Meet Eoghan and Alan. Read on and see how they brought their ‘blurry idea’ Dev, meet Tech to life. Applications for The Ideas Collective 2016 open until Tuesday 24th May!

After taking an online course on “Mobiles for International Development” I got thinking about the kind of power that technology possesses. It plays a huge role in our lives – and dictates quite a lot of what I do and see, not only because I’m studying Computer Engineering, but also it’s disrupted the way we do things today.

I brought my newly found trail of thought forward with Alan and after an evening of incubating ideas in Doyle’s we decided that there must be tons of innovative new ways to use technology to provoke a force for positive social or environmental change. Is there more to technology?

“There must be tons of innovative new ways to use technology to provoke a force for positive social or environmental change”

We speculated that if we got a bunch of enthusiastic students from a diverse range of backgrounds to put their heads together for a day to build out new ways of using technology for good surely we could spawn something great. And that was it really ­ the inception of Dev, meet Tech.

Of course, we didn’t have a name, or an implementable plan, or even a general direction of what to do to make this very blurry idea a reality yet. Actually, all we really had was a hangover and some freshly nested idealised thoughts!

A while later we stumbled across The Ideas Collective. This seemed perfect. We take our eager enthusiasm together with our blurry idea and over the course of 100 days, flesh it out into a living and breathing action project.

“The Ideas Collective was an incredible experience and we couldn’t recommend it more to anybody who has even the vaguest of ideas”

Flash forward a few weeks and we were nervously entering our first Ideas Collective workshop. We spent the weekend with an incredible bunch diverse, passionate and motivated young innovators.

On top of this, as it turned out, we all had blurry ideas. Throughout the next 100 days we got to watch not only our own project grow,
but all other projects progress from
grainy concepts to implemented social
innovations.

That progression in itself was incredibly exciting to see. Almost one year on and we’re still watching these projects evolve and build momentum. We’re watching the guys at Nu. build an ethical clothing community as well as the guys at KEY Ideas&Decisions build their civic engagement platform for young people in Ireland.

The Ideas Collective was an incredible experience and we couldn’t recommend it more to anybody who has even the vaguest of ideas and a willingness to immerse themselves in the program, meet great new people and reap the rewards from investing their time and effort.

Author: Eoghan Martin

Find out more about Dev, Meet Tech

Do you want to be part of the The Ideas Collective 2017? Get your application in early to secure your place. Deadline for applications 15th May!

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