About Teplitsa

Teplitsa’s mission is to strengthen Russian civil society with smart use of technology through connection with civic activists. Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), socially aware IT, media, and creative businesses.
"Teplitsa. Technologies for Social Good" is an independent and capacity building project with a mission to strengthen a Russian non-government sector (NGO) with information technologies.

Our team uses an ecosystem approach. What does it mean? We analyse the civil society via its connections, resources and competences. Our goals are as follows: 1) to build a strong connection among civil initiatives, NGOs, activists and creative professionals; 2) to show all the tools and resources to achieve their goals and missions 3) to widen IT competences and similar civic spheres (digital security, advocacy and what not).

We have our website, our educational online-platform and free IT-tools,;implement programmes of IT-help and connection with IT specialists; we organise events. We assist NGOs and grassroots initiatives to develop themselves more sustainably to effectively achieve their audience and solve problems together.

Teplitsa announces that human rights and international peace are key values. Teplitsa continues to work despite sharply negative repressions in the civil society in Russia after 24.February.

Project history

We launched the project in 2012. The story began earlier in 2010 when Central Russia was on fire. Aleksei Sidorenko and his colleagues created a map to help in fire, which connected volunteers and hundreds of people who were suffering. The team was awarded the Runet Prize in 2010. This project showed how technologies could help people and what its potential was.

Teplitsa was launched as the answer to the question: "What if we create an independent initiative which can help hundreds and thousands of social projects?". Teplitsa started to research the problems in NGOs and build technological and intellectual infrastructure to developNGOs and independent initiatives complexly. We saw that for activists it was not so easy to launch online tools.

So, having analysed Russian civil society needs, we saw the main directions: 1) educational and inspiring publications; 2) public events; 3) specialized software; 4) networks . In 2019 we collaborated with foreign social TechSoup for nonprofits and helped Russian NGOs to get programs for a special price. Inspite of TeploDigital has stopped in Russia We are trying continue our partnership.

Team

Our team are managers, journalists, web-developers, educators, data and technology researchers.
Алексей Сидоренко
руководитель проекта
Никита Дульнев
Главный редактор
Наталия Авдеева
МЕНЕДЖЕР ПРОДУКТОВ
Денис Ягодин
ДИРЕКТОР ПО ИННОВАЦИЯМ

We work for:

  • 1human right organisations and civil initiatives
  • 2activists
  • 3private nonprofit charity organisations and social enterprenerships
  • 4media, journalists and bloggers
  • 5social based it-specialists and volunteers and web studios that pledged to help civil society organisations
  • 6anti-war initiatives

Our strengths

  1. Sustainability — management and financial resources needed for development;
  2. Consciousness, meaningfulness and data — the science approach and understanding difficulties are extremely important in nonprofits;
  3. Efficiency — new technologies open new opportunities to increase the social impact of the projects;
  4. Security — we need to figure out some risk factors;
  5. Communication — effective ways to communicate help to see the problem for wider audience and get more support;
  6. Ethical approach — technologies change every time, they create new decisions and new challenges. We need to remember they are always the result of human decisions. We believe that technologies must be ethical in their design step. Only in such a case can they fill in the gaps in inequality of social and economic relations, present a good balance between nature and society restrictions, make the life of people with special needs and other insecure groups more bearable;

Our programmes and activities

We have been describing civic technologies and their influence for 10 years. Our website is a base of knowledge for activists with 5000+ of helpful articles and video lessons.
We have united 185 web-studios in the community of “Paseka”, which work with nonprofit initiatives. We launched the platform IT-Volunteer where specialists make use of pro bono methods: more than 1,7 tasks have been solved by volunteers.
We organise educational events such as meetups, conferences, live-courses, online/offline webinars and workshops. Since 2012 we keep organising hackathons about social problems.
We promote the idea of online-tool accessibility. We developed the plugin Leika for fundraising, Shmapper for crowdsourcing and constructor Kandinsky (based on WordPress) for creating websites without programming skills.
ПWe help to increase ideas, search for teams and launch projects, for example: Lacmus – algorithm searching for lost people using photos from drones; Light Algorithm – a programme which collects statistics about domestic violence in trial sentences.
We develop actual skills on the platform of Teplitsa.Courses, help to increase and systematise knowledge using lectures, tests and communities.
Our topics: web-development, it-tools, services implementation, communication and media strategies.
Tokio team optimises processes in your organisation using tools, automates routine tasks and increases your digital security.
We collect data about non-profit organisations using data science approaches and find the best practices.
50+
online courses launched during covid pandemic
≈ 2000
events organised in Moscow and different Russian cities
44
hackathons organised on the topic of social problems
185
web studios are ready to work with non-profit projects

Our special projects

Social projects that changed Russia
Collection of stories 18 social projects that have changed modern Russia.
Horizon Scanner
The unique research about the role of informational technologies in the future of civil society.
Help with startups
Online handbook on how to get impact investment into technological startups which solves social problems.
Game "2024"
Online game about ethics in technology. You are a female president and your goal is to improve life in the country using critical approaches.
Game "False security"
Online game about digital security and how to protect yourself from cyberattacks and prepare for the unpredicted hacks.

Our work reviews

I watched video lessons on how to use Kandinsky (constructor of website). I launched a website for the foundation “Prove your area” with the instructions very fast! Now, the audience can get statistics about drug crime in Saint-Petersburg and how we can prevent these crimes”.
Aleksei Lahov
activist
I love the platform IT-Volonteer. "I have started my career here!"
Valentina Nazarova
web-designer, it-volunteer
The Teplitsa team is one of the teams which have the same values and goals. For several years, we have been working together, creating programmes and projects which help to fight censorship and defend our privacy. I am happy to have such partners, to get support and increase our experience together.
Natalia Malusheva
co-founder and press secretary "Roskomsvoboda"