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July 05, 2009
Mobile phone sensors and crowdsourced citizen science
Finally have 1/2 a day to luxiurate in back copies of The Economist. Came across an article about mobile phone sensors and the future of data gathering. A great read and especialy apropos The Extraordinaries in its closing paragraphs:
"Some computer scientists look forward to the day when mobile phones and sensors can provide a central nervous system for the entire planet. An abundance of sensors, they believe, will lead to two things. First, the amount of data will increase, allowing scientists to build more realistic models. Alessandro Vespignani of Indiana University compares the current state of affairs to weather forecasting a century ago, before satellites had provided meteorologists with the data to build and optimise mathematical models. When it comes to problems such as tracking and predicting the spread of diseases and other environmental hazards, he argues, scientists can never get enough data.
Second, once people are able to contribute data to research projects from their mobile phones, it could provide an ideal way to broaden public involvement in scientific activities. This would be the next logical step after the popularity of web-based participation in scientific research, from folding proteins to categorising photographs of galaxies. Eric Paulos, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, predicts the rise of “citizen scientists” able to measure and sample their surroundings wherever they go. When people can report mundane variables such as the level of traffic noise in their street or the degree of air pollution at the bus stop, he argues, their outlook on science changes. “People develop a relationship with and a sense of ownership over the data,” he says. He foresees amateur experts being driven by a new sense of volunteerism, the 21st-century equivalent of cleaning up the neighbourhood park."
Every time we turn around, there seems to be another article about crowdsourcing and volunteerism. The moment is ripe.
June 17, 2009
The Knight Foundation awards major grant to The Extraordinaries!
Press Contact: Jacob Colker
(773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
Boston, MA – June 17, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce
that we have won an important grant from the John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation (http://www.KnightFoundation.org).
This is a breakthrough moment for our team, and we are incredibly
grateful to the Knight Foundation for this opportunity. With this
critical grant, The Extraordinaries will run an intensive pilot in San
Jose, California featuring our volunteer-on-demand software. Over the
next year, we'll be working closely with nonprofits and community
organizations in San Jose to engage and harness the enthusiasm of their
volunteers.
The Knight Foundation is a national foundation with local roots. The foundation seeks out opportunities that can transform both communities and journalism, works to help them reach their highest potential, and works to ensure that each community's citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.
(773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
The Knight Foundation is a national foundation with local roots. The foundation seeks out opportunities that can transform both communities and journalism, works to help them reach their highest potential, and works to ensure that each community's citizens get the information they need to thrive in a democracy.
"We're honored that Knight is giving us this opportunity" said Jacob
Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. "We are excited that our
mission to help community organizations engage their supporters through
micro-volunteer tasks fits with the Knight Foundations' objective of
empowering communities."
The Extraordinaries
delivers micro‐volunteer tasks to people whenever and wherever they are
available by mobile phone and the web, allowing organizations strapped
for funding and resources to engage and leverage their supporters.
Despite busy schedules, we all have time, usually when waiting: for the
metro, in lines, or at the doctor’s office. With these spare minutes,
we can do something extraordinary.
Got a few minutes free? Be extraordinary.
June 16, 2009
HUGE News!!! The @Extraordinaries Wins a 2009 @EchoingGreen Fellowship!!!
Press Contact: Jacob Colker
(773) 742-5515 / jacob [at] BeExtra.org
San Francisco, CA – June 15, 2009 — The Extraordinaries is excited to announce today that we have been awarded a 2009 Echoing Green Fellowship!!! Echoing Green received nearly 1,000 applications for these 14 spots, and we are incredibly honored to join the ranks of the Echoing Green Fellows community.
This year's fellows are an incredible group of people. Among the fellows are Former First Daughter of the United States Barbara Bush and her project Global Health Corps (http://www.ghcorps.org), Esra’a Al Shafei and her project Mideast Youth (http://www.mideastyouth.com), and our good friend Stephane de Messieres and his project Citizens Market (http://www.citizensmarket.org). But really, they're all incredible people, and thus we list them all at the bottom of this post.
