Session 1: Social Impact

Reviewers: Haney Armstrong, Jonathan Peizer, Tessie Guillermo,

Maps 2.0

Expert Reviewer Questions:

• How do you grow the accidental GIS techie's GIS skills?
• How do you apply the information to take action so people can make change?
• Availability to non-English speaking and disabled users?
• What about partnerships with nonprofit networks to get the tools out there? How do you get the Community of Practice to think about application of using it?
• If you build it will they come?
• How will you influence users to make use of the tools? What are the training and outreach strategies?

Response:
They will be forming communities of practice and working with organizations like Aspiration. They will take the model of what they have done in the field during disasters. The approach they will take is to put people together and get out of the way. This has worked for information between individuals and organizations during disasters. It will be self-forming groups. Also admits "We don't have all the answers."

They hope to find the experts and allow the teams to form and exchange information in the discussion with accidental techies. "We facilitate the discussion and pick up on the energy in the field." The accidental techies are the prime audience for this project and they will seek out the information. Accidental techies can envision the results of using GIS but not sure how to get there. "The project is herding the mavens and super users of GIS to spread their knowledge to the users who are accidental techies."

Audience Q: How do you evangelize to nonprofits that thinking geospatially will be a benefit to them?

Maps2.0: Will be collecting use cases, and have collected quite a bit from the disaster relief community. A ping to the chat at where2.0 answers: In a mine field.

Grassroots.org Toolbox

Expert Reviewers questions:

• How will it help nonprofits build capacity around using the tools?
• How do you develop the community of users around the tools?
• To what extent are you partnering with nonprofit tool builders?
• How will you collaborate with ntaps who provide fee-based services? How do you fit in with nptaps? What is your special niche? You provide free services to whom?
• Will you go beyond US/Canada?

Response:
There is a huge gap at the bottom and it needs to get filled.
Why free? Some organizations have no budget to tech. We are serving grassroots organizations, no budget, no staff or may have a volunteer. We are not providing custom services. We are looking are low hanging fruit. "Should we have a web site?" They are aimed at low budget nonprofits.

They will create communities of practice around using the CMS. A later step

They are trying to document and integrate a lot of different tools. They are looking for a centralized panel that can be tied together. An organization with tech staff can set up drupal. An organization without tech staff, may be able to install it but not use it.

The project faces challenges in measuring social impact because the groups they serve are all different. They are gathering testimonials and computing some ROI. Need to look at how to best measure effectiveness.

Right now US/Canada have systems to determine nonprofit status. Want to work internationally, but need partners in the field to help vet the organizations.

FamilyFarmed.org

• Will the project benefit a low-income consumer? Will your project make healthy food more accessible to them?
• Who is the profile of the family farm? Are there workers on the farms who can benefit? Do you measure this?
• The potential of using your web site for organizing around food policy and healthy living? Have you thought of a strategy?
• To what extent is there some health or safety indication for the farmer?

Response:
Is this yuppy chow? Organic food has this reputation. They are proud of the fact that people are willing to pay for organic food. There are many communities where there isn't access to fresh food. The concept of "food deserts."
How do we get more safe food access? Talking about legislation. What about extending the model to McDonalds?

Why does local produce have a social impact? What are the three big ones?

-Organic food cuts down on carbon - cuts down on driving and cuts down carbon footprint
-Jobs in economic development - creates jobs
-Food access - access to fresh food, particularly low income communities

The scalability factor keeps organic expensive. Can't bring down the prices unless there is some legislative support. We need the underlying infrastructure that doesn't exist.

TakingItGlobal

• Can you give us an example of the network taking aggregate action?
• How does leadership emerge through this network? How is it evidenced? Explicit or organic?
• If you look at your web site, it isn't clear what you do.
• What has been the social impact?
• Partnering with other groups?
• How will you get more members from developing countries?

Response:
They facilitated over 30 information society campaigns with young people all over the world. They had ten young people on official government delegations. "Young people need to be empowered as contributors in the information society."

Through the project's web site, they have group collaboration features
and youth participating at a conference were able to develop materials
together.

They acknowledged the play on the wordplay doesn't work. Wanted a shorter url, but has been taken. Offered a number of statistics of how their site has enabled engagement with young people as well as other indicators.
Hired Kabissa to work with groups in Africa.

In dialogue with Internet Access Centers to distribute their site offline with CD's

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