Caravan Studios: How Did We Get Here
•Download as PPTX, PDF•
3 likes•1,223 views
The document discusses plans for Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup Global, to create a public good app house. It proposes obtaining apps through technology activists, community-identified and funded development, and corporate donations. Challenges would incentivize certain app categories. Input from NGOs would inform app development. Distribution would be through the TechSoup Global marketplace. Sustainability concerns include maintenance costs, managing donations and ensuring adoption beyond downloads. The goal is to make the web more local and configurable through community-focused solutions.
Recommended
More Related Content
What's hot
What's hot (8)
Viewers also liked
Similar to Caravan Studios: How Did We Get Here
Similar to Caravan Studios: How Did We Get Here (20)
More from Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup
More from Caravan Studios, a division of TechSoup (20)
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Caravan Studios: How Did We Get Here
- 2. John Cleese said, and I’m paraphrasing:
- 3. Creativity happens when you’ve been resting your mind against a problem for a long time. http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/
- 4. Which is another way of saying:
- 6. 1.
- 7. There are issues. http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html
- 8. And there are problems. http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html
- 9. We can’t confuse the two.
- 10. Technology can illuminate issues.
- 12. Technology can identify problems.
- 14. Technology can prompt needed actions.
- 16. 2.
- 17. Caterina Fake in How Augmented Reality Might Really Work
- 18. We have a lot of tools that help with the expansive bit.
- 19. And that forced us to get good at this bit.
- 21. Now, we need to get good at making the web smaller.
- 22. At making the web local.
- 23. At making the web configurable.
- 24. At making the web fit in our pocket.
- 25. 3.
- 26. And that means we need to stop thinking about the web.
- 27. So, where does that leave us?
- 28. We’ve gotten good at a combination of big and precise.
- 29. We need to get better at the platform.
- 30. At letting people use the platform.
- 31. And we need to get better
- 32. at making the web smaller.
- 33. Now we’re getting to Caravan Studios.
- 34. We want to make the web smaller.
- 35. We want you to forget about the web.
- 36. How?
- 37. By providing solutions for communities.
- 38. The Public Good App House.
- 39. How can we create an environment in which NGOs can inform the development of apps? And benefit from them?
- 40. We are going to define a repeatable methodology to organize input from the sector.
- 41. We will use that information to get apps from three main places. 1. Technology activists. 2. Community-identified and funded development. 3. Corporate donations.
- 42. 1. Technology activists. • Partner with Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America, Campus Party and other event organizers. • Hold our own hackathons • In partnership with a corporation • In partnership with an NGO • Use challenges to incent development in certain categories.
- 43. 2. Community-identified and funded development.
- 44. 3. Corporate donations • License apps that have been created for social good. • Development of community-identified products. • Provide input from the field to CSR efforts.
- 45. There are two big areas to tackle with regard to scale. • Broad-based NGO input. • Engineering oversight and quality control.
- 46. We also need to closely monitor sustainability. • Distribution in the TechSoup Global marketplace. • Cost of maintaining and enhancing a variety of code. • Cost of managing community donations and input. • Define adoption as more than a download.
- 48. Which is another way of saying:
- 49. Everything in this deck is already wrong.
- 50. Caravan Studios is a division of TechSoup Global, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
- 51. We hope you will connect with us at: @caravanstudios http://caravanstudios.tumblr.com and @techsoup http://www.techsoupglobal.org
Editor's Notes
- http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/
- Again with the paraphrasing. But here’s the reference: http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html
- Again with the paraphrasing. But here’s the reference: http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html
- From: http://ilovemountains.org/
- From: http://seeclickfix.com/kansas_city
- From: http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/35097/?p1=A1
- This isn’t just about holding the event. We have to develop a framework that allows technology activists to donate their code to the Public Good App House. To that end, we are meeting with creative commons to get an appropriate license which is one way that we can explicitly identify donation. We also need to describe how this donation will work in the field.We believe that challenges are a tool that can create urgency. We’ve used in the past to incent people to surface their work and to help provide funding so that that work can move forward. We have some open questions about using challenges in this model:Is money the best incentive? Research would indicate that paying volunteers depresses volunteerism. So, in this model, we want to do things that contribute to the reputations and connections of volunteers. This might include: creating badges that allow participants to identify themselves as contributors, ensuring that credit to the original development team persists in all versions of the apps, partnering with an organization like LinkedIn to create some recognitions that can so up on that site, partnering with corporations to provide access to a community of experts to showcase the developed appsHow done do we need an app to be to take it on?Can the original engineers serve as some kind of advisory committee?
- Safe Night is done with seed funding from Microsoft but with support from other corporations and foundations as well – Vodafone Americas Foundation, Blue Shield of California Foundation. In addition, we are continuing to do fund development.The project as an advisory group that includes community members. We are currently in the process of finalizing development.We are also selecting the pilot group and getting them the necessary information to bring them on to the project.Finally, as we’ve talked about this with broader community members, we’ve identified two other places for development:Human traffickingParoleesWe are also going to fund the quick development of some small apps for the domestic violence, and adjacent communities – the first will be a panic button that works as a web part in sharepoint.
- This is still very nascent but we know that it’s something that we are hearing and we would like to begin exploring so that we can understand what is necessary for this to work.
- The wiki is a repository. But we need a way that people can vote up a particular problem as one that has more urgency around it. We also need to make sure that these problem identifications stay open enough to have a robust set of possible solutions. This isn’t a place, necessarily, for one-to-one development of solutions.Building out from adjacent communities. Providing feedback to those communities when apps are developed and adopted.Donating code is a discrete act that we can ask people to do. But how do we judge that code and then finish it? It seems like takes a community of engineers who would be willing to provide feedback in certain areas. I think there are some open source governance models that could apply here (imagine in different technical areas we have a board who votes on whether a set of code will be committed, so to speak, to the public good app house; which begs the question of what we do with the rest of the code).We are building these initial processes in ways that will help us define that.