1. Good Crowds is ready. We’re adding projects right now and are waiting for our bank accounts / trust registration to complete. Good Crowds will also launch in January with about 15 odd projects that will be put up for [read more ...]]]> Its been long since I last posted. But have some updates that I’d like to share

1. Good Crowds is ready. We’re adding projects right now and are waiting for our bank accounts / trust registration to complete. Good Crowds will also launch in January with about 15 odd projects that will be put up for funding. We’re looking for projects that we can fund in disciplines such as technology, journalism, arts, demoracy, public interest litigation, large innovation programs. Would love to have you writing in with your project ideas that we can put up for funding.

2. Good News has kicked off: this is the umbrella under which we will be putting up projects in journalism that have a demonstrable social impact. Please read http://www.scribd.com/doc/24800527/Good-News-Crowdfunded-Journalism for more details and suggest story ideas that you or people you know would like to put up for funding.

Ben Rattray of Change.org @ Big Omaha 2009 from Big Omaha on Vimeo.

I found some of the analysis to [read more ...]]]> The Feast has this presentation on slideshare that talks about what is wrong in a set of 10 industries ranging from education, journalism, food etc and then gives 1 example of a social innovation intervention within that industry that seems to be working. Principles are derived from these examples.

I found some of the analysis to be only half right, but still a good reference point.

1. There is a serious lack of good journalism these days. Newspapers are going out of business, cutting down [read more ...]]]> Spot.Us (www.spot.us) is a community funded reporting platform set up in the Bay Area by David Cohn with the help of a seed grant from the Knight Foundation. I think its a phenomenal idea for two reasons

1. There is a serious lack of good journalism these days. Newspapers are going out of business, cutting down on their journalist staff, travel etc. Similarly, the pressure to increase TRPs and enhanced competition have forced TV channels to sensationalize their content. Catering to the lowest common denominator. Even a campaign such as Jaago Re that encouraged people into voting more cannot run without useful, deep information on who to vote for. It is a widely accepted fact that the funds required to produce deep stories that provide the context & background are getting scarcer. This is a very scary thought – I did a very very quick scan on the homepage of Times Of India today (www.timesofindia.com) – the mix between serious stories and fluff / semi-porn is roughly 60 – 40. What is more disappointing though is that the longest story doesnt have enough depth.

This paucity of journalism, some claim, is countered by the rising trend of community or citizen journalism. My belief is that while community journalism is good in certain situations – its not effective at uncovering deep stories.

There is a huge need for good journalism which (being a public good) is deep and neutral. And funding for this will not be coming from the traditional media channels or from foundations or the government (though government funded journalism is great – NPR & BBC are great examples).

Which makes Spot.Us a winner. Freelance journalists who are experienced in certain beats can propose stories they want to cover and cite an amount that they’d need to raise to cover the story.  And citizens can donate money towards stories that matter to them. Completely liberating – and aligned to market needs !

And Spot.Us has done well – they’ve managed to fund a significant number of stories – and some of the amounts raised have been substantial: USD 4,000 for a beat covering the city hall.

2. Its Open Source: In my last post on Good Bytes, I’d talked about a crowdfunding project that we’d be launching soon – to fund journalism and legal action against corrupt people in power. I was reaching out to different people with expertise in creating such platforms and got pointed to Github (www.github.com) which is a website that has the source code for many opensource projects. And the source code for Spot.Us was there !!! This is the blog post on which I found the source code link posted there by David himself and here is what we had to write:

“Just about every week I get an inquiry from someone to start their own version of Spot.Us. From up North (Canada) to down South (Brazil) and all the way over to Australia. I’ve gotten requests on how Spot.Us can expand to new regions. So here it is….

The code for spot.us is 100% open source.
(Technically I haven’t slapped an OS license on it. But I will.. promise. And in the meantime, this is a poor man’s version of it: “you can use the code.”)

I wanted to wait until I had some more features to do this post. And now – those features are ready. Since we are also in the Chronicle today – I figure it is a good time to give away any secret sauce we might have.

What this means:

• We have absorbed 90-95% of the cost to start your own community funded reporting site.
• It can be nonprofit or for-profit. You could end up making LOTS of money if it works for you! …. just don’t forget to hire me
  
• I’ll help. If somebody is very serious about this – I will get on the phone or even meet in person to talk about how you can do this.”

And this felt like a prayer answered ! Never have I felt the amazing thing that is opensource software so strongly till now – not while using wordpress or firefox. Here’s a guy who’s running a non-profit – very early stages and they have their own set of issues: raising funds to support a new innovation, ironing out the 100s of process issues that he must be facing and he is giving away the software for free and also volunteering his time to help other projects.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Which brings me to what Good Bytes will create. I believe that there is a lot of value in such crowdfunding platforms within India – wherein the government does not fund a lot of innovation in journalism, arts & culture or social impact engineering etc.

