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Collective Communication, Inc. |
Count me in! |
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Collective Communication, Inc. |
Count me in! |
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That's not CIA - that is CfA, Code for America - "disruption as a public service". Recently Jennifer Wagner and I applied as an InterMix "team" for a 25,000 dollar start up grant from Code for America (CfA). It was a simple application - see the attached pdf. Odds would seem much against our getting an award, but the process of applying brought up a new idea - that we might aim to get funding in the form of a government contract. CfA is all about the use of technology in the intersection of the corporate, nonprofit, government space, so it got me thinking how we could be useful to government. In one section of the application I wrote the following: From the government point of view, the software will be particularly useful when a sense of community is needed to back up a large social project. Just as a for instance, a city might notice the latest research showing that lead in the soil correlates highly with violence in particular areas of the city. In order to mobilize the city to get the lead out, as it were, the many civic organizations, from houses of worship to universities to shopping centers and so forth could be brought in to a single InterMix discussion and the sense of big picture consensus built up online would help enormously in overcoming the fractured nature of modern society in the face to face process that would be needed to get things moving on the ground.There is a startup meme that is relevant here. Collective Impact is an insightful and successful methodology for creating social change in complex situations. A good place to begin getting acquainted with the idea is the Collective Impact article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Here you will read that the five conditions of collective success are: 1) a common agenda, 2) shared measurement systems, 3) mutually reinforcing activities, 4) continuous communication and 5) backbone support organizations. Typically a collective impact project will involve government, nonprofits and corporations. In the SSI Review write-up about the fourth condition, continuous communication, a point is made about the need (and difficulty) of building trust between all the potential partners in the project. This is where InterMix Voices of Humanity technology could be helpful in both deepening and speeding up the development of trust. The government arm interested in building a coalition with civil society and for profit entities could easily use InterMix as its listserve. We, that is CCI, could provide a hosting service, technical training for InterMix administrators and customization as needed or desired for the particular project. There is a government sponsored project
that fits the bill rather nicely here in San Francisco: Gender
Equality Principles. It looks like they have a common agenda,
shared measurement and backbone support organizations. At this point
I am not so sure about points 3 and 4 above though of course there must
be some action in those areas. Perhaps they could do with a little
beefing up in the continuous communication department. Since the
Women's Movement in the Bay Area is one of our major targets, it makes
sense we should try to connect with the government organization that is
involved, which is the San
Francisco Department on the Status of Women. Once we get through
our beta test of the software, we just might find some interest and some
income. Meanwhile, keep your fingers crossed!
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