My name is Maretta, and my project is called ubongo university. UU is Ubongo’s internal knowledge-sharing platform. I am a product management intern from the University of Texas, Austin in the United States, and I am so happy to be spending my summer in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania at Ubongo!
What is the purpose of ubongo university?
On ubongo university, ubongo employees can create lessons about the work that they do and request lessons to grow their own professional knowledge. We have specific tutorials such as “How to Add the Ubongoer’s Signature on WordPress” and “Booking Studio Times” and more general tutorials like “Intro to Graphic Design” and “How to Compose a Simple Melody.” Ideally, ubongo university should help answer FAQs in the office, speed the on-boarding process of new hires, and help each staff member learn about procedures outside of their own department.
What did you do to build ubongo university?
Initially, I researched different potential host sites for ubongo university. I was given two prototypes for UU on different host sites. I created a third prototype on a different host site. I tested the three different versions of ubongo university on different employees in the office to see which they liked best. In the end, the most popular version was the Google Sites prototype, so that is the one I expanded. I added the lesson suggestions I got during the testing period to the existing list of lesson requests and consulted the staff to see who should make each lesson. Then, I assigned one lesson to each of the people who we appointed to create a lesson. Since finishing this first round of lesson assignments, I have been adding lessons to the site, organizing the site to make it more user-friendly, trouble-shooting technical problems (like finding user analytics and adding comment sections to each lesson), and working on a sustainable system of site maintenance for when I leave Ubongo. I’ve also created several lessons of my own. My favorite was the “Who’s Who” page because I got to interview everyone in the office.
What else have you done at Ubongo?
I have also gotten the opportunity to work with the pre-production team writing scripts, sit-in on production and grant meetings, work on my legal writing skills, and right now I’m making a video for future Ubongo interns! I’ve also really enjoyed getting to know the kiddos who run around the ubongo office 🙂
What will you take away from your experience as an Ubongo intern?
My time at ubongo has taught me how much you can learn about the environment around you if you just try! I’ve been here for under two months and have already learned so much about my own project, everyone in the office, ubongo as a company, and Tanzanian culture. I also know none of this would have been possible without the immense amount of help and support I’ve been greeted with at every turn on this trip. I’m hoping to bring that combination of eagerness to learn and to help back home in a month.
