Tech Solutions on a Shoestring

For almost a year, I have been unable to generate any traction on a real solution to addressing the critical issues we currently face. This singular advancement in electrical technology will, first and foremost, reduce energy consumption by up to 40%, on a national scale, that puts $140 billion back into Americans pockets, second this new tech makes all electrical appliances optimally efficient and will increase the working life by decades, standard light bulbs are projected to last up to 50 years. The electric car could make a come back, as recharging the battery system would only take minutes, instead of overnight, this advent would lead to an immediate reduction of dependence on foreign oil, thus reducing terrorist funding. This new technology would pave a new path for solar energy proliferation, as long distance travel of electricity reaches unheard of lengths. The solution is ready now, for more info please contact Jim a:t ninety91783@mypacks.net

Hi Jim,

Can you tell us more about this tech solution. What are the next steps in making this a reality. Is funding the issue?

I want to suggest that perhaps the most interesting purpose of technology is not necessarily to save us time, money, or both (at least directly). At its best, it allows us to do things that we could not otherwise have done at all—not even for unrealistically large amounts of money. The complexity of coordinating, for example, an effort to aggregate and make broadly available all of the information compiled and made public each day by the users of idealist.org would have been prohibitive prior to widespread internet use. Dealing with the technology to set something like that up, of course, is often more costly, time-consuming and generally obnoxious than we would like it to be, but the point here is that sometimes the critical choice is not between a cheap and dirty (open-source, ad-hoc'd, etc.) solution and an expensive (proprietary, custom, etc.) one—but rather between doing a thing and not doing it.

Agreed! A lot of what we are looking at doing with technology are things that we couldn't have done before. Part of that is being able to leverage what others have built instead of recreating it all over again. Then we can create something with fewer resources and spend more time implementing change rather than creating infrastructure. We're also able to create things that are of a higher quality with the same resources in this manner.

In many ways, having a software development business behind us allow us to take greater advantage. As Six says above, it's the only way we're able to do what we're doing at all. In fact, without the technology we would never have come into being.

Charles Cameron suggested somewhere that I might be a one-man army. Well two-man in fact, since deployment of technology toward cyber-activism allows us to punch above our weight.

Our real adversaries are organised crime, the bandits and those that defend them. They now have computers too and a lot more to spend on bandwidth. DDoS attacks on human rights sites for instance, smear blogs. If we're the only activists to encoounter these, I'm very surprised. Not quite as suprised as the human rights orgs who appeal for anyone out there to understand what's happening, mind you.

Finding companies that are experts in software development (or HR, accounting, etc.) and are reliable can let you focus on the task at hand rather than deal with code or configuration.

DDoS attacks and other tech maladies can cripple your means of communicating with your users/audience. Finding a proactive ISP that can deal with those kind of issues can be a lifesaver. Sometimes they can be expensive, but more often than not, it's just a matter of finding the right fit.

Jason,

Thanks for starting this dialogue. There's a lot in here - time, money, trade-offs between online and offline. The one thing for all social entrepreneurs is the urgency we feel to focus on our core programs and deliver on our hopes and promises for a better world. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, technology displaces time, energy and accomplishment of core program goals for social enterpreneurs and organizations.

I hope I don't sound like an ad here, but I am very excited and proud of what our socially-driven venture, www.markettiger.com is trying to do. The Millenium Development Goals underly our vision and mission to give everyone in the world a fair shot at prosperity. We have pilot communities in North America, Africa and Asia started and it's really exciting to see what happens when you get technology out of the way and position it to empower people.

Our promise is to get technology out of the way for local communities and small business people so they can simply focus on growth and share in global prosperity. The communities we are working with are shocked when we show them how easy it is to set up their own online community or online business in seconds and get access to all the current collaboration tools. They get web presence, online marketing and ecommerce in a matter of seconds.

Taking down the cost barrier, we give them all this for free. They get a web page with all the current web funtionality for free. They don't have to pay google for advertising or pay high-priced tech experts to drive up their page rankings. They get all this for free AND we will give them back 80 percent of our advertising revenues. Soon, we will be launching our ad exchange that gives communities and small businesses a place to go and grab / drag and drop onto their web page the ads that they know will generate a return. No more trying to figure out all those technology choices on how to affect results online.

Going further on both cost and time, ecommerce is the big hairy monster of online business and communities. Here again, we knock them out of the way. In March, we turn up our global trade platform which gives people seamless, easy access to global ecommerce and payment processing right in our online global marketplace.

