Skip to content

omidyar.net

Sections
Personal tools
Help
Help index
Help on this page
RSS feeds are no longer available.

UCSC's CMPS80J Technology Targeted at Social Issues: UCSC's CMPS80J Technology Targeted at Social Issues

Subsections
Actions

UCSC's CMPS80J Technology Targeted at Social Issues

These proposals are part of the coursework for a university class, CMPS80J at UC Santa Cruz. The professor provided funding of $5,000 for the best team project to spend the summer pursuing it further. In addition to project proposals, the class made heavy use of Omidyar.net for discussion of class topics.

Based on the feedback from the o.net community, the class was selected for a "Community Favorites" award by the Community Management Team. These awards reward and encourage groups that use omidyar.net for collaboration. This award amounts to $5,000, and the professor has elected to use the award and the members of o.net to provide a second team with the opportunity to pursue their project over the summer.

Finalist teams were selected based on a combination of factors: Quality of written proposal, quality of in class presentation, feasibility of actually accomplishing the project, desire to continue, and popularity on o.net.

A panel of judges has already selected the first winning team based on in person presentations on Tue June 12, 2007.

The omidyar.net community is now being invited to choose which additional team will continue. The selection criteria is "maximum impact". Of course there are higher risks with some projects, also higher rewards. There are some teams that want to go forward, and some that are so-so on their idea. There are some teams which don't quite have their story straight, but its easy to see that given a summer of funding to work it out they would, and they'd be great. Your job is to tease this apart, and select the team which will put the funding to best use.

To help you with the selection task, you have access to the students project proposals, as well as discussion boards to ask additional questions. The students were asked to add an additional section to their proposal outlining how they would use the $5000. New discussions were created for the voting process since the old discussion had hundreds of posts from during the class. Finally there is a meta-discussion for community members to discuss the tradeoffs between projects, as well as try to convince each other what the proper selection criteria should be.

There are 5 finalists, each community member gets 3 votes.

Link to meta discussion comparing the projects:

http://www.omidyar.net/group/cmp s80j/news/67/

Link to VOTING

http://www.omidyar.net/group/cmp s80j/poll/3/

Finalists Projects (now being voted on by community members)

The goal of EZ-Ride is to create a carpool system for UCSC students to be picked up at convenient locations in Santa Cruz. The system works by having students with on campus parking passes fill their cars with carpoolers and then receive priority parking in the North Remote parking lot.

We are going to team up with various Community Colleges and Penitentiary's throughout California to offer inmates the opportunity to take college courses online while they work towards obtaining an AA degree. We will set up a student loan system for the inmates in order for them to pay their college tuition. The inmates will then be responsible for paying this debt back after their sentences are up and have found a full time job. This way many inmates will have a college education by the time they are released from jail.

We envision a planned community where retail, commercial, and residential spaces can coexist in an environmentally-friendly and sustainable manner. This mixed-use development will consist of condominiums, retail/commercial and office space, and will be