia. Each NGO has challenged Miro to translate his technical skills into projects that can help NGOs become stronger and more effective organizations. He's discovered that methods must differ a bit in each case, but that Roma NGOs in Slovakia face many common problems. They have difficulty communicating with each other, securing funds, mobilizing Roma communities to take joint action, and making their case to the wider population. In various ways Miro has begun to address these challenges using technology as a conduit for learning. His successes have begun to add up, as have his own lessons learned. Three of the NGOs with which Miro works are profiled below.

Connecting Roma to Roma: Projekt Schola

"I want to be professional and get the work done, which requires partnerships with other Roma organizations," describes Sylvia Rigova, the director of Projekt Schola, a Roma NGO based in Kosice, Slovakia. "It's sad, however," she continues, "that many Roma NGOs don't talk to each other - because of competition between them for the same funds, personality conflicts, and a lack of incentives for cooperation on joint projects." This, argues Rigova, perpetuates stereotypes that Roma are disorganized, can't work together, and don't have clear political goals.

As a RIP eRider, Miro wants to change this. He has been working with Projekt Scola for a little over a month now, helping them create a secure computer database to store information on the segregation of Roma children in Slovak schools. Projekt Schola collects data about the treatment of Roma schoolchildren and conducts teacher trainings to educate teachers about the challenges Roma children face. As a testament to their success, their model of teacher training has recently been adopted by the Slovak Ministry of Education. Projekt Schola will continue to work alongside the government to expand such programs, but it also wants to make its lobbying more effective.

This, Rigova argues, requires the right kind of information and cooperation between NGOs. She sees the greatest potential gain from working with RIP as the access to more information through partnerships with other organizations. Miro's presence in the office can help foster these opportunities, and he is determined to help Projekt Schola expand its contacts. "My immediate goal for them is to help them work with the Roma Press Agency, an organization across the street which could help them channel their information to the national and international press," Miro says. "But I also want to put them in contact with Guyla (his eRider colleague in Hungary), who has been working on desegregation issues as well, and whose groups have developed a successful approach to dealing with Roma parents." Miro knows this sort of connection will be much more valuable in the long run than simple technical assistance.

Desegregating Roma schools is a challenge faced by Roma leaders in every country, although forms of segregation vary from place to place. In Slovakia Roma students are sent to separate schools, which are inevitably of lower quality and lack access to the same resources as regular schools. In the Czech Republic, Roma children are instead placed in schools for the mentally disabled, while in Hungary, Roma children are put in special classes within the same schools, rendering them less than fully integrated. Due to the different systems, approaches to desegregation have to be nuanced. But the crux of the problem is the same everywhere: unequal access to education for Roma children.

A common subset of this problem has surfaced in many countries: getting Roma parents involved in desegregation efforts is notoriously difficult. Training teachers, lobbying school administrations, and tutoring Roma students is easy by comparison, argues Rigova, who describes how "parents are our most complex target group at Projekt Schola. They often do not understand how the separate schools are detrimental for their children, and how their children would benefit if they worked together with NGOs to protest the policies of the school districts." She is looking forward to using Miro's contacts with RIP eRiders in five different countries to gain insight into how they have dealt with this challenge.

Access to information on strategies able to convince Roma parents of the merits of desegregation was not exactly what Rigova expected from her roving technology consultant, but she is happy he will be able to provide such useful connections between Roma organizations. Miro will put her in contact with Gyula Vamosi, in Hungary, and Maria Metodieva, who is working closely with a network of NGOs in Bulgaria on a nation-wide desegregation initiative.

He also hopes to encourage the staff of Projekt Schola to interact with the Roma organization across the street, and of course to help them finish their database and redesign their website. That's the easy part for Miro, and just one way of addressing the larger challenges faced by Roma NGOs.

"Lucia": an office for change

Most Roma NGOs in Slovakia do not use the back room of their office as a rehearsal space for a musical ensemble, nor are there any Roma women's organizations in Slovakia that run Internet cafes. "Lucia," based in Kosice, hopes to be the first to do both.

