Why I Love Our Partnership With helloworld.se

Is corporate social responsibility (CSR) just a way of getting free publicity by giving money to worthy causes or is it actually propelling society in the right direction? Hopefully it is all about the latter, and I love that Klarna is taking part in helping young people embrace and discover new technologies!

Image from Hello World’s website

What is Hello World?

Hello World is a Swedish non-profit aiming to encourage and inspire “computer-aided creativity” amongst kids and teenagers. This boils down to meet-ups and summer camps where participants work with for example programming, 3D printing and electronics. An interesting aspect of their mission is the goal to have a 50/50 split of girls and boys at their events, a very positive thing in a time when we want to encourage girls and women to start working with science and technology.

Their impressive list of partners shows that this is something that a lot of people value. Side note: Klarna has hosted a meet-up for kids, has arranged a workshop for the Hello World instructors and has provided programming challenges for the Hello World summer camp.

Do We Need Initiatives Like Hello World?

Hello World and similar initiatives are about helping young people discover and nurture their talents together with other likeminded young people. Software development is something that can be done by yourself but it is just way more productive and fun to do it with others. Meeting others like you is very important, especially when you happen to be interested in something that does not require you to be a part of a group, as opposed to for example playing football or singing in a choir.

So, do we need these meet-ups and summer camps for tech-curious children and teenagers?

Yes, I truly believe so, just by looking at myself… I love programming. I love making life easier, for myself or others, by developing tools which simplify and automate the boring parts of our lives. Had I been more creative and artistic I would also have made the world more user-friendly and beautiful at the same time, but for now I gladly let other people take care of the art part of technology. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. No one is good at everything, meaning that societies and companies need to encourage their people, young and old, to go out and find what they are good at.

I suppose this sometimes translates to “we need to embrace diversity in the workplace”, and while that is certainly true that we must all work hard against discrimination and biases, I think it is equally important to show kids and teenagers that the tech industry is for everyone. We must not let young people from under-represented groups, like women, feel like outsiders. By limiting the talent pool, unconsciously or not, we lower the pace of innovation and progress. Hello World’s ambition of having just as many girls as boys at their meet-ups and camps is a very good idea for fostering a culture where gender in tech is no longer an issue.

An interesting aspect of reaching out to girls in particular is that both girls and boys feel equally “tech savvy” when they are 12–15 but then something happens and young women between 16 and 25 feel a bit less confident in their “tech skills” than young men (note that this is about confidence level, not actual skill level). This becomes all too apparent when looking at the low number of women at university engineering programmes in Sweden and listening to Swedish IT consultant Ulrika Malmgren talking to a group of potential engineering students. Ensuring that young women stay interested in technology is therefore very important for the tech industry. Luckily there are many women in Swedish tech companies who girls might feel inspired by, and some of those women are included in DI’s list of 24 women who shape the future for Swedish tech.

Getting back to kids in general, both girls and boys, we find additional proof of the value of private initiatives to encourage young people to pursue a career, or hobby, in technology (and science and academia) in an interview with researcher Anders Jidesjö:

“It is often said that children and teenagers are not interested in natural sciences and technology. That is not true. They have a lot of interests in those fields but sometime around the 8th grade it crashes. […] It seems school ruins their interest.”

The observation that kids, or at least girls, lose interest in computer technology around the 8th grade is also mentioned in an article from 2015 which talks about how getting girls interested in programming is a matter of democracy. A lot of people are, luckily, working to change this. One example are teachers Jannike Kohinoor and Helena Dalivin who started Girls Code back in 2015, and who recently visited Microsoft with a group of girls.

Another excellent example of things moving in the right direction is 12-year-old developer Greta Nygren who, amongst other things, has published a 38-minute video on automating Minecraft using Python. She was recently interviewed by StockholmDirekt, in case you want to know more.

So, we should all try to encourage young people to continue exploring the world of science and technology!

How Can You And I Help?

Personally, I imagine that two things are needed:

• Get children and teenagers interested in all the wonderful things one can do with a computer, like develop games and produce digital content.
• Make sure that workplaces are inclusive, so that under-represented groups feel at ease and feel valued. There is no point in getting under-represented groups, like young women, to become developers if they quit the business because of poor working conditions.

(Side note: I do not think I, a white 30-something Swedish man with a degree in computer science, should be too confident when it comes to providing ideas for helping people who do not fit the stereotypes of software engineers. I will gladly take advice from people with more insight!)

Anyway… If you want to learn more about initiatives and organizations working to promote computer technology you might want to take a close look at these:

• PyLadies is a “group of women developers worldwide who love the Python programming language”. Mariana Bocoi, one of my colleagues at Klarna, arranged a meet-up for female developers in Stockholm where they developed a chat-bot using Python and Heroku.
• Swedish Hello World is sort of what this article is all about, organizations trying to get kids and teens interested in technology.
• Scratch is a very popular game development tool for children which has seen a tremendous growth over the last three years.
• Swedish Kodcentrum is non-profit organization providing free workshops and meet-ups for kids interested in programming and creating digital content. They also host Kodboken, a web site for adults who want to help children with programming. Side note: You can submit an application to become a volonteer on their web site.
• Swedish Programming4Kids provide camps and courses in robotics and Scratch.
• Swedish CoderDojo Stockholm is a rather informal network providing free “coding dojos” for kids and teenagers. Companies like Skype, Bettson and Bisnode hosted their spring 2017 dojos.
• Swedish IIS has links to some twenty Swedish cities where you can attend meet-ups and coding dojos for kids.
• Swedish Tjejer Kodar provide training and camps for women in tech.
• Swedish PINK Programming is “a non-profit organization [working] to enable more women to discover the joy of programming [and] to increase the proportion of women working in the tech industry.”

Which of all these will you be signing up for?

Appendix: More Reading

CSR ambitions of various tech companies (most are in Swedish):

• Swedish consultancy company Chas has a bunch of local commitments, including helping shelters for the homeless, donating money to cancer research, and promoting technology at a school in a socioeconomically low-ranking neighbourhood in Stockholm.
• Swedish consultancy company Sigma focuses on local initiatives in Malmö and their Star for Life projects in Africa.
• Swedish TNG works to integrate immigrants in the society, promote programming for women, promote programming among children, and donate money to charity.
• CSR at Microsoft is, among other things, about young inventors, immigrant integration, free software for charity organizations and promoting programming among children.
• Forbes recently published an article about How Spotify Uses Music To Drive Social Change. Spotify has also started The Equalizer Project, aimed at helping female songwriters and producers.
• PayPal has started Giving Fund, a charity providing payment services for free to charity organizations.
• Accenture’s initiative to help 3 million people with things like getting an education or starting companies was featured in the Ny Teknik article Nu vill alla företag ta sitt ansvar för CSR (2010) .

Articles about CSR in general (most are in Swedish):

• Susanne Sweet: CSR är en måstefråga för stora företag
• It-företag inte tillräckligt engagerade i CSR-frågor
• Länkar till intiativ kring barn och datorer
• Så kan ditt företag arbete med etik och socialt ansvarstagande
• En CSR-nagel i företagens ögon
• How to Make Social Impact a Part of Your Company From Day One
• CSR — Hur kommer det utvecklas i framtiden? (research paper)