The first platform we will create (built around the Spot.Us code as far as possible with our own improvements and customizations) will be a platform that will enable Indians (in India and abroad) to crowdfund journalism that covers deep and pressing matters. These could be investigative stories exploring corruption, or educational stories exploring how climate change is proceeding in India and what can be done by us, or awareness building stories exploring how some sports such as archery dont get their due in terms of governemnt or private funding or these could also be stories that are inspiring.

I’ve been talking to technology folks trying to round up a few volunteers who’d get involved in this platform. And will formally start raising funding and putting together a full time team in place soon.

Would appreciate if you can point me to some smart Ruby On Rails developers / architects since Spot.Us is developed on that.

Cheers

About Inspiring Stories

Inspiring Stories is a MetaGood project (www.metagood.org) which seeks to unearth stories of inspiring individuals and groups who are doing work that is making a difference and enabling positive changes in our society. These stories would be captured through interviews, photo & video documentaries and would be disseminated over the MetaGood website [read more ...]]]>

About Inspiring Stories

Inspiring Stories is a MetaGood project (www.metagood.org) which seeks to unearth stories of inspiring individuals and groups who are doing work that is making a difference and enabling positive changes in our society. These stories would be captured through interviews, photo & video documentaries and would be disseminated over the MetaGood website & spin-off books.

Themes For Inspiring Stories

Inspiring Stories will run stories aligned to a few themes because this will allow us to have depth and focus and will also enable us to create spin-offs such as theme specific books that will be released under Creative Commons licensing at cost only pricing.

The 7 themes that Inspiring Stories will run (sequentially) are:

1. Inspiring Career Transitions: Stories of people who’ve made significant career shifts to follow their true calling often with leaps of faith, assuming financial risk etc. Examples in which the second career has a positive social impact will be STRONGLY preferred.
2. Social Entrepreneurs / Innovators: Social innovation has seen considerable growth over the last few years. There are a varied set of entities involved in social innovation investors (Acumen Fund), to innovation firms, to individuals. There are extremely rich models of how social innovation can happen. These stories will document social innovators and entrepreneurs doing their work in India.
3. Stories Of Sustainable Business: The way capitalism is structured right now is not sustainable from an ecological perspective. Earth is a closed system and cannot be mined endlessly for resources without significant ecological impact (by way of dwindling resources or by impacts such as climate change). The problem is that we’re tightly hooked to this brand of capitalism – any fall in growth leads to dramatic financial repercussions with rising unemployment. A more sustainable model of capitalism is needed and there are a few examples that exist. These stories will document these individuals & organizations who are experimenting with “Sustainable Capitalism”: it could be a person who heads a PE firm that invests only in responsible business or a small business owner who has tightly embedded Cradle to Cradle thinking in all her business processes.
4. Inspiring People In The Government: In India, adjectives normally associated with our government are inefficient, corrupt, incapable, regressive, brutal, inept, short-sighted etc. And to a very large extent this reputation is deserved. However, there are people within the government (bureaucrats / police officers / legal folks / civil servants etc) who are islands of progressiveness and capability. Telling these stories is important to enhance citizen trust and hope in our governmental machinery and to increase citizen engagement.
5. Stories Of Inspiring Underprivileged: There are a lot of people who live in financially adverse situations and yet do extremely inspiring work – in both full time and part-time capacities. These stories are especially important because they show how people can make a difference with extremely limited means. Examples could be a village lady who’s spearheading a campaign to prevent child marriage in her village.
6. Inspiring Students: Across India, there are hundreds of students (in schools and colleges) who are contributing towards a better world. These students participate towards creating a better world in multiple ways: volunteering with or starting non-profits, organizing positive activism, starting enterprises that generate employment, creating new products in their research labs or creating works of art, theater that have the potential for social impact. These stories will document the lives of such students and will try and inspire many more students into similar activity.
7. Inspire Social Change Movements: Movements such as the Slow Food Movement, Slow Money are bringing together individuals to enable positive change.  These stories will explore such movements in detail , enabling them to attract attention, resources and thus scaling up.

Theme & Story Formats

Each of the themes will run for 20 stories. Theme 1 will start first and once we’re through with 20 stories in it, we’d move to Theme 2 and so on.

Each of the stories within these themes will comprise of a mix of text and pictures. The idea would be to provide sufficient context & detail within each of the stories and thus the word range would be (strictly) between 3,000 & 4,000 words with 5–7 associated images.

Licensing

These stories would be put up on the MetaGood website and also other formats such as books for each theme. We’d be releasing the stories under a Creative Commons license enabling non-commercial reuse of the stories by other entities.

Freelance Writing Project

MetaGood is inviting experienced freelance writers (preferably magazine writers) to contribute stories to this project.