Communities and business people all over the world will be able to do trade using our ecommerce platform for free. I am so excited because when one leads with social change and focuses on improving the human condition globally, there is a limitless pallet of options to creatively empower people rather than put up yet another hunk of technology that distracts, frustrates and slows people down from their core mission.

We just launched recently so I would love to talk to anyone about our allergy to technology here even though it is at the heart of what we do.

Thanks again Jason for making tech a focus in the social entrepreneur community. I look forward to reading more.

Michael www.riseofthelittleguy.com

Hi Michael - Helping small social venture businesses and nonprofits to get a foothold on the internet is a great objective, and I'm glad to see that internet companies are stepping up to help nonprofits. Here are a couple of the programs I have found that enable nonprofits to tap into free outreach on the internet, perhaps you can add more?

eBay Giving Works http://givingworks.ebay.com/nonprofit MissionFish http://www.missionfish.org/NPMMF/npregintro.jsp PayPal Donations http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside Google Adword Grants http://www.google.com/grants/ YouTube Nonprofit Program http://youtube.com/nonprofits Facebook Causes http://apps.facebook.com/causes/about

Just a note that it seems Google and YouTube are taking about 6 months to review applications so don't expect this to be a quick fix for an immediate marketing need, but it is a great long term opportunity so you should apply right away and get the ball rolling.

As far as using the internet to facilitate getting donations, in addition to PayPal and Facebook mentioned above, there seem to be a few channels available, but I have not used any of them - perhaps someone who has can comment on which are the easiest and best to use (as far as simplicity, but also reach - do some platforms provide more exposure? Which provides the best donation widgets for your site?)

Network for Good (partnered with Yahoo!) Charity Badges (widgets you can drop on your site): https://www.networkforgood.org/pca/PcaLandingPage.aspx Global Giving (works for international) http://www.globalgiving.com/contactus/project2.html JustGive.org (you have to be registered with http://www.guidestar.org/npo/) http://www.justgive.org/html/nonprofits/faqnonprofits.html#1 Charity.com http://www.charity.com/register.shtml

Also, most of the programs above are for nonprofits that have a 501(c)(3) number. Do you or Jason have any tips for programs that help nonprofits that are internationally based or just don't have the 501(c)(3)?

Thanks Jason for this conversation to help social ventures get off the ground technically without too much upfront investment! Jill

I lead a small non profit, using technology to connect people from around the world with information I host at http://www.tutormentorconnection.org, which they can use in their own communities to help kids living in poverty. Learning to use technology as a tool has been a growing habit for the last 30 years of my life.

I worked in the advertising department at the corporate headquarters of Montgomery Ward, in Chicago, when the first Apple Lisa went on the market. Because we were changing ad diagrams so frequently, we got a computer to try to reduce some of the time it took to constantly revise ads. This was the first of 28 years of innovation in uses of technology for me.

I've found that not only can I do more, I can reach more people, at less cost, and this helps me find others who will help me do my work, thus expanding my impact. With new tools of information visualization, I can now present complex ideas, gaining even greatert support for the work I do.

The trade off is that there is a growing amount of knowledge to try to absorb, and a growing number of people to coach and facilitate. This means less face to face and telephone time, yet helps me reach more and more people.

My goal is to try to find a way to stretch the day to 30 hours. Any ideas?

Well, I can't think of anything other than a Dr. Emmett Brown modified Delorean to help squeeze 30 hours out of every day. It sounds like knowledge management tools might be helpful though. Good knowledge management software requires something none of us particularly enjoy, though: documentation. If, however, you can get your training materials set up in a good system, adding in videos or audio to make them more engaging for those being assimilated, and be consistent with maintaining the materials, the amount of time it takes to get people up and running can be decreased. Then maybe we'll only have to figure out how to cram 26 hours into each day.

Technology continually becomes obsolete. Any online solution today will be replaced by the same vendor or another. These online solutions are great in that every year we can do more: faster, cheaper, better delivery to a wider or more targeted audience etc.

The question is what is our continuous upgrade plan for online apps and data? And what is the Silicon Valley's upgrade commitment to us?

Ah, one of the great challenges that face a user of any tech service: the need o take your data with you when a better service arrives vs. a company's desire to lock you in to their proprietary format. One thing to look into before committing your data to any company's wares is the portability of that data once it has been in their system. If you can't get it out quickly and easily, don't put it in. See what open standards they support vs. what they SAY they support.

No matter how much hassle it may be in the short term, I embrace open source software. I will gladly go through a little extra work in learning how it works. By paying a person is supporting an institution that makes the software simply unavailable for those who can't afford it.

The more we are willing to work a little longer or try a little harder to make open source work for us now, the easier and more efficiently it will work for everyone in the future.