"After seventeen rounds of review, three rounds of cuts, four rigorous personal interviews, background checks, reference checks, supporting research, and more, we're honored that our project has made it through and met the standards of such an incredible organization," said Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and CEO of The Extraordinaries. "Echoing Green is in the business of dreaming with us -- and then helping to make those dreams possible. It's an extraordinary opportunity." Colker continued.
With the 2009 class, Echoing Green has now invested over $28 million in 471 fellows since 1987, providing critical seed funding, health insurance, training, and the full backing of the entire fellows community to make these projects successful. Many organizations which Echoing Green funded at their early stages are today internationally-recognized: Teach For America, Working Today, Genocide Intervention Network, Citizen Schools, JumpStart for Children, College Summit, the Global Fund for Children, and City Year. A full description of the 2009 Echoing Green Fellows can be viewed at http://www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/year/2009 and a list with brief project summaries is attached below.
To get a better sense of the class of 2009, watch the three-minute video that is viewable from the home page of http://www.echoinggreen.org
Named after the William Blake poem, Echoing Green is a global nonprofit that supports emerging entrepreneurs who enact innovative solutions that address root causes to social problems. It is one of the only organizations solely dedicated to investing in early-stage social entrepreneurs. To drive transformative social change, Echoing Green identifies and assists some of the world’s best emerging social entrepreneurs launching new high-impact organizations. Through the fellowship program, Echoing Green supports this community of visionaries as they develop new solutions to society’s toughest problems. Founded by the leadership of the private equity firm General Atlantic in 1987, Echoing Green has supported more than 470 leaders sparking change in forty-one countries and forty-one states.
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OTHER 2009 FELLOWS
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Natalie Bridgeman – Accountability Counsel
San Francisco, California
The Bold Idea: Partner with communities harmed by international finance and development projects to hold international institutions and corporations accountable and develop new accountability systems where none exist. Accountability Counsel partners directly with communities seeking redress for harm caused by development projects and works to create broad, systemic change through the creation of a new Foreign Investor Accountability Mechanism (“FIAM”). At the grassroots level, Accountability Counsel conducts trainings regarding accountability tools and assists communities with strategies to implement those tools, including claims to accountability mechanisms and litigation.
Stephane de Messieres – Citizens Market
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Bold Idea: Leverage crowd-sourcing tools and citizen journalism to better inform consumers seeking to engage in ethical consumption and enable these consumers to use their full market power to influence environmental and social issues. Citizens Market is a user-generated website where anyone can contribute a review and a rating for any company's performance on a social or environmental issue. Consumers can access a company’s scores by searching the site or by using text messaging or a barcode scan for the product when purchasing. Citizens Market’s aim is to host a vibrant online community of 1 million information contributors.
Bethany Henderson – City Hall Fellows, Inc.
Pasadena, California
The Bold Idea: Incentivize and empower diverse, top college graduates to tackle social ills from within existing government institutions, thus ensuring our cities have leaders capable of confronting cities’ myriad challenges. City Hall Fellows serve as special assistants to senior city managers working on substantive projects. During their Fellowship, Fellows engage in an extensive curriculum to explore how their city works, why it works that way and the people, organizations and issue that impact local policy making. City Hall Fellows received over 400 applications for its inaugural cohort of twenty-one Fellows. Bethany has plans to expand to multiple cities in the US and to increase the Fellowship class size to between 250 and 500 Fellows per year.
Eric Glustrom – Educate!
Boulder, Colorado
The Bold Idea: Empower high school students in Uganda to become the next generation of socially responsible leaders through a two-year leadership curriculum and long-term mentoring that equips students to create social enterprises. Educate! disrupts the rote memorization-based education system in Uganda by equipping high school students to create social enterprises through a two-year socially responsible leadership curriculum, long-term mentoring, and an alumni network.
