Projects

From Change

If you have any ideas or would like to get involved please contact socialchange@gethos.net.

Contents 1 Social & Environmental Data Exchange 1.1 Related 2 Non-profit Networks 2.1 Related 3 Social & Environmental Think Tank 4 Decentralised Governance of "The Commons"

Social & Environmental Data Exchange

Vision: create a single system for collecting, modeling and diseminating social and enirvonmental metrics.

To effectively manage social change we need to have a clear understanding of the problem. The first step to understanding a new problem is to gather relavent data. However, this seems to be an area that has not been given the due attention by the non-profit sector. What we would really like to see is a global data exchange that can be used to record, share and analyse social & environmental data.

This is a huge undertaking and there are a number of factors that should be considered:

• sharing of data across organisations
• how to build models that enable the data to be interpreted
• ensure the appropriate level of local control
• ensure the appropriate level of decentralised management
• aggregate all related data into a single view irrespective of the source
• tag and index data to facilitate finding communities of interest, model creation and aggregation
• open to all sectors and any regions world wide
• ensure easy visualisation

I believe that the key to the success is for:

• non-profit organisations to explicitly be involved and manage or access the data that is relevant to them,
• the information be shared with all participants and the public at large, and that
• it should be easy to start tracking new types of data

This is in contrast with a third party gathering data across regions or sectors but without integrated feedback into the related organisations. It is also in contrast with an organisation maintaining their own private set of data that can not be easily shared with other organisations.

In effect we want start building a world wide network that provides the mechanisms for world to become aware of its state of health.

Related

• worldometers - a very simple demonstration of various social and environmental metrics
• data gathering - discussing the difficulties in SA municipality due to poor data
• NASA World Wind - potentially useful for presentation of data
• Exchange Network
• Open Philanthropy Exchange
• GEO - Global Environment Outlook portal
• World Changing

(planning)

Non-profit Networks

Vision: study the networks of relationships and patterns inherent in the non-profit sector.

There are various directories of non-profit organisations such as Prodder. However, these do not attempt analyse the structure inherent in this list and provide a richer global view. That is, there may be a number of ways of viewing this list and uncovering networks and hierarchies that will help non-profit organisations to understand where they fit into the bigger picture.

This project hopes to capture this data in a way that will make it easier understand the overall coverage that non-profit organisations provide. This coverage may be both in terms of geographic coverage as well as skills or focus areas.

Furthermore, the project hopes to uncover relationships that may exist between organisations. These relationship might indicate the existence of process chains and dependencies between organisations. With this information organisations will hopefully be in a better position to specialise and collaborate with other organisations.

With these views it should become possible to identify gaps that need to be filled, or areas where there is too much slack. These gaps may exist relative to different areas of need, geographic distribution or be dependency gaps in a larger process.

Related

• What is Network Analysis?
• Prodder SANGONeT directory
• Social networks

Social & Environmental Think Tank

Vision: create a stategy center for tackling social and environmental problems and generating ideas and theories

For example:

• find ways of strengthing patterns in social networks through policies and technologies.
• find ways of measuring social and environmental health indicators and feeding this back into the social network.
• investigate the psychology of what keeps people interested, brings people to act together etc.

Decentralised Governance of "The Commons"

Vision: create processes and mechanisms that make it easier for members of the public help with the management of the commons

e.g. put digital tags onto traffic lights so that a simple cell phone application can be used to log a fault for a traffic light The rate of handling of faults can then be directly monitored and the appropriate public departments and politicians can be held accountable