(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for part three in the coming days.)

I briefly introduced the GCW in my first post.  For more details, please check out a short primer that I drafted, which discusses its high-level mechanisms, functions, and goals.  My thinking evolves by the second, and I’m talking with lots of people to figure out the nitty-gritty of how this framework would actually work.  As I do so, I’m happy to see that projects in the spirit of mine are starting to emerge.  Here are three recent examples:

1. The November / December 2008 issue of Foreign Policy spotlights Raj Kumar’s Development 2.0 project, devex.com, which allows site members to, “depending on their level of access, post projects, form networks based on common interests, browse and monitor upcoming bids, find job opportunities, and get in touch with experts on the ground…At the heart of the site, though, is its massive projects database, which currently lists more than 47,000 projects on everything from rural sanitation in Bangladesh to policing in the Palestinian territories – searchable by region, country, donor, project type, or status.  By aggregating this information in one place, Kumar says, Devex gives everyone a chance to find out about opportunities, not just the well-connected…”
2.  MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence just announced an initiative to harness “collective brainpower and computing power” in the service of addressing global challenges.  The “center is developing an online deliberation tool that allows experts in a wide range of fields to get together to share ideas.  Unlike existing online discussion forums, the Climate Collaboratorium requires users to catalog their contributions and connect them to points that have already been made.  Such ‘argument maps’ help eliminate the repetitive, unhelpful comments and tangents that render most online discussion forums unhelpful.  The researchers are also connecting their deliberation tool with computer-based climate models, so users’ suggestions about different parts of the problem can be more easily combined and tested.”
3. The World in 2009, a publication of The Economist, profiles a digital mapping project that  aims to improve how money is spent in Africa: “The kind of maps which in the past had been  held to ransom by secretive African governments will pop up in African internet café in 2009.  Many will be annotated ‘wiki’ style, with layers of information added and verified by  an online community: street names for all, distribution of infant deaths for development workers, livestock density for agricultural officials, Catholic primary schools for a local bishop, and YouTube videos on the best snorkeling spots for tourists…[by using digital maps] teams of epidemiologists working together with medical workers texting in information from their mobile phones will do a better job of tracking exotic pathogens before they become mass killers.  Similarly, aid workers in 2009 will use digital maps for real-time information on famines and conflict, starting with an acute famine in Ethiopia.”

What these undertakings, among others, demonstrate is that a GCW could be an immensely powerful tool for addressing global challenges.  For the most part, they’ve tended to focus on specific global challenges or specific countries.  We need to go a step beyond and focus on the big picture – all global problems in all countries.  

(Editor’s Note: Ali joins us from the Carnegie Endowment and has prepared a three-post series on his suggestion for a Global Challenges Wikipedia, stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming days.)

I’m new to the Wikinomics blog, so I thought that I’d say a few words about myself.  I graduated from MIT last year with degrees in Political Science and Management, and now I’m a Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, a think tank in D.C. 

I recently entered Change.org’s competition to propel ten ideas to the fore of the Obama administration’s agenda.  Although my proposal to establish a global challenges Wikipedia didn’t make the cut (it came in 66^th place out of about 8,000 ideas), it generated a lot of interest amongst NGOs, consulting firms, and policy organizations.  Here’s the short (and kind of wonky) idea description that I submitted to the Change.org team:

There are currently about 20 global challenges (for example, climate change and infectious diseases) and 200 countries.  A “global challenges Wikipedia (GCW)” would empower us to address those challenges efficiently and systematically.  It would have three parts:  

1.  The global challenges repository (GCR) would be a 20 x 200 matrix.  Its cells would contain
   (a) A history of that global challenge in that country;
   (b) An inventory of the players – the international institutions, governments, businesses, NGOs, and individuals – that are addressing it, and how; and
   (c) A profile of the issue, financial, and logistical networks between these players.   Government-commissioned expert teams, one per global challenge, would ensure the accuracy of contributions to the GCR.
    

    

2. The solutions portal would also be 20 x 200.  Its cells would contain
   (a) Descriptions of policy initiatives that have been successfully deployed against that  global challenge in that country in the past;
   (b) A thread on how to address that global challenge in that country; and
   (c) A thread on how the aforementioned players can collaborate without replicating each other’s efforts and wasting resources.  The expert teams would ensure that contributions offer solution-oriented comments. They would evaluate the ability of the solutions that have worked for a given country to be tested in and applied to others [(2)(a)].  They would also monitor the discussion threads [2(b), 2(c)] to identify areas of consensus and accordingly articulate new solutions. 

