The U.S. Department of State, in partnership with El Bosque University in Bogota, Colombia, sponsored a Technology Camp (TechCamp), July 27–28, for more than 50 public health professionals from countries across the Western Hemisphere. The TechCamp program built a network of health communicators to share information and increased their knowledge about modern technologies that play an important part of public information campaigns about how to prevent the transmission of emerging infectious diseases, including Zika.

Experts from 12 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, and the United States, attended panels, participated in “speed-geeking” sessions, which offered practitioners and researchers the opportunity to quickly learn about a range of potentially useful technologies, and discussed how to apply what they learned about new technologies to communicate more effectively with the public about global health issues of interest across their region.

TechCamps are a Department of State program that link civil society groups with technology experts, sharing and developing tools to apply tech solutions to real-world issues. More than 3,000 participants globally have taken part in a TechCamp since the program’s inception in 2010.

To learn more about the event, please follow #TechCampBogota on Twitter. A Flickr album with photos of the event can be found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/usembassybogota/sets/72157668719622373.