Change Broadcasting Channels

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The Idea:

What will change in the world because this Project happens?

People are becoming more socially responsible, and want to be up-to-date with news about social change and impact. Plus, they are self organizing in online and real world communities to work together and bring change.

CBC (Change Broadcasting Channels) allows users to select channels of social change, and receive instant news about these channels on a mobile phone through SMS or twitter. Every channel has a community of subsribers that use the community tools to promote and share big stories and events. create momentum to find solutions to problems and trigger change.

Today there are a few barriers to getting instant access to socially relevant news:

· Relevant news needs to be obtained from sites dedicated to socially responsibility.

· Most of these sites have information from blogs and RSS feeds. Very few if any, have information from global news wires.

· These sites by nature offer a pull-based model, rather than an alert-based one where the user is notified of any news of interest as it happens.

· The user does not have much flexibility in choosing the news they want to track.

The idea of Change Broadcasting Channel is to create channels of news about issues of social change, and the endpoint for these channels is your mobile phone. Twitter serves basic phones with only SMS functionality. Flurry serves phones with a data plan.

A user can subscribe to an existing channel or create their own, based on a set of keywords.

Each channel has a community which is the group of subscribers to the channel. And this community gets triggers (the SMSes/twitters from a river of news) that create momentum, driving them to address their cause.

CBC will also integrate with http://www.groundreport.com to bring real user-reporting on channels mixed with mainstream media news from Daylife.

Change Broadcasting Channels will change the world by instantly informing socially active individuals of news of their interest, eliminating any delay in action. These users are part of communities where they actively use the modern tools to bring out the most relevant stories and issues and cultivate a discussion to find solutions.

What information will people interact with to make this change?

The 4 main interfaces/data sources that people will interact with - news from http://daylife.com and http://groundreport.com and SMS/messaging capabilities from Twitter and Flurry mobs.

CBC 'Pop Demand' allows users to specify keywords of social change that they want to keep track of. Users can submit these keywords, which are evaluated and added to the social channel taxonomy. Once the request for certain keywords exceeds a certain number, this keyword becomes an official channel. Some examples channels:

* Crisis & Conflicts * Education * Energy * Social Sector Finance * Microfinance * Women's Rights * Cultural Rights * Child Rights * Human Trafficking * Poverty * Human Rights * Environment * Health * Community Improvement * Arts & Culture * Public & Social Benefit * Safety & Disaster * Employment Issues * Urban Development

A user can subscribe to one or more channels over SMS. CBC continuously polls the news for these keywords, and notifies the subscribers of the respective channels over SMS or twitter with a summary of news of those keywords. CBC uses twitter to send and receive SMS. Twitter users can send a direct message to the daylife twitter user dlfe, to recommend keywords for subsciption (eg d dlfe tax 'microfinance'). The CBC system saves the keyword and adds it to the channel request list. News messages are also sent to the users as direct messages to their twitter user ids.