At the Socialcamp in Berlin last weekend, a session dealt with “social business 2.0,” which turned out to be an intense and inspiring discussion on open innovation for appropriate technology through crowdsourcing – a sentence with many buzzwords. Essentially, many questions were raised, but among those were: How can innovative solutions and their implementation be coordinated through the web? And, what is the role of the web and which are its limitations? I hope this post may trigger some answers in the comments!

Appropriate technology development through the web?

Photo by Todd Huffman (CC BY 2.0)

A group of people who met over at the Betterplace platform – a German peer-to-peer aid platform –  and whom did not know each other before, founded a project request to build an new innovative toilet waste water system. Of course, there are many of such solutions out there already, but in their case, the group has no technical skilled members and it, therefore, seeked for people with a technical solution to help them out. I keep the description rather short, because the main discussion was more about the different dimensions of crowdsourcing. So, how such a complex, technical advanced project can be done through the web?

Definition of Appropriate Technology according to Wikipedia:
“Appropriate technology is technology that is designed with special consideration to the environmental, ethical, cultural, social and economical aspects of the community it is intended for.”
And, according to Oikos:
“Appropriate Technology is technology that creates minimal environmental impact while serving basic human needs. Uses the simplest level of technology that can effectively achieve the intended purpose in a particular location.”

Crowdsourcing vs. Community building
It seems that, within the discussion, the term crowdsourcing is understood very differently. Can you even crowdsource a technical solution? Can you mobilize a crowd of engineers or do you need a community? Dan Woods asks “Does crowdsourcing exist as it is popularly conceived?” and replies “Yes, it does, but it doesn’t have anything to do with innovation.”

So I think you need to have a community involved in such a project, otherwise how could you motivate people to participate and evaluate such a solution voluntarily?

But then again, we realized we focused too much on the solution and too little on implementation. One needs to focus on the implementation and on what the people who are using it really want. There is the famous failure of the solar cooker, which led to eye injury from its parabolic antenna and ignored that what people wanted was to cook in the evenings.

But, for appropriate technology aren’t the people living in the local context the real experts? How can a bridge be build between scientist and local practitioners?
There are interesting platforms, which can be used in many different ways to use the web for innovation:

• Appropedia is a site for collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development.
• Nabuur, where volunteers worldwide help to find solutions for villages.
• Scientist without borders
• Innocentive, a platform to find scientific solutions with a for-profit purpose.
• Social Innovation Camp is an experiment in using social technology for social change

Connecting the local and global: Local vs. global knowledge
These four initiatives have very different approaches and do not necessarily aim to open innovation. Who owns the solution and who decides for the solution to be implemented? The discussion goes onto whether it is possible for the technical part of the solution to separate the solution in different parts? Or would that mean competition? But what if each engineer has different solutions, then which one should be taken? Clearly, you need expert knowledge, but it is even more important for such a project to learn together, on the path for a such a solution and to be open to all problems and feedback.

So, peer-to-peer aid has to do a lot with peer-to-peer learning. But to be inclusive is quite tricky as many rural areas in developing countries have no easy access. There is an interesting initiative by Stephan Wolak to make this link through mobile phones and connect the local to the global.
Do you know any more examples? What is your perspective for the potentials and limitations of such crowdsourcing efforts for open innovation?

No related posts.

One of the greatest things about the Internet is that you can get in touch with people worldwide. I remember that back on the day I chatted for the first time and read from bluemoon11 that the sun was shining in Sidney. Twelve years ago that seemed breathtaking, but today it is rather amusing. Simultaneously, in the past, time volunteer engagement in other countries was a job quite difficult to tackle. You either knew someone or had friends from within, who were involved in a project, or got convinced by the volunteer in the pedestrian walk to donate money to their organization.

This has changed quite a lot, with fascinating new ways to individually engage on a peer to peer basis. Nowadays you can not only choose your donor, but also get yourself involved and follow the whole project and its outcome (e.g. Globalgiving or Kiva). There are also many more ways to engage such as the global neighbourhood Nabuur, where not everything is just about money, but also about the expertise that thousands of volunteers worldwide bring to the community. The social web has unleashed a huge wave of massive collaboration for social good already difficult to oversee. Being it science without borders, or working jointly on the first open source ecological village, or individually start their own little fundraising project, a small Facebook group, and ask for further action.

That brings up the questions: What organization will and can play in the future? We are slowly moving into ad-hoc peer-to-peer voluntarism independent from organizations. A nightmare for a classical fundraising approach. Certainly, organizations which depend on personal donations and mobilization of members will have a tough time if they do not include their audience.

But lets come back to new ways of volunteering. No doubt it is and will always be difficult to come up with new projects to fund, but there are now many existing projects which developed around all types of volunteer work efficiently. In many of this cases, costs are minimal and the output much higher thanks to all the expertise from participants. This is the case for a project outline not only written by two experts, but in a Wikipedia kind of fashion by numerous volunteers, which highlights all kinds of experiences. Will the chances of success be higher, or is the complexity of the project setting overwhelming? I imagine the more expertise there is, the better the project can be implemented. Look at the Katine project by the Guardian, where suddenly a project is portrayed from all different angles.

Another promising aspect of micro-volunteering can be seen on pages such as microvoluntarios.org and extraordinaries.org. In the first, volunteers can contribute with small tasks, which seems also attractive to companies, who donate the time of their employees. In the second, you can even donate through your mobile phone from wherever you are. Giulio Quaggiotto wrote a nice blog post about it.

Waiting for the bus and have nothing better to do than play around with your phone? Games are no longer the only options – now you can volunteer. The Extraordinaries (hat tip: Chris Kreutz) “delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.” Here’s some examples of what you could do while waiting for your doctor’s appointment: translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva); transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness) or help immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL). A nice example of tapping into the collective “cognitive surplus” for social innovation purposes.

So, not mass, but micro-collaboration might be next big thing. There are many examples which show that this could have working results even though, so far, only a minority knows about these new ways of engaging. Donating was yesterday, engaging yourself is next.

No related posts.