Writers would need to propose story ideas (consisting of details of the individual and a short note on why a story about them would be good). For each story idea that gets accepted, MetaGood would commission the writer and would pay Rs 10,000 upon the satisfactory completion of the story. We would also be receiving story ideas from other sources and will commission writers to write these stories.

We can also discuss commissioning multiple stories upon the satisfactory completion of the first story.

In such a project, it’s extremely important that the writers feel for the cause and hence we’d have conversations on the phone to gauge alignment before starting out with the assignment.

Next Steps

If you’re a writer and want to write some of these stories, please get in touch with Nirat Bhatnagar either on email (nirat@metagood.org ) or phone (+91 98996.92572) and:

• Please send in your CV that highlights your writing experience (professionally and personally)
• Please also include either links or attachments of your past professional writing / blog writing.
• In this mail, please suggest a definite story idea(s) on Theme 1 – citing specific people you know of who fit the bill. You may choose to withhold the name / contact information of the person if you wish to retain details of your story source. This is not mandatory – you may choose to write on one of the story ideas present in the MetaGood idea bank.

This project will be staffed with full time “Inspiring Storytellers” : who’d be responsible for identifying such inspiring people, interviewing them, taking pictures / videos and then writing stories about them. This team would be selected extremely [read more ...]]]> The first project at MetaGood will be a website with regular stories on people who are doing inspiring work.

This project will be staffed with full time “Inspiring Storytellers” : who’d be responsible for identifying such inspiring people, interviewing them, taking pictures / videos and then writing stories about them. This team would be selected extremely carefully since such initiatives tend to succeed only if the person feels passionately about this cause. Initially the team would be based in NCR but soon would expand to cover Mumbai and Bangalore. Volunteers would also be tapped to contribute stories – with expenses towards transcription & travel borne by MetaGood.

We’ve received enthusiastic response to the job description for “Inspiring Storytellers” that was circulated on different egroups – with extremely talented people writing in to know more about the role.

We’re in the middle of these discussions with them and hope to finalize the first Inspiring Storyteller soon.

—————–

The Job Description that was circulated is below:

MetaGood: Inspiring Storyteller

If you’re an idealist and are looking for an opportunity to make a

difference by discovering and telling stories of inspiring people who

are doing their bit and making a difference in this world, this might

be of great interest to you.

The Organization

MetaGood ( www.metagood.org ) is a social

innovation incubator founded by IIT / IIM alumni. MetaGood will catalyze

social innovation projects through a 5 step process that will involve

inspiring people into contributing towards these social innovation

projects, enabling different types of people to come together to form

teams and helping them with financial, marketing and technology

resources needed for the social innovation project.

The Role

To make this happen the inspiration part is very essential and thus, we’re

looking for a talented and idealistic writer who will discover

examples of inspiring individuals and organizations that exist all

around us and then write about them on the MetaGood website.

Your stories could be about how a young engineer is starting up an

organization to engage youth in policy making or a designer who’s

trying to save trees through a line of clothes that get people to “Use

Less”. Or it could be about the village lady who’s trying really hard

to tackle the stigma associated with HIV in her village.

You’d have considerable freedom in deciding which stories to pursue as

long as they are aligned with the overall direction of MetaGood.

To understand this better, please take a look at the

slideshare presentation present on the website

www.metagood.org .

There would also be complete freedom to experiment with the

storytelling format: the written word, photo documentaries, podcasts

etc.

Experience & Skills

•     A wholistic world view, idealism (not naiveté) and storytelling talent.

•     At least some experience in a professional setting. This could be in

an NGO, newspaper, magazine or advertising firm etc. Ideally, you

should have 3+ years of experience.

•     A degree from a leading college or university; preferably one that

is progressive and encourages independent thought.

•     Impeccable writing & oral communication skills.

•     Ability to think critically and understand the larger picture.

•     Leadership and the ability to deal with ambiguity.

•     Creativity not only in the final output but also in the process

•     Experience in handling digital cameras, camcorders and field audio   recorders.

•     Comfort in using video / audio editing tools such as Audacity /

Final Cut Pro etc. This is strong preferred but not required.

Location

Delhi or Gurgaon with occasional out-of-station travel.

Compensation

Would be at par with similar roles at leading national dailies.

In case this is of interest, please contact Nirat Bhatnagar at

nirat@metagood.org or +91 98996.92572

Am launching MetaGood – an initiative to document inspiring individuals and social innovators along with their projects. MetaGood will spawn multiple initiatives such as speaker series, catalyze social innovation projects, act as an infomediary between volunteers and organizations who need their skills and time.

More details can be found [read more ...]]]> Hi All,

Am launching MetaGood – an initiative to document inspiring individuals and social innovators along with their projects. MetaGood will spawn multiple initiatives such as speaker series, catalyze social innovation projects, act as an infomediary between volunteers and organizations who need their skills and time.

More details can be found on the presentation. Please write to me at nirat@metagood.org if this strikes a chord.