Distributed Technologist Alliance (DTA)

Making global opportunity local for displaced talent.

Two compounded problems are at work: an ethnically and regionally homogenous tech sector that is woefully undersupplied by locally grown technical talent; and economies in North Africa and the Middle East that are unable to provide local technical talent with career opportunities that a.) leverage their advanced technical education and b.) hone them into regional and global changemakers. By creating consistent quality standards for global engineering and technical training and connecting untapped local talent with mission-driven tech startups in the US and Europe, our coalition aims to provide talented youth from MENA with access to advanced technology jobs. With the objective of creating high-tech economic opportunity and diversifying the next generation of technology leaders, our coalition will partner with regional talent builders to broaden job access and develop the skills and experience needed to lead the Future of Work.

Founded by talent builders at MIT ReACT and Think.iT, our coalition-based approach is innovative in its sui generis combination of providing access to untapped, high-demand talent in nascent markets; an unprecedented benchmarking of quality standards for open source engineering skill training; and community-driven approach to skills acceleration and remote work that eclipses the traditional pain points of remote hiring and career-building.

Our solution is not a single piece of technology, but a coalition-based model to train and connect North Africa and the Middle East’s next generation of technical talent with immediate high-value tech placement opportunities. The coalition will use objective quality benchmarks and skill assessments to help startups reduce guesswork and hire remote technical talent instantly. By acting as a central clearinghouse for talent builders and hiring partners, we will use our visual talent database to 'drag and drop' the right organization to the right technologist—and through smart tooling facilitate the longer-term working relationship in a seamless way.

We will focus on building the supply side of our marketplace by broadening membership and participation by talent builders and learning communities in the MENA region. Our immediate objectives will be to raise awareness and cooperation around our long-term objectives; identify major pain points and best practices in the qualification and placement of new talent; and collaborate to develop tiered open source learning programming for different talent skill levels to support our benchmarks.

We will also partner with a mentorship matching platform, Localize.world, to facilitate peer-to-peer mentorship and support amongst individuals from our talent builder partners.

Our broad coalition can support a more efficient and equitable on-ramping for new talent. Developed best practices and standards for upskilling technical talent will move us toward higher quality, consistency, and reliability for employers looking to leverage it. New and existing technological solutions in the coalition will lead to more employers engaging with greater ease. Through these connections we project building tools to support characterizing employer needs and matching them with compatibly built professional profiles, and helping each party evaluate opportunities. Through these strategies we anticipate critical growth and benefit to the number of communities we can reach.

On the talent side, we will identify talent builders and learning communities looking for opportunities on behalf of the talent populations they are serving through our networking and referral connections within the Tech for Good communities and universities in the MENA region (as an example, our relationships with organizations like Al Makinah). Our approach will focus on providing joint action solutions to their shared pain points: lack of brand awareness, lack of training resources, and lack of accessibility with potential hiring partners.

Between Think.iT and MIT ReACT, we are currently serving 50 displaced and disenfranchised individuals through full-time income generating jobs as well as continuous blended learning skill acceleration. The solutions we are independently developing at each organization combine to support the shared vision we have for DTA—including open programming learning curricula and course performance, data-driven talent assessment solutions, and remote job opportunity facilitation with innovated distributed teams around the world.

In 12 months, we anticipate partnering with 50 organizations on each side of the clearinghouse to ultimately serve 1000 - 2000 full-time placed individuals. By focusing on scalable open learning and talent benchmarking solutions, we project 5x growth in number of individuals served over the next 3 years.

Through the work of our individual organizations, our coalition team has specialized experience in developing open blended learning modules for technical skill acceleration, data-driven talent identification and assessment solutions, hiring partner discovery and relationship-building, and organizational pitching and fundraising. We also have direct experience collaborating with talent communities in MENA, our region of desired impact; with hiring partners in our target markets of the US and EU; and with government entities in each aforementioned region.

As a non-profit organization, our business model is capitalizing on the value created for both talent builders as well as hiring partners. As talents are staffed on teams of our hiring partners, the coalition charges a 5% percentage fee per brokered contract, which are reinvested into our social mission by maintaining the platform and expanding our existing pool of talent builders. In addition, external funds, such as mission focused grant support by one of our partners, the BMW Foundation, will support us in the starting and growth stages of the coalition and help us realize the design and execution of both the open source learning curriculum as well as talent matching and work facilitation tooling.

After solidifying a team of like-minded organizations thanks to SOLVE's community work, joining as a SOLVER would make our vision stronger by allowing to connect with a vast network of talent builders, hiring partners and exponential tech for good evangelists. Solve represents a nexus of potential partnerships, users, and funding without whom a more equitable future of work will never be achieved. Ready dialogue, valuable feedback from diverse thought-leaders, increasing the intellectual rigor behind our proposed solutions framework, and creating the potential for aggregating similarly inspired solutions and activities for testing and implementation are we are excited by the opportunity.

We need to identify regional partners supporting well-qualified remote technical talent, develop and distribute open source learning curriculum to accelerate skill training, establish an objective set of standards by which talents can be assessed, and identify and establish the most effective pathways between honed talent profiles and hiring partners while assuring quality and trust on both sides. Being part of the Solve community will help give us the critical visibility, support, and relationships we need to populate this “visual database” of talent—and define the right approach to meet the technical and economic expectations of companies ready to engage remote workers.