• projects
  
  • HELP
  • Freecycle Network
  • Big Brothers, Big Sisters
  • Kabissa
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HELP

 

summary: we address 3 elements of humanitarian aid: rescue, relief, redevelopment

 

questions & feedback

 

Q: "Doc in a Box" - wouldn't it be cheap to send in doctors & nurses w/ backpacks full of equipment?

A: in the initial phases, that's what we do. These clinic boxes are used later in the redevelopment phase, to establish a location for providing services. They can become little community centers for even more than the medical aspects. It's also important to have a secure center where things can be locked up in disaster areas.

 

A: Telemedicine - everything is battery/solar powered. The consultation helps to provide additional expertise in making diagnoses & administering care

 

Q: services for donors?

A: ISDN/IP to bring many resources to play - enables them to tap into hospital resources, & provide live media uplinks to draw attention to the problem & enable the public to get involved with the fundraising.

 

Q: how many lives have you already saved, and how will the enhanced version increase this?

A: it's hard to say because a lot of work is a bit farther removed from life-death scenarios - e.g. water purification project.

 

A: we are creating criteria for evaluating outcomes. Here's an example of one measure we can give - through our water purification efforts after a flood in El Salvador, we impacted 45,000. We want to quantify where possible, but are careful not to overestimate.

 

Can we measure water purity & shut of the source when they're contaminated?

 

questions from the floor

 

Q: how is your organization different from Doctors without Borders; why do we need a second bureaucracy?

A: we have a slightly different focus, including the telemedine component for disaster relief. When these different organizations get in, there isn't someone to coordinate efforts between groups. We work in this area. We are working with Sahana (sahana.disasterlogistics.org) (disaster management database), which has a complete missing persons registry, registration for refugee camps, etc., leading the initiative to get this into Africa.

 

 

Freecycle Network

 

summary: we keep 4 million items/month out of landfills, and keeping 4x the height of Everest out of landfills annually. We didn't anticipate the communal aspect that has grown up from this effort, also. Freecycle is based on the premise of local communities.

 

questions/feedback

 

Q: You have done an impressive job of running the project thus far on a shoestring budget. could you grow your network larger if you had a larger professional staff? Why not grow the organization to expand the social impact?

 

A: the most involved volunteers are working more than full time jobs. We could definitely benefit from having a larger staff. We've tried 4x to design a website for the groups so we wouldn't be so dependent on Yahoo Groups, but it was impossible to do with solely volunteer efforts.

 

Q: one way you might be able to expand your staff is to partner with . For example, maybe you could partner with Habitat for Humanity, or Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to provide the furnishing.

 

A: Habitat is trying to build a reputation for sustainability as well as what they already do. Maybe we can partner with their "Habistores" (sp?) . Putting in a freestore party at the local landfill? It's been wildly successful at the 2 cities we've implemented this in. We're calling them Freecycle corrals, and hope to build them in

 

Q: what exactly is the state of the situation between you and Yahoo; why are you trying to build this new site?

A: We are very grateful for Yahoo's tools; they're easy for people to understand. They've done some work on developing a profit sharing model with Yahoo, but it's been generally difficult because of the for-profit motivations.

 

questions from the floor

 

Q: why doesn't continuing to use Yahoo work?

 

A: we can't provide the user info to other groups; e.g. we can't develop widgets for Facebook or MySpace. The basic format of Yahoo (email) makes it hard to parse and reuse information. Also can't make RSS feeds.

 

Q: why haven't you partnered with Craigslist?

 

A: we'd love to. It's the same problem with information being difficult to share due to their platform.

 

Q: plans to expand marketing?

 

A: we haven't done much in that regard, and we don’t have a plan yet, but we need to. We've done 3 press releases since we started, and that's just because we had to. It's been very local & grassroots driven. Someone suggested talking to a volunteer publicist, we think that's a great idea.