David del Ser – Frogtek
New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Boost the productivity and income of small shopkeepers in the developing world with affordable business tools that can be run on mobile phones. Frogtek develops simple business tools using touchscreens and barcode readers that uneducated microentrepreneurs can use. The organization partners with local community organizations, microfinance institutions, and mobile carriers to distribute the tools.
Julie Carney and Emma Clippinger – Gardens for Health International
Cambridge, Massachusetts
The Bold Idea: Enable HIV-positive individuals to improve their nutrition and health through low-cost sustainable agriculture practices. Gardens for Health International (GHI) provides legal support to communities of people living with HIV/AIDS, enabling them to form small business cooperatives and to gain access to arable land. GHI provides micro-loans to the cooperatives, delivers nutritional training and identifies and provides the initial investments for high impact agribusiness opportunities, such as tomato greenhouses, fruit tree nurseries, mushroom production and animal husbandry.
Barbara Bush and Jonny Dorsey – Global Health Corps
New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Build the next generation of global health leaders and improve the quality of healthcare services for the poor by connecting outstanding young professionals from around the world with health-focused organizations. Global Health Corps (GHC) partners with organizations with proven success but limited resources to host international teams of young professionals for a yearlong fellowship. GHC recruits outstanding fellows from the U.S. and abroad who possess skills that will add immediate value to the organization and who show strong leadership potential.
Sarah Hemminger – Incentive Mentoring Program
Baltimore, Maryland
The Bold Idea: Empower struggling teenagers to break the cycle of poverty, drugs and lack of education by surrounding them with “families” of mentors who fill critical gaps in academic and social support. The Incentive Mentoring Program (IMP) families coach life skills through activities based on three elements: academic assistance; community service; and team building. Without overburdening individual volunteers, a team of six to twelve mentors led by an experienced “head of household” can form customized solutions to the challenges these children and their families face.
Veena Ramanna – IndiaGoverns
New Delhi, India
The Bold Idea: Change the nature of political discourse in India by providing constituency and Members of Parliament performance information to voters, citizen activists, and journalists. IndiaGoverns focuses on collecting, analyzing, and organizing development data, such as investments in infrastructure and schools, and performance data in politically meaningful terms. IndiaGoverns then uses community partnerships, mobile phone technology, and the internet to disseminate the information to the electorate.
Angie beatty and Shawn Mckie – The J.U.I.C.E. Project
St. Louis, Missouri
The Bold Idea: Combat disease mortality in inner cities by reimagining the corner store as a one-stop shop for nutritious yet affordable food, free exercise training/activities, media/health literacy education, and art programs. Situated in a predominantly Black and low-income neighborhood, The J.U.I.C.E. Project provides free and on-site programming that blends media/health literacy education with physical exercise and art for social change. They empower youth to make healthy lifestyle choices by helping them understand how food, physical activity, and behaviors (e.g. heavy television, alcohol, and tobacco consumption) impact their physical and mental health.
Esra’a Al Shafei – Mideast Youth
Manama, Bahrain
The Bold Idea: Connect youth from the Middle East and North Africa online to promote human rights, religious freedom, tolerance, and free speech. Mideast Youth provides the only creative space for youth to freely express themselves, and exchange information, experiences, views, and opinions, visibly involving various minorities who have been persecuted, censored, and violently discriminated against for decades.
Dhruv Lakra – Mirakle Couriers
Mumbai, India
The Bold Idea: Create meaningful and sustainable employment opportunities for low-income deaf adults in India, thereby increasing their standard of living and making them economically independent. Mirakle Couriers is a full-service courier company that offers delivery and tracking services to clients in Mumbai. All delivery and back office functions will be performed by deaf employees. In addition to providing job training, Mirakle Couriers provides life skills training for their employees including personal financial management.
