Michael Soto
Michael Soto is Co-Founder of Spark Collaboration, a PhD Student in Sociology at the 5X社区视频 of Minnesota, and a Fellow of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC). He graduated from Sussex with an Anthropology of Development & Social Transformation MA in 2013.
Throughout the MA I was continually amazed by the quality of the faculty and their eagerness to support my own development as a scholar” Michael Soto
My parents immigrated to the US from Colombia shortly before I was born. Growing up in New Jersey, I was always looking South and dreaming of having a positive impact in Colombia. Growing up bilingual and alternating between social worlds I was very aware of the multiplicity of perspectives where many only saw one.
I did my undergrad at Harvard 5X社区视频, where I self-designed a course of study on Development in Latin America. I had taken classes in Economics, Government, and other Social Sciences that each focused on 'development' but the discussions were entirely isolated from each other. This is what motivated me to craft an interdisciplinary study on development. During my undergraduate studies, Sussex came onto my radar through the work of Professor Hubert Schmitz at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS).
After graduating from college in 2006, I worked in an array of nonprofit and international development contexts for five years (Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, benefits access and workforce development programs in NYC, a political campaign in Colombia and a workforce development initiative in Colombia) before starting my graduate studies at Sussex in 2011. I decided to go back to school and was fortunate enough to be admitted into several Sussex programs. I ended up choosing the MA in Anthropology of Development and Social Transformation since it took a critical approach to development, not just looking at how to implement development intiatives, but to reflect on the broader implications.
I really enjoyed my time at Sussex. I would say that it was the first time that I spent significant effort on the actual practice of writing. During my first semester, a professor from one of my courses invited each of us to submit an optional mid-semester paper which would not be graded but would allow us to get early feedback. It was a wonderful opportunity which I am glad that I took. It set the tone for me for the rest of my masters program, to do a great deal of writing and re-writing, and it completely transformed how I looked at the entire writing process.
Throughout the MA I was continually amazed by the quality of the faculty and their eagerness to support my own development as a scholar. I enjoyed having several months to focus on my thesis and the many conversations that I had with my adviser, Dimitris Dalakoglou, with whom I have continued to keep in touch over the years. A couple of years after I graduated we met up again while he was a visiting scholar at CUNY, and the again when he gave a talk at Princeton. When I began thinking of PhD progrmas, I also considered applying to VUM in Amsterdam where he now is the Chair of Social Anthropology. In addition to Sussex itself, the location also significantly shaped my experience. Brighton is absolutely fabulous, and it is a short (1 hour) train ride from London.
I made several trips to London during the MA, and following the program moved to London in search of work. My visa extended several months after I finished my thesis and I was able to secure a paid internship at Nesta, the UK innovation foundation. I was part of the Innovation Skills team and we were focused on helping international development agencies (DFID, UNDP) to be more innovative. I interviewed several top UNDP leaders in the Balkans in preparation for a workshop that Nesta facilitated for them.
While I was at Nesta, I was perplexed with how individuals stayed on top of everything happening in the organization. There was a constant influx of new projects and consequently a high rotation of staff. In response, I along with Jon Kingsbury, developed a process we jokingly called 'Randomised Coffee Trials.' Nesta ran a lot of randomised control trials, and so we thought it was worth throwing out the control and adding some coffee for good measure. It was a simple process, each week we introduced each staff member that was interested in participating to someone else in the organization, and invited the pair to get coffee together. It was a fun, and phenomenally efficient way to break down silos and to build a more cohesive team across the entire organization.
As I was getting ready to return to the States, I wrote a short blog post, . Within just a couple days the Nesta head of communications approached me and told me I had to write a follow-up piece - my blog post had become the single most visited page in the history of Nesta. I convened two guest blog posts from across the globe (Colombia and the Netherlands) on Serendipity and wrote a summary of the conversations that I had had over that week.
Upon returning to the US, I began the hard road of converting the idea into a startup. I joined a technology company called Trackmind Solutions where we developed , a platformed geared towards automating and scaling 'Randomised Coffee Trials.' Over the past five years we have been highlighted in Harvard Business Review, US News and World Report, the Connected Commons, and the Huntington Post. We also won an employee engagement award for our work with the International Federation for the Red Cross and Red Crescent.
Among my own blog posts, two that have received significant attention are: and . Spark Collaboration continues to grow as a business with clients across the globe (Americas, Australia, UK) in the government, nonprofit, and for-profit sectors. In parallel to this, in 2016, I started a PhD in Sociology at the 5X社区视频 of Minnesota, where I am also a fellow of the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change. Last summer, my adviser and I were supported by the UMN Human Rights Lab to conduct research on the peace process in Northern Ireland. I am currently conducting dissertation fieldwork in Colombia on peace building initiatives.