mySociety

Development Resource Tool

FROM: Stu Smith

What NEED does this meet?
I serve on a variety of boards and organizations in the not for profit community that produce special events to raise funds and awareness of the mission and achievements of these agencies, and each event requires building all the resources from scratch. I've always dreamed of having a database tool that could be a sliding scale subscription type resource available to all not for profits and the providers of goods and services they connect with to produce these events.

What is the APPROACH?
To build an online interactive subscription database resource that small not for profits could access for goods and services necessary to produce their special events.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
Almost every not for profit has some form of a development officer or team that devotes most of their time to creating and managing special events to raise funds and awareness, to attract media attention, recruit volunteers and board members and to build ongoing relationships that keep their work known to the community they serve and are part of.

What is the COMPETITION?
I've seen a faltering endeavor called SFGoodworks.com but the founder says he ran out of money. I'd love to find something already in use so I could forget my idea and use theirs.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
I imagine the initial costs would be building an effective interactive database and beta testing it. I don't know the costs, but I know that programmers need to be paid and there are costs for creating a legal entity, building a model and launching it. My hope is that some company might be interested in a grant for development.

ACT - Activist Communications Tool

FROM: Teresa Crawford

What NEED does this meet?
Activists around the world have an overwhelming need to process, package and disseminate information to engage, insprire and motivate supporters, allies and other activists. Existing tools are not easily adapted to integrate SMS, blog, e-mail and fax to support information campaigns. ACT would build an adaptable, scalable platform that integrates these tools and make them useful for activists.

What is the APPROACH?
The tool integrates two currently widely used tools – e-mail and fax - and two under utilized but potentially powerful tools – SMS and blog – into one low resource, easily used software tool that will help organizations streamline and maximize the impact of their information campaigns. ACT would be a completely client managed solution that depends on existing external blog, SMS, fax servers and services with the costs paid by the activist.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
Using ACT activists will be able to better manage their campaigns and improve the quality of the relationship they have with their constituents, supporters and other activists. It also lessens the information overload and decreases activists reliance on outside consultants and technical support to harness ICTs for their campaigns. The anticipated outcome is the increased likelihood that individuals, organizations, networks and movements campaign goals are achieved more quickly and on a larger scale.

What is the COMPETITION?
There are no exisiting Open Source services such as this and only a handful of expensive proprietary systems.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
A team already exists of developers and designers in New York, San Francisco, Amsterdam and Sofia, Bulgaria who are prepared to develop the tool. Non profit technology assistance providers in Central and Eastern Europe, Sub Saharan Africa and the Balkans are ready to roll out the tool. Total cost is 150,000 USD.

Support Groups

FROM: Damon

What NEED does this meet?
Provide software & webspace to make it simple for new virtual support groups to be created & maintained.

What is the APPROACH?
Something like phpwebsite could be used to provide useful, interactive websites that are easy to maintain.

Some of phpwebsite's features: news, calendar, comments, photoalbums, FAQ, and polls. See http://phpwebsite.appstate.edu/.

It could also use mailman for providing email discussion forums.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
There are lots of small charities that may like to have a virtual support group but don't have the resources to create & maintain one.

We could make it so that a new support group website could be created with practically a single click.

What is the COMPETITION?
There are lots of support groups out there, e.g. see http://www.patient.co.uk/selfhelp.asp

But they may not have the range of features that could be made available with phpwebsite or similar tools.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
It may need some programmer time to tailor something like phpwebsite
for the needs of support groups.

The other cost is the bandwidth & sysadmin/maintenance.

Event Registration System

FROM: Tim Aumann

What NEED does this meet?
Charitable groups run events all the time that require to sign up - anything from a class or seminar to summer camp programs and trips. Each charity currently buys or develops software for managing these events (or worse, different sowftare for each type of event!). The idea would be develop a flexible, open-source system that a charity could use for event registration.

What is the APPROACH?
This approach is distintive in two ways. First, by offering the service for free, you free up charitable resources. Second, by offering a flexible yet standard method for event management, you make the entire event management process easier for the charity.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
People will be able to sign up for events that interest them easily and quickly online. Charities will not have to expend resources developing event management systems.

What is the COMPETITION?
Not that I know of. There are event management packages that can be purchased from for-profit organizations.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
It depends on how flexible you want to make it. With flexibility comes expense. A simple "sign me up for this one-off class of seminar" application would be cheaper than system that could also handle signing you up for multiple classes at different times at the same event. Same with if you add in a mehtod for online payment. But overall, it should not be too expensive. Probably a couple of man-months or so to develop and code. Using open-source toosl such as Java and MySQL would cut the operational expenses.

Virtual Town

FROM: Adam Retter

What NEED does this meet?
Aimed at small towns and communitys - not really suitable for large cities unless broken down into areas.

What is the APPROACH?
Develop a website that is a virtual representation of a town, i.e. a map of the town possibly 3D. Users in the town can find other people in the town and communicate with them by clicking on their house. etc. Users can opt in and upload pictures of the outside of their house to improve the map etc. Additional software could show when users in the town are online by adding flags to their maps. Acts as a community portal with forums, voting, local news etc. Focuses around the central idea of the map/3d representation of the town.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
Improves communication within the community, benefits community spirit and interaction in small communitys for example rural areas.

What is the COMPETITION?
not that im aware of!??

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Not sure yet - probably not that expensive. most data will be input by community users themselves.