Adam Stofsky – New Media Advocacy Project
New York, New York
The Bold Idea: Empower defenders of human rights and social justice by integrating video and internet social networking into their advocacy strategy, enabling them win their legal cases and organize communities. New Media Advocacy Project will pioneer strategies for using video in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities. It will use social networking to give advocates an unprecedented connection to their client communities, allowing them to locate the best witnesses and gather evidence.
June 03, 2009
The crowd can help French and Brazilian military search for #AirFrance #AF447 wreckage by digging through satellite photos in real time
Planes from numerous countries are scouring the Atlantic Ocean looking for signs of the Airbus 330 that recently disappeared en-route from Brazil to France. The search is relying upon a report of another passenger flight seeing something in the ocean, and has been limited by the inevitable setting of the sun. This got us thinking: there has got to be a more efficient way to conduct the search.
While the current on-the-ground search should, of course, be continued, these efforts could easily tap into the power of the crowd to put thousands of eyes to work -- both around the world, and around the clock. Utilizing real-time satellite images, people anywhere could zoom into specific regions of these photographs and scour them for signs of wreckage. Because everything is GPS-referenced, users could then tag any areas that show signs of the plane, and this information would be accessible to those conducting the search in the area of interest. This would increase efficiency in two ways: firstly, it would increase the overall number of people participating in the search for debris, and secondly, it would allow those with specific search and rescue expertise to focus in on regions that are noted of interest, rather than dispersing their focus throughout the entire Ocean. Adam Smith would be proud of this division of labor: it would allow hundreds of thousands of concerned citizens to focus on a specific task that contributes to the whole search process, while those with search-expertise can focus on specific areas with their equipment rather than disperse their expertise and their resources throughout the Atlantic.
What do you think? How else could search efforts like this tap into "The Crowd?" Leave your thoughts in our comments section!
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Alex Budak is a recent graduate of UCLA and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Georgetown University, with a focus on Technology and Social Entrepreneurship. He is joining The Extraordinaries this summer as a Research Fellow.
June 02, 2009
Robert Rosenthal from VolunteerMatch Interviews Jacob @ N2Y4
Thanks to Robert from VolunteerMatch, the leading online service for volunteerism, for interviewing Jacob at N2y4. And check out their new blog here.
June 01, 2009
Extraordinaries featured on Minnesota Public Radio! (Future Tense with Jon Gordon)
Listen to the program clip here:
http://download.publicradio.org/podcast/futuretense/mpr_20090601_futuretense.mp3
About the Program:
Produced
and hosted by Jon Gordon, a Minnesota Public Radio reporter based in
Silicon Valley, this daily "journal of the Digital Age" airs during
broadcasts of CBC's As It Happens and Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Edition.
Official program Web site
May 28, 2009
Citizen Alert: Crowd Sourced Public Health Workers
Over the past several weeks, many of us have been exposed (no pun intended) to the news surrounding the H1N1 (swine) flu outbreak. From the World Health Organization (WHO) declaring a Level 5 pandemic to schools closing down, it was a pretty nerve wracking series of events. In the world of public health, alerting the public to disease outbreaks, food/product recalls and general prevention information, is absolutely vital. With regular information on where the disease was spreading and more importantly, how to prevent from getting it, organizations such as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) did a great job in protecting our health. But just think, wouldn't the health information be able to spread faster if they enlisted the help of you and me as well?
With the development of crowd sourcing tools such as The Extraordinaries, I firmly believe that the public can pitch in and become honorary public health workers! For example, with the H1N1 outbreak there were various information resources ranging from maps of the outbreak in the US to which schools were closing down, however I think the most important information that would be helpful in spreading around would be how to prevent getting the flu. The Acting Surgeon General put up a short video on Youtube explaining a few simple ways to do this. Using the Extraordinaries, what if you could help the video get as many eyes as possible by automatically uploading the video to your Facebook account, or a link in your Facebook status - even a prompt to post the link to Twitter. In just a minute or two, you would be able to inform your circle of friends about an important piece of information from a credible source. Done. In that time you volunteered your time to become a public health advocate.