 

Q: I would encourage you to keep the barriers to getting involved (posting), to make sure it doesn't become passive (just watching RSS feeds)

 

Q: do you have any information about the inertia at the time of joining? A new user gets around 8 emails when they join; they might be discouraged

 

A: That's one of the biggest challenges of our current platform. We probably lose a lot of people out of frustration because the default for Yahoo groups is individual emails, and a Freecycle group might get a hundred emails a day.

 

Big Brothers, Big Sisters AIM (agency information management) system

 

overview: AIM will make 400 Big Brothers, Big Sisters agencies more effective. We had a grant a couple years to do an evaluation: found that participants are 46% less likely to use drugs, 50% less likely to display violent behavior. We want to do longitudinal studies when we get the chance. We also want to expand our outreach; currently it's mostly self-identified. We just started a new program to identify children of incarcerated parents. We also want to know if there a tipping point, a critical mass where we change societal patterns?

 

questions/feedback

 

Q: how will the AIM system help these outcomes?

 

A: they will help make sure everything continues to run (e.g. managing safety issues) as they scale up

 

Q: your system is very based on Microsoft technology. What will be the social impact of your tools outside of your organization?

 

A: we don't have current plans for this; there are other groups in that space already - e.g. mentoring.org. Our system is more powerful. When it's been proven and stabilized, we will look at sharing it more broadly. We hope also to eventually build a secure portal for volunteers.

 

Q: there's a huge cost of rolling out a new system in terms of training, etc. How do you balance this against direct services from the ground?

 

A: all of our training is online. The hardest part is converting their old data, because everyone has different systems; also, there is a cleanup of data (redundancies, etc). We've seen a 6 month pain period, but agencies that have come out the other side say it's worth it.

 

Q: is the system transferable to other mentorship programs?

 

A: yes, we think it wouldn't been too difficult, though we don't currently have plans to implement this

 

Q: do you have a plan for reaching out on a human level, encouraging adoption?

 

A: we know that national headquarters can't just tell affiliates what to do. We've got the early adopters encouraging other agencies to switch over. We're turning off some of the bells for the smaller agencies.

 

Q: when you deploy your new system, what's your benchmark for % of volunteers you want to get matched?

 

A: we're not sure where the ceiling is; we have an average of 30% across all our agencies. We've discovered that the main indicator for this is the length of the registration process.

 

 

Kabissa

 

overview: Our objective is to create a network of 20 web2.0 investors to hook in with our existing network of 1000 African NGOs. People working in Africa don't have the time online to figure these things out, so we think having web2.0 ambassadors would help get them up to speed.

 

questions/feedback

 

Q: what is your reach currently, what would the ambassadors do? Are you looking for funding to recruit 20 ambassadors?

 

A: they would be quarter to half-time people. What they would do is become familiar with those organizations' technology needs. We're growing at 20% annually without marketing; we think that having these ambassadors would help ramp that up.

 

Q: what's the broader long term impact after you have them established this? Also, web2.0 is demand driven; what demand has propelled this?

 

A: we took a poll of what organizations need - the #1 request was understanding new technology trends. Once they do understand what's possible, they're really excited about it.

 

questions from the floor

 

Q: can you give a specific example of how an organization will benefit from this resource?

 

A: with web1.0, African NGOs saw an opportunity to connect to the outside world. Now, with web2.0 there's an opportunity for these groups to reach out to each other and share their work.

 

Q: what training will you be providing the ambassadors?

 

A: the ambassadors will be from the organizations; they will already be familiarized with the context. We also want the ambassadors to come together face to face, and a monthly conference call to support each other. A staff member at Kabissa will be in charge of helping them to network.

 

Q: larger partnerships - beyond the 20?

A: haven't planned it out yet, but that would be great. We definitely want to partner with other organizations like Global Voices & Aspiration. We also want the ambassadors to express the needs of African organizations to open source projects.

 

Q: dealing with any negative reactions or resistance to the technology?

 

A: Privacy/security is one of our major concerns, because of the political situations of some of our members. We try to stay out of the politics themselves, and just be enablers/technology providers.