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The GOOD Maker
Monday, April 15th, 2013
GOOD Maker is (yet another) crowdsourcing platform for organisations to pose social innovation challenges. Anyone can suggest an answer and the community votes on the best solution. Currently both US and ‘prize’ oriented, challenges range from coming up with recipes for locally sourced food, to thinking of innovative things to do with old PCs. READ MORE
Udacity
Friday, November 23rd, 2012
Udacity is a ’21st century university’ that offers free, open, online university level courses, and teaches hundreds of thousands of students. This article looks at how Udacity and similar projects have the potential to disrupt the education sector, drawing parallels between Udacity and its courses and the consequences of Napster and the MP3 for the music industry. READ MORE
Mapping corruption
Friday, November 9th, 2012
Corruption mapping has developed significantly over the past few years, supported by organisations and platforms like Ushahidi. The technology can be applied to a range of problems – from analysing bribes to tracking outbreaks of violence. This article suggests several key questions that map developers need to consider, with a short presentation highlighting some mapping examples. There’s also a further link at the base of the article to a UNDP blog post which considers the impact of such tools. READ MORE
The First Billion
Friday, September 14th, 2012
Big Society Capital have just published a survey of the Social Investment market, which they describe as ‘private finance for social good’ . Demand for this sort of investment could reach £750m by 2015, according to consulting firm BCG. (The £1bn in the title comes with heavy caveats). Much of the demand will be for personal care services. It acknowledges that the income to pay these social impact bonds comes from government spending, but then doesn’t really look at the market in the wider context of government spending and reform. Raises more questions than answers. READ MORE (pdf)
Lessons for Social Entrepreneurs
Friday, August 3rd, 2012
Al Bruno, cofounder of the Global Social Benefit Incubator, has supported over 150 social entrepreneurs in developing effective business plans. Here he offers ten ‘life-or-death’ lessons that are of great use for entrepreneurs pitching to funders or partners. READ MORE
Church or beer?
Friday, July 6th, 2012
This is a really interesting example of what you can do with the enormous volumes of geographically coded data generated by social media. It took a sample of the tweets containing the word “beer” and a sample containing the word “church”. They then mapped and analysed the results. Whilst this is a slightly silly example, it illustrates an approach that could be used in everything from marketing and fundraising through to epidemiology and urban planning. It’s cheap, powerful and easy to access. READ MORE
Crowdfunding for local places
Friday, June 8th, 2012
Spacehive is a new, UK-based crowdfunding tool for local public space projects, like parks and playgrounds. It’s a great idea, but money is only part of the problem when it comes to neighbourhood renewal. Navigating local planning and politics is complicated. Hopefully Spacehive can become a platform to help tackle these challenges, too. READ MORE
Trickle out
Friday, May 25th, 2012
Trickle Out is an ESRC project studying the contribution social enterprises are making to economic, social and environmental progress in East and Southern Africa. One of the side benefits is this directory of small social enterprises. READ MORE
Lessons worth sharing
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
TED, the Californian technology and innovation conference, has always had an open approach. This has spawned 4000 TEDx events and seen their online videos transcribed by 7,500 volunteers into over 80 languages. TED-Ed is their new platform for creating lessons and lesson plans by remixing (or ‘flipping’) their videos. They seem to be well ahead of universities here, blurring the boundaries of formal and informal education. READ MORE
Avaaz launch petition site
Friday, April 20th, 2012
The online campaigning experts at Avaaz have launched a site that allows people to build and run their own petitions. Whilst the site gives anyone access to the Avaaz technology, you have to promote it yourself. Avaaz’s success is based on its engagement with their community. The technology is secondary. The interesting question will be how issues can transition from this crowd-sourced site across to the main community. READ MORE