Behind Aam Digital
About Us
Aam Digital combines expertise in international cooperation with software development. Inspired by the experiences of development professionals, we built an open source tool to enable high-quality case management. As a young social enterprise it is our goal to co-develop our product with our users and to prioritize impact over profits.
From Open Source project to social enterprise
Our History
Our founder Sebastian Leidig started Aam Digital based on his experience as project manager in an educational project in Kolkata, India. During his master’s at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) he establishes Aam Digital as part of the student-led initiative Engineers Without Borders.
Having developed a fully functional product already in 2018, we decided to make Aam Digital available globally, through a social enterprise. Since 2020 we are working as a full-time team, to make high-class digital solutions available for everyone. This allows us to support small grassroots projects as well as large international organisations.
What unites Aam Digital employees as well as our growing open source community is our common goal: Empowering front-line workers through world-class software!
Our Team
A software engineer by training and former program manager at an NGO in India, Sebastian combines deep IT expertise with practical insights into the daily challenges of international development. Out of this background he initially started the volunteer-run open source project to establish Aam Digital.
Sebastian is responsible for product management at Aam Digital, making sure our software really meets the need of users in the field.
With experience in industry-scale software and cloud projects, Tom brings a deep technical background to the picture.
Tom is heading Aam Digital’s technical implementation and operations, making sure our application meets the highest technical standards and is always available and secure.
Moiz has a diverse professional experience of working with grassroot NGOs, technical resource institutions, systems change and advisory organizations.
Moiz is an engineer by qualification and holds double masters in Management Studies and Public Administration. He completed his Executive Master of Public Administration from Hertie school, Berlin.
At Aam Digital, he handles stakeholder engagement & partnership development and helps social impact organizations and government institutions to improve their project implementation and impact.
Aam Digital is developed as an open source project by a broad team of contributors in addition to the core team. Find us on GitHub.
Our Vision & Values
Why Open Source?
We believe that together we can achieve more than alone. Hence, the core of our work, the Aam Digital source code, is publicly available. We are convinced that Open Source is the key to maximizing impact, especially in the field of international development.
We base our software development on Principles for Digital Development, which aim to ensure that digital tools can maximize their impact. Designing for scale, reusing and improving, being collaborative – and explicitly using Open Source are key aspects. We want to build a global solution rather than being an isolated drop in the ocean.
As an Open Source solution Aam Digital is also transparent and flexible. Everyone can dig into the technical details themselves and check whether it meets security standards. And its future does not depend on a single company – if you want, take it in your own direction.
Aam Digital has been recognized as a Digital Public Good (DPG), showing that we meet important standards to “adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm by design, and help attain the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.
Aam Digital is an open source, easy-to-use case management software for social sector organizations. We exist to improve the effectiveness, transparency and impact of work at the last mile by social workers, teachers and others. Their positive impact on the people they support always comes first. To really help them in their work, it’s essential for us to work closely with our users and look at the safety, environment and (side) effects of our software.
Aam Digital is committed to implementing the “Digital Principles for Development”, the best practices for tech in international development. As our “industry standard” initiated by players like UNICEF, UNDP, SIDA, WHO and USAID and a community of like-minded innovative ventures, these principles help us do the right thing.
Since we drafted the first sketch of Aam Digital’s app, we have been guided and inspired by the ideas behind the “Digital Principles for Development”:
🌳 Understand the existing ecosystem
♻️ Share, reuse and improve
🧑🤝🧑 Design with people
🌈 Design for inclusion
🌞 Build for sustainability
📊 Establish people-first data practices
🔍 Create open and transparent practices
🛡️ Anticipate and mitigate harms
🔬 Use evidence to improve outcomes
Contact
Join Us!
We are always excited to welcome new volunteers. Aam Digital is developed as an open source project by a broad team of contributors. Our members come from a diverse range of backgrounds and bring in different expertise (or just the passion to learn and contribute).
Simply write us a short note and join one of our meetings to see whether you would like to do more.
Interested to collaborate in a different way? Let us know about it!
Email: info@aam-digital.com