    

3. The case studies of past successes and write-ups of new solutions would be inputted into a 20  x 200 solutions repository, which would offer a dynamic pool of insights for application to new challenges.

The impetus behind the GCW is simple – one of the main problems that we face in addressing global challenges is that there are too many players in the game.  It seems like not a day passes without the announcement of a new NGO that’s devoted to mitigating global poverty or promoting corporate social responsibility.  This outpouring of awareness, enthusiasm, and effort is, of course, wonderful in theory.  The problem comes, however, when these players start clashing – sometimes because they’re unaware of each other and sometimes because they compete with each other.

A subtler, but no less important problem is the uniformity (or lack thereof) of their objectives.  Global poverty offers a great illustration.  Some players want to tackle it in a specific country.  Others want to address it in a specific region.  Yet others want to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals.  Complicating matters further is that there’s often a conflation of goals.  For example, reducing global poverty and promoting global development are often interchanged even though they have very different meanings.  Collaboration is far harder, and far less productive, if the collaborating parties don’t have the same end goal in mind.

Our task, then, is to rein in the chaos and make the problem-solving resources that we have – people, technology, and money being the big three – as efficient and productive as possible.

–

That’s part one! What do you think?  Please feel free to leave a comment below, or contact me at awyne@alum.mit.edu. I look forward to hearing from you! 

For about as long as corporations have been the dominant form of value creation in society, they have been viewed as enemies by social activists. Naomi Klein’s No Logo documents the rise of a social movement in the 1990s that is specifically anti-corporation. The 2003 book and film The Corporation has taught a generation of socially concerned youth that corporations act, by flawed design, like psychopaths. “The corporate model is broken and must be changed,” is perhaps one of the most unifying mantras across the diverse range of social activists.

And here’s this guy Ben, starting a network for social change, and he incorporated it? Did he not get the memo?

Actually, I believe that this is an example of a much larger trend that is remaking the model of the corporation, blurring the line between businesses and NGOs, redistributing corporate power from shareholders to communities, and marking the beginning of a post-capitalist society.

Change.org isn’t about making money, Ben told me, but it has equity investors and a “sound business model.” The site is free and has no advertising. But rather than support themselves by raising money, they charge NGOs for some higher-end consulting services, and use that revenue to pay for the rest of their work. The hope is that their business model will allow them to become completely self-sufficient.

Change.org acts like a business, and has a business model that could be used to make money, but chooses to be concerned with social rather than monetary profit. The same idea is found in micro lending: small loans given to entrepreneurs in developing countries. These loans make money, but more importantly, they create social value.

As NGOs become more business-like, businesses are becoming more socially-responsive, because their power is being redistributed from shareholders to communities. Wikinomics argues that businesses’ value is increasingly coming from their communities. As corporations own fewer and fewer physical assets and lose their ability to control their intellectual property, employees and customers are able to bypass shareholders and recreate a business in a new image overnight. This is even more true in an era where value is created by prosumers and outside-collaborators.

In order to keep their communities, businesses need to make the case that they are contributing to positive social change. A global talent crunch is forcing corporations to compete over employees, and one of the biggest sells is providing jobs that have a meaningful social impact. Customers are increasingly making socially-informed purchases, and increased transparency is giving them more information to do so than ever before.

Naomi Klein and others saw the rise of socially-concerned brands like Starbucks, Apple, Nike, etc. as a corruption of progressive values. But what has been overlooked is the fact that, in creating these brands, these companies have handed over power from shareholders to consumers.

When Greenpeace launched its GreenMyApple campaign to get apple to become more environmentally friendly, they did not attack the company, but created a community of appreciative Apple customers who wanted the company to do a better job at espousing their values. And guess what, they won.

We are moving to an era where NGOs behave like corporations, social activists collaborate with the businesses they are trying to change, and companies get their value from their ability to attract collaborators by showing how much social good they are doing. The corporation will survive, but it will be controlled not by the owners of capital (shareholders), but by the community it serves.

A recent report on mobile technology use by NGOs that Paul blogged about last week included an innovative example of how mobile sensing technology is revolutionizing data collection.

“According to [Eric]Paulos [of Intel Research, California], in many cases our knowledge of ambient air quality is limited to ‘a small handful of government installed environmental monitoring stations that use extrapolation to derive a single air quality measurement for an entire metropolitan region.’ He argues that this ‘sparse sensing strategy does little to capture the very dynamic variability of air quality that depends on automobile traffic patterns, human activity, and output of industries.’”

A pilot program in Accra, Ghana overcame many of these issues by equipping seven taxi cabs with mobile, GPS-equipped carbon monoxide detectors. The merged data created a detailed and dynamic map of air-quality data across the city. Not only is this information valuable for researchers and planners, the taxi-drivers themselves started using the information to avoid high-pollution areas on their routes.

