Tag: AWS Institute

The topic of food insecurity is personal for so many of us. Both of my parents were school teachers in Pulaski County, Kentucky, a county that has a 21.3 percent food insecurity rate for children—the same rate of childhood hunger as where I live now in Washington, DC. According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), more than 11 million children across the country struggle with hunger and live in food insecure households. Here are ways that AWS technology is helping address this challenging issue.

As we continue to work with public sector bodies around the world, AWS understands how valuable open source software and development communities are at this time. To accelerate the combined global response to COVID-19, we gathered examples of third-party open code, tools, and standards that reformers in the public sector can immediately use. We’ve included these in a new resource now available in Open Government Solutions.

Education ministries, colleges, and schools around the world are rapidly adopting remote learning and working to maintain business continuity and provide students with continued access to education. From quickly scaling learning management systems and launching virtual classrooms to upskilling educators and setting up remote help-desks, AWS and its education technology partners are providing mission-critical infrastructure that is enabling our customers to continue delivering against their missions, safely and efficiently. From Italy to Bahrain to the United States, check out these stories.

At the Education World Forum (EWF) in London, global leader for workforce and education at Amazon Web Services (AWS) Andrew Ko discussed the workforce shortage in cloud skills – and the importance of piloting initiatives that “cloudify” curriculum to skill-up, upskill, and reskill students, educators, the current workforce, and IT leaders.

This year’s AWS Government Delegation Day at re:Invent in Las Vegas had a similar look and feel to last year’s inaugural program – but with a more global and expansive twist. The 2019 program welcomed a diverse crowd of international government executives from 40 countries, including from Europe, Asia, Latin America, Canada, and the Middle East. Over 300 government officials made the trip to Las Vegas for this customized talent development initiative focused on these key themes.

Since 2015, 11 communities in the United States have reached “functional zero” – effectively ending chronic or veteran homelessness and demonstrating that although homelessness is a complex challenge, it is solvable. By reaching this milestone, communities in Built for Zero, a national initiative comprised of more than 70 U.S. communities, have shown that real-time, personal-level data can empower organizations to respond to the homelessness challenge. These communities measurably ended homelessness when they followed these best practices.

When considering digital transformation, governments tend to focus on the potential drawbacks instead of focusing on the risks of failing to adopt new technologies. A newly released report by Ottawa-based Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute, “The Risk of the Digital Status Quo,” outlines four risks of forgoing digital modernization in Canada and offers strategies to address those risks.

More than 400 regional and local organizations working to address homelessness in the United States are using a new tool by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to better understand and address the homelessness challenge. Those agencies, also known as “Continuums of Care (CoCs),” can use the tool to visualize the situation they are helping address and optimize their responses.

Governments face stiff competition with the private sector when it comes to recruiting civil servants with digital skills. As they look to innovate and make their services more citizen-centric, government leaders can benefit from bold strategies to recruit diverse, digitally savvy talent. Dr. Wendy Cukier, Director of the Diversity Institute at Ryerson University, explores the challenges facing the Canadian public service and recommendations to develop the federal workforce, in a new paper produced in collaboration with Public Policy Forum and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Institute. While the paper focuses on Canada, the strategies offered are relevant to leaders around the world.

Educators are increasingly adopting data analytics to understand and address gaps in education. This includes educators in higher education seeking to personalize student-learning experiences and improve learning outcomes, as well as policymakers looking to understand and scale effective teaching methods, increase efficiency and teaching capacity, among other concerns. AWS’s “Four Steps to Success” offers a high-level guide for leaders seeking to adopt new tools to make better use of the data they are collecting.