The same could be done in the situation with food recalls. Remember the salmonella/peanut butter fiasco? There could be a time when something similar happens again to a food item and you as a concerned citizen would be able to volunteer a few minutes of your time, when next you are at the grocery, to identify if there are still any remaining tainted items. Using the photo capabilities of your phone, there might be a way to tie in GPS integration so that certain stores can be identified (alerting the store managers). With these actions you'd be able to help prevent someone in your community from purchasing a product that may have slipped through the cracks and consequently becoming sick.
The possibilities start looking promising when you factor in the genuine desire for people to do good and help others stay well - especially if it doesn't take alot of time.
Disease prevention and food recall activists? Consider yourself one of them with the potential of The Extraordinaries.
May 27, 2009
The Extraordinaries, Frontline SMS Medic, and VozMob win NetSquared #N2Y4 Mobile Challenge!!!
Thanks so much to the NetSquared community for supporting us, and to the NetSquared staff for such an amazing event.
Much love.
May 19, 2009
How nonprofits are using the iPhone: Countdown to the Decision
Featured Today: Countdown to the Decision
With
roughly 135 days left until the International Olympic Committee makes
their city of choice announcement for the 2016 Olympics, candidate city
of Chicago and all it's die-hard fans can download the iPhone app: Countdown to the Decision
to show their support. Each day gives you a new fact about Chicago 2016
preparations, the city, and the history of Olympic and Paralympic
games. For more information on iPhone apps that support non-profit
organization, click the 'NonProfits & iPhone' category.
Who?
Chicago 2016
Where to find it?
http://www.chicago2016.org/
What is it?
"On
October 2, 2009, the International Olympic Committee will decide which
Iternational city will host the 2016 Games. Help show your support and
make Chicago's dream a reality by downloading "Countdown to the
Decision". "Countdown to the Decision" is a daily countdown to the
International Olympic Committee decision. It also includes a daily
Chicago image and Olympic Games fun fact. Flick left to view previous
Countown images and facts."
Cost: Free
Screenshots:
How YOU Could Use The Extraordinaries -- Post #11 -- Quest Bridge
Quest Bridge
What They Do
Located in Palo Alto, California, Quest Bridge's mission is to create a "singular place where exceptionally talented low-income students can navigate educational and life opportunities." They do this through recruiting, developing, and supporting outstanding low-income students beginning in high school, and helping them to be successful in college, graduate school, and post-college employment. Quest Bridge has partnered with a number of top universities, and works to ensure these motivated students go on to succeed in college and in life.
How Quest Bridge can "Be Extraordinary!"
Quest Bridge does a great job in helping outstanding students succeed despite significant life obstacles. But, what if they could provide even more support to these students in achieving their dreams? The Extraordinaries volunteers could reach out and help guide these students as they navigate the complicated world of college and job applications. Students could anonymously submit their personal statements for their college applications and receive feedback from Extraordinaries volunteers from their phones. Students with an interest in a specific career field could indicate so, and submit a series of questions about what that a certain job entails and how to break-in to that career. Extraordinaries volunteers with knowledge of these sectors could respond -- either through typing answers on their phone, or through actually calling these students directly -- and provide guidance and mentorship.
Help with college applications, and career advising are things many take for granted; but for motivated, low-income students, such as those in Quest Bridge, this type of help -- all of which could be done through a mobile phone -- has the chance to significantly impact the lives of this country's brightest talent.
Want to Learn More?
What Do You Think?
How could YOU use your phone to reach out to these bright, motivated students? Is there another way you could think of supporting Quest Bridge's mission through The Extraordinaries' application? We'd love to hear your thoughts.
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Alex Budak is a recent graduate of UCLA and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Public Policy at Georgetown University, with a focus on Technology and Social Entrepreneurship. He is joining The Extraordinaries this summer as a Research Fellow.
