The Extraordinaries

Here is an interesting post about Information age volunteering and crowdsourcing from a founder of The Extraordinaries I came across while searching for micro-volunteering

It's similar to what is being proposed at the Urban Survival Project but with a focus on letting people contribute from their smartphones. 

Visualisation of Funding

This is nice JISC (Joing Information Systems committee) funding visualisation using IBMs excellent ManyEyes

When I get time I want to drill into these numbers and projects and see if anyone is doing anything similar to us, work out if we are eligible for funding and if so how best to pitch our work!

Collaborative expert systems

It might be nice to have something along these lines in iVoluntr Each volunteer could then make their contributions (eg. helping someone structure a cv) last through a permanent collaborative expert system. Citizens could then consult before asking the site to match them up with a live-voluntr. 

Have you ever seen 20Q ? It can figure out almost any object you are thinking of in 20 - apparently unrelated - questions, by cleverly partitioning the solution space.

This would work in a similar way. eg. "is this about money?", "is this involving just 1 person?" etc. would bring them "need help with cv" Just ideas.. SHOULD be feasible

Scaling social network pricing

Nice analysis of how easy it is to mis-price your work in this emerging sector:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/reversing_the_enterprise_20_pricing_model.php

Forum Minutes - 21/1/2009

Minutes

• Chair - Nigel Desborough
  
• Ben appointed treasurer
  
• Budget for competition ~ £9k
  
• Some people prefer working away from the youth/find youth participation unproductive
• "Contact local police" link
• Local traffic wardens sometimes allow use of their vans, eg. giving lifts for youth projects
• Kickz project can incentivise through Millwall Tickets. Balham Rd new pitch
• Mel has approached an insurance company for £10k
• Police have a "Basic Command Unit" fund that can be used in the community
• The Payback scheme might be included somehow
• A web-designer Orville Philips could get involved (07966 163 342)
• Positive Futures is doing good stuff (my Aunty works with them in Lewisham)
• Hackney's guide to YOF funding in general a good portal
• Lewisham's Young Mayor

Actions

All

• Meet to finalise a design for the competition landing page / website ambitions

Mel

• Beg a free copy of photoshop from Adobe/colleges/unis/design companies
  
• Continue fund raising
• Foster and manage relationships with other similar stakeholders
• 
  

Ben

• Meet with Riz from Urban Survival Project for brainstorm
• Provide estimates for site architectures

mysociety.org = Wow

Man , the internet is big.. I've been trying to find every major player and attempt at what we are doing. Everytime I think I think I've seen everything I find another project that has been alive for years and is thriving with it's own collection of tools and users.

However, this is the closest that I have found to the ideas that interest me:

• mysociety.org
  

Some of the political sites they have created are amazing, allowing things like:

• GroupsNearYou helps you find local blogs/groups with 
  
• TheyWorkForYou gives you info on local MPs and officials, then you can WriteToThem
  
• FixMyStreet Report, view, or discuss local problems (eg. graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting)
  

For a more in-depth introduction, watch this lecture (45mins)

Existing Sites

There are a number of sites out there that do parts of what we want to do, but nothing that really ties them together.

Here are some older examples :

neighbournet

communitykit

my neighbourhoods

Here are some cool Facebook widgets:

meet your neighbours

friend plotter

We can use these to integrate peoples friends from facebook enabling 'weak-linked' friends to discover each other in the community and encourage involvement.

Corporate Style:

everyblock.com

This is by far the most informative community portal I have yet to see, but is clearly aimed at the commercial market. We should investigate getting local information feeds, but our focus is on community projects and engaging the youth.

SDBackyard.com

..this looks interesting. I like the idea of working 2-way with local papers (eg. let them add and publish content back into their papers)

http://streetsize.com/

..shouldn't take much effort to do this better!

Rizwan from the Urban Survival Project is keeping an online-volunteering list of links 

Most local websites focus on business searches, as they pay to be in search results. There are lots of good examples and we should get some good ideas from their features!

Please let us know if you know other sites ...