Lucia's mission is to empower Roma women and spread Roma culture, especially through their musical ensemble "Del o Del," which travels Slovakia and East-Central Europe playing traditional Roma music. The ensemble-mixed men and women-practices in the back room of Lucia's Kosice offices, but they offer more than just music. They perform at cultural festivals and concerts with the message of political and social empowerment for Roma women.

Lucia's activities have widened to include other forms of assistance for Roma communities, but the sense of women's community and vibrant culture they have created is undeniable. During the day the office teems with activity, and the walls are adorned with photos of music recitals and other community events that have many times filled up the space with dozens of people.

Inspired by Technology:
Helena Balogova - Lucia's Executive Director.

Miro came to the organization early in 2003 with the simple purpose of setting up an Excel spreadsheet to streamline their accounting. His attendance to this basic task has blossomed into a potentially new future for Lucia. Though the office currently has one computer and a lone dial-up Internet connection, another idea emerged to carry Lucia's mission forward after Miro consulted with his eRider colleagues: using their fabulous office space as an Internet café and computer training center for the local Roma community with a special focus on access for women and girls.

The idea was helped along by the visit of Teresa Crawford, the Advocacy Project's technical director and the coordinator of RIP, who brought photos of a women's organization in Kosovo that had set up its own computer lab for women. Lucia's director saw the photos and was inspired. She knew that Lucia's offices were already serving as a de facto community center, where Roma were coming regularly to be together and seek advice and support. Furthermore, the office resides in a building just off the main street in Kosice - the entrance lies just a few hundred meters from the central church and town fountain. Once introduced to the idea of a computer lab and Internet café, Lucia's leaders immediately saw the potential to use technology as their newest tool of empowerment for the Kosice Roma community. Without RIP's connections, however, this never would have happened.

Since the idea of a Roma Internet café and computer center first emerged, Lucia staff have become more excited and begun to fundraise for computer equipment with Miro's help. In the meantime that one lone computer has also become highly overused. Everyone who comes in and out of the office already wants to use it for this or that - typing a document or checking email -and this has further inspired Lucia's goal of establishing a computer center.

Clearly the idea also has economic potential. The traffic through the office is increasing all the time, and the addition of more computers can generate revenue. Though they plan to charge affordable rates, and keep the focus on building community and cultural awareness, they also see the Internet café as the key to Lucia's growth as an organization, which is currently dependent on donor funds. With the computer center, their activities could slowly become self-sustaining.

Lucia's activities, furthermore, have recently begun to expand in scope and impact. The staff often provides legal advice to their members, and has started to help them establish their own NGOs. They are also engaged in generating new tactics to promote multiculturalism. For example, armed with their mission of cultural awareness and education, Lucia leaders recently invited members of Kosice's local Jewish community to a concert and presentation of Roma music. The initiative met with great success in fostering what has traditionally been limited interaction between Roma and other Slovak minorities.

"The reluctance and slight fear on their faces when they first arrived was noticeable," remembered Lucia leader Helena Balogova, "But they had come, and once they realized we were clean, didn't want to steal anything from them, and that we played great music they opened up and enjoyed themselves." Afterwards, the rabbi told her that he never would have imagined such a happening even just a few years ago, but was now happy to invite them to their next Jewish community event. "That's what it means to break stereotypes," concluded Balogova.

Lucia hopes the idea for an Internet café and training center will enable the organization to sponsor more multicultural activities and develop such inter-ethnic networks further. Its offices could provide a space to not only increase the computer competency of the Roma community, but also for other Kosice citizens to learn about Roma and their culture.

Miro faces a large task ahead in his efforts to help Lucia fundraise for computers - a decidedly non-technical job - but he is confident that by tapping into the body of knowledge stored in his RIP colleagues, he can make it happen.

Managing content at the Roma Press Agency (RPA)

News coverage of the Roma has rarely been positive. Negative stereotypes fill the pages of the press. Any substantive information on Roma communities is lacking in most Central and Eastern European countries. From this gap of public information a variety of alternative media outlets have sprung up in response to the frustrations of Roma.

Miro and a colleague from Nepal work
together translating the interface of a
Content Management System.

The Roma Press Agency (RPA), run by Roma for Roma, is one such organization, serving as an alternative media agency for Roma issues in Slovakia. (Dzeno, in the Czech Republic, serves a similar purpose.)

RPA's approach is based on its multi-functional website, where Roma journalists write for an online periodical. The agency also monitors other articles written on Roma issues from different media sources. Its database of links covers current Roma stories in multiple countries and provides a wealth of relevant information for both journalists and readers. In addition to the website, RPA runs an alternative press service to place articles by their Roma journalists into other papers and media outlets.

Miro began working with RPA at the beginning of 2003 with the aim of helping them develop their website, offering training, and providing strategic planning advice. His greatest success: the development of a "content management system" for their web site and training of RPA staff to use it. A content management system, or "CMS" in the techie world, is a user-friendly computer program for updating websites. Articles and whole sections of text can be posted by someone who does not know HTML or other complicated web site design programs. A user can simply copy an article from a regular Word document and paste it into the CMS, and the program automatically posts it to a particular page on the web site.

Teaching RPA how to use the CMS program independently is also part of Miro's task, and he has already completed a series of trainings with them. Setting up this sort of program involves technical know-how above the level of the staff's ability, but once installed, the whole operation can be sustained by RPA without Miro's help. It used to take the staff of RPA a week of intensive work to format articles from their journalists, lay out the design of their on-line magazine, and channel the material to a web designer to post. It was a complicated and difficult process. Yet now that Miro set up a content management system for RPA by integrating the software with RPA's existing web site, the whole process takes a couple of hours and can be done by most of the staff. The first on-line edition posted entirely using the CMS will go up next month.

RIP's Model of Support: Information Sharing and Sustainability

Miro's work with RPA and the content management system has also been the inspiration for a much wider RIP initiative. At a recent training for RIP eRiders in Prague, all six of RIP's country representatives were trained in the use of a content management system. They will soon be able to take this software to the NGOs with which they work, enabling these organizations to more effectively update their web pages on their own-without the help of the eRiders each time. This not only leaves the eRiders more time for other work, but it will leave the NGOs with a sustainable way to maintain their technology tools on their own and be more effective in their campaigns and advocacy - both on-line and off.

Miro agreed to act as the backup tech support for each of the eRiders as they learned both the CMS technology and the best way to teach NGOs how to use it. The whole RIP eRider team will initially rely on him to answer questions and solve technical problems - which will mean his technical savvy will impact Roma NGOs as far away as Macedonia and Romania. Eventually, however, the goal is to leave each NGO self-sufficient by providing proper backup support, ongoing trainings, and the efficient sharing of best practices through the RIP network team. This will enable each eRider to become an expert like Miro, and potentially then each NGO will have a staff member who becomes as proficient as the eRiders - all of which creates a chain of productive learning.

Thus the way Miro helps the RPA use the content management system is only the start of something much bigger. Any form of technical knowledge can be disseminated this way through the eRider network, and furthermore that knowledge will "stick" where it is needed most - with the NGOs who want to use technology in their campaigns in order to be more effective.

The CMS is particularly suited to NGOs that seek to frequently post on-line information, like media outlets, but it can also enable Roma organizations just getting started on the web to have an easier time updating their material. Technology thus can both make existing campaigns more efficient and open opportunities for younger organizations to use the web for their work. All of this is aimed developing the capacity of NGOs in their effort to better the lives of Roma people.

The RIP eRider team also took the initiative to make these possibilities even closer to realization at the training in Prague. The team translated the interface (the commands you read on the computer screen) of a version of a content management system (called as "CMSlite") into all of their national languages - as well as Romanes, the language spoken by most Roma people throughout Eastern Europe. According to the trainer at the Center for Advanced Media Studies in Prague, this was the first time any content management system software has been translated into the Romanes language. The efforts of a few eRiders to make a program usable for their own work, therefore, was also a significant step in opening the doors of technology to Roma people everywhere.

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