Industry News
DigitalOcean Launches Inaugural Social Impact Program with DO Impact
By eLearning Inside
April 06, 2022
NEW YORK – DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:DOCN), the cloud for developers, startups and SMBs, today announced the launch of DO Impact, a global social impact program aimed at empowering changemakers through products, philanthropy, and people — enabling the internal and larger DigitalOcean communities to give back.
“Our mission is to help the builders of the world create software that changes the world. Our new DO Impact initiative allows us to accomplish this through DigitalOcean’s greatest assets — its people, products and philanthropy,” says Yancey Spruill, CEO of DigitalOcean. “We’re excited to expand Hollie’s Hub for Good, one of our signature initiatives under DO Impact, to deepen the reach and capacity of nonprofits, startups and developers who are solving the world’s toughest problems.”
DO Impact kicks off today with the expansion of Hollie’s Hub for Good, a charitable initiative established in 2020 that provides DigitalOcean infrastructure credits to nonprofits addressing health, educational, and economic disparities.
The following nonprofits are receiving an inaugural round of monetary grants. Organizations include:
Fast Forward, a U.S-based organization providing global tech nonprofits with the funding, resources, and support needed to create a positive impact on scale
The Federation of Humanitarian Technologists, a U.K-based network of technologists dedicated to maintaining critical open-source digital infrastructure used in humanitarian responses
QuestaGame, an Australian organization leveraging the power of mobile technology to create new citizen scientists and collect biodiversity data for the purpose of research and conservation
The grants to these nonprofits and 27 others, which total $500,000, represent the first fulfillment of DigitalOcean’s Pledge 1% IPO commitment, in which it pledged to allocate $50 million to charitable initiatives over the next 10 years.
“DigitalOcean has already created an amazing community that it supports with open-source content and cloud technology that is highly targeted to their needs,” said Admas Kanyagia, VP of Social Impact at DigitalOcean. “DO Impact is not an afterthought for us — it’s a natural extension of who we are and what we value.”
As part of DO Impact, the company will also launch a new volunteer program that enables employees to share their technical expertise with nonprofits and educational organizations. “There’s an important multiplier effect when companies and their employees share their time, expertise and resources,” said Kanyagia. “We look forward to working with organizations that will benefit from all three to scale their impact on the world.”
DigitalOcean simplifies cloud computing so developers and businesses can spend more time building software that changes the world. With its mission-critical infrastructure and fully managed offerings, DigitalOcean helps developers, startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) rapidly build, deploy and scale applications to accelerate innovation and increase productivity and agility. DigitalOcean combines the power of simplicity, community, open-source, and customer support so customers can spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time building innovative applications that drive business growth.
Featured image: Christina @ wocintechchat.com, Unsplash.
“As bots enter the classroom, both teachers and learners will have to reflect on their uses and outcomes. They will need to adopt an awareness of AI’s presence. Teachers must recognize AI’s short comings, such as inherently developing biases and its inability to process human emotions.”
This statement is correct as it relates to AI, generally; however, it assumes that AI exists as THE entity that students directly interact with. There are many potential expressions of AI, including a human-in-the-loop approach, in which it is configured in such as way as to facilitate dialogs and interactions between people, either studentteacher or studentstudent.
For example, we’re building an L2 language speaking practice app (Language Hero Smart Chat). We use AI to enable beginning students, who speak different languages, to have natural, real life conversations in each other’s language from Day 1. They speak directly to each other, interacting with the system only to select from multiple content choices suggested by it, designed to facilitate a real free-ranging dialog resulting in real bonding, to the extent it’s possible, rather than to practice a particular lexical structure (they can also text or go off the grid to have pure video chat).
Teachers can use this system as well for group chat. They can upload their own curriculum as well (the Smart Chat system configures it as multiple vector (branching script) chat or merges it with the system curriculum (focused on real life useful topics like travel, food, shopping, social chat, expressing ideas, etc.). Everything they say is comprehensible to their students, and so are all student responses.
When such a system is implemented in a manner that pays particular attention to the affective components that make human interaction so effective for creating the desire to learn (and corresponding openness to processing L2 content, in this case), we think it can be a more effective tool than bot chat.