Community Portal

FROM: Roger Holmes

What NEED does this meet?
The best content on the web is generated by non-technical people from home, whether for economic reasons (eg ebay, loot), special interest (the thousands of sites and newsgroups on every topic under the sun) or community/social (friends reunited, up your street, millions of blogs). This project would harness this, focussed around communities, and would include local info generated by local people (I know, I know - first person to mention The League gets a clip round the lug), such as where to live, where to eat, where to go out, who to vote for, where to go to school,how to recycle, how to carshare, whatever).

Community portals and interest areas inside would be generated by whoever wants to do so, for whatever purpose, but the organisation of communities & topics, searching tools etc., would be provided centrally and be very effective. It would allow downloads, mulitmedia, chat/IM, community SMS/MMS tools, blah blah. Similar to Yahoo groups, Friends reunited, etc, but organised completely around your local community.

Like upyourstreet, but all communities, topics and content generated by its users. The \'brand recognition\' that is being generated by mySociety is very important to achieving critical mass (friendsreunited for communities). It can also be a launchpad for lots of related proposals - car sharing, lets schemes, local lobbying & political organisation, etc. In fact, you could view it as the end-user companion to this site

What is the APPROACH?
Lots of open source software available to do this - linux, tomcat, jetspeed, mysql, etc. Simple scalable architecture using cheap commodity hosting.

The biggest issue will be how to moderate it.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
It\'ll be the homepage of choice for people using the internet, provide an easy way for people to find out what\'s going on in their local area, an easy way for people to organise, share, etc.

What is the COMPETITION?
There must be, but in terms of a nationwide network of community-based portals generated and maintained by its users (rather than content mostly provided by a commercial operation), I don\'t know of any

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Easy and cheap to build, more difficult to establish critical mass and momentum, moderation will take some thinking about - anyway, pretty easy to build.

Initial implementation - maybe 2-3 people for 3 months, hosted on a couple of linux servers in a commercial hosting setup - maybe £3k/year on 2 dedicated servers that can easily be added to as traffic grows

An Open Source eAdvocacy Toolkit

FROM: Mike Gifford

What NEED does this meet?
There are lots of groups out there which need to have access to better lobbying tools. Going to a third party solution will work for some NGOs, but often they are too expensive for smaller organizations. There need to be more Open Source eAdvocacy tools out there for activists to use.

What is the APPROACH?
Well, we've started by bundling ePetition & eAction (email/fax) tools into our CMS, Back-End.org. There's a lot more which we need to do though to make the Contact Management tools more useful from a campaign perspective. We'd like to see a more integrated package to allow individuals to sign up on a ePetition & then be sent a followup message from a campaigner suggesting that they can email their MP.

We're working to promote this tool & look for support from other organizations who might be able to assist in better integrating this tool for campaigners & doing more usability/documentation work so that campaigners can get it off the ground more quickly.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
They won't have to either start off creating this application from scratch or go to a more expensive third party to have an online lobbying force.

I'm also hoping discussions around the eAdvocacy toolkit can lead to us all having better applications.

What is the COMPETITION?
There isn't a similar Open Source tool out there. Certainly not one that is both being actively maintained or is GPL compatible.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Hard to put a price tag on this. As with any online venture you can spend an eternity on it, always making it better.

I'd say that $10-20,000 would go a long way to having a solid, integrated, documented eAdvocacy toolkit built on our existing framework.

Activist Portal

FROM: E. Normand

What NEED does this meet?
The need for people to communicate and organize activist events, demonstrations, protests, and other actions. The need for citizens of the world to voice their concerns about the directions humanity is taking.

What is the APPROACH?
The plan is to provide a Web Portal that provides (free):
-secure (encrypted), anonymous email to users.
-mailing lists, forums, etc, which are created by the users and can be optionally password protected
-web space for pictures, documents, etc.
-news (again, provided by the users)

What are the BENEFITS to people?
The site will link activists from around the world in a secure, user-driven way. Freedom of information.

What is the COMPETITION?
There are other CMS's out there that provide political news. But I have not found one that gives the individual activist as much power (and hence, freedom) to participate in it as a part of a community.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
Simple to implement in an existing framework such as Zope. Would require many email addresses. Basically self-managed.

Road Body Count

FROM: Julian Todd

What NEED does this meet?
Friends and relatives of all road victims have a strong common interest to see justice done, and for the deaths to not be in vain. This website would serve three purposes:
(1) As a catharsis for the relatives to have an on-line memorial;
(2) As a emailing-list forum for the group of acquaintances of each victim to share news and pressure on the progress of the official investigation, the court case, and the lenient sentencing;
(3) As a count-meter which people can put onto their web-pages to keep track of the rate of road deaths as they occur -- the results of part (1) gives the faces behind the statistics.
Input can also be filed on the basis of cited official press releases where no family has come forward.

What is the APPROACH?
It's iraqibodycount.com brought back home.

What are the BENEFITS to people?
It's a virtual cemetary where bodies are buried in cyberspace in a meaningful manner that builds a memorial like the WW1 graveyards in France that were supposed to remind us not to do that kind of slaughter again.

What is the COMPETITION?
It's already been done, of course.
http://www.roadpeace.org/internetmemorials/index.html

Unfortunately, they're bound by the libel laws to behave responsibly in the eyes of the official society. The government is seen as the rightful body for collating and taking the passion out of the statistics, so all this would be duplicating their work, on the basis of which they set their enlightened and optimal policy.

This concept extends to other fields, such as smoking deaths.

What BUDGET & LOGISTICS are required?
This takes commitment and energy of the kind some people get when their best friend gets killed.

Technically, the most important factor is an extensible data-format which records what the public knows about the death and the subsequent legal procedings. Everything from the cost of the burial, to the name of the defending legal counsel, to a diary of tactics they use to reduce the charges could be included in such a way that it is easy to compile a database that is of substantial campaign value.