According to the report, “Mobile sensing represents an important shift in mobile device usage from communication tool to a ‘networked mobile measurement instrument.’” They may be on to something.

The idea of using mobile technology to enhance data collection has been around for a while, most notably in areas such as personal health monitoring and inventory management. But these uses are only starting to take off, and there seem to be many more to come.

Here are a few other examples of mobile sensing at work:

• CarTel is a project by MIT researchers that uses mobile sensor devices embedded in cars to collect data on traffic congestion and optimize travel routes.  
• A project at the University of Cambridge has equipped bike couriers with carbon monoxide detectors hooked up to mobile phones to collect air-quality data for the Cambridge area.
• Nokia’s recently released Eco Sensor Concept is a phone that collects data on the environment, weather, and a user’s health. It would also allow users to share information, enabling mass data-mapping projects.
• The BBC recently reported on a test that equipped public busses in Berlin with sensors and cameras linked, using mobile technology, to traffic control centers. “The scientists believe the data could be used to give motorists automatic warnings of traffic jams, as well as helping control centres respond to dynamic conditions on roads.”

The report lists 11 case studies in three areas: Global Health, Humanitarian Assistance and Environmental Conservation. Although I highly recommend reading the entire report here are a few highlights of the more creative ways that mobile phones have been used:

• A South African NGO called Cell-Life started an HIV/AIDS “Aftercare” program for rural and poor patients who have little access to healthcare services. A worker equipped with a mobile phone makes home visits to 15-20 patients. Data on each patient is captured and sent via text message to the organization’s database. It is then used to provide individualized care to the patient while yielding valuable information about the AIDS epidemic in each region.

• The World Food Programme piloted using text messages to alert refugees and displaced people about the availability of food aid. The project was launched in Syria, where many of the 1.4 million displaced Iraqis rely on the agency for survival. Whereas before, the WFP would need to rely on local NGOs to help with distribution, the text messaging campaign proved far more accurate and effective.

• FishMS is a service in South Africa that allows consumers to make more informed decisions about the seafood they buy. A user can text the name of a fish to FishMS and instantaneously receive a message indicating whether the species is sustainably harvested. In just over a year the service received 30 000 inquiries from concerned shoppers.

The report outlines several other case studies of how mobile technologies are allowing people to connect, self-organize or receive vital information to improve their lives. While initiatives such as the One Laptop per Child are commendable in trying to bring the information age to developing countries, it certainly seems that mobile technologies will remain one step ahead.

View the Slideshare link here.

One of the issues we discussed at length is the growing call for NGOs to embrace greater openness and transparency with regard to how they spend donor’s money and how they wield influence in developing countries. Organizations such as Intelligent Giving are giving donors more information, while others like Global Giving and Kiva are giving people the option to bypass established NGOs and provide micro-loans directly to local entrepreneurs and small businesses. The trend toward increasing transparency is putting pressure on NGOs to find new ways to maximize the impact of their efforts to address issues like poverty alleviation and climate change.

Growing transparency, in turn, means NGOs need to work smarter and harness opportunities to collaborate with all of the key stakeholders in the ecosystem, including their donors, their peers in other sectors, and the ultimate recipients of their aid. One can easily envision dozens of opportunities: from InnoCentive-like marketplaces that connect solution seekers with problems solvers (see the UN’s Solution Exchange, for example) to Digg.com-like forums where participants in the development community suggest and rank projects that require funding. Virtual worlds like Second Life could provide donors and recipients with a venue to build virtual mock-up of their projects, while e-Bay-like development auctions could provide governments, communities and individuals in the developing world with the ability to bid on the “development products” of aid agencies and NGOs. All of this NGO 2.0 activity would need to transpire in an environment where organizations worked harder to share knowledge and coordinate their activities through clearinghouses and other mechanisms that my colleague Dan Herman can elucidate.

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the sector is accepting the newfound political responsibilities that come with their growing size and influence on the international scene. New geopolitical realties have created an opportunity – and some might say responsibility – for NGOs to play a larger role in governance at local, national and international levels. Decades of participation in local and international development efforts have shown that NGOs can be effective change agents and make important contributions to decision-making with a blend of effective leadership and adequate access to information and resources. Governments have even come to rely on NGOs in many cases to help create and implement policies that better reflect the needs and aspirations of citizens. But, as with governments, NGOs will face significant challenges fulfilling their new roles competently and responsibly.

Got any NGO 2.0 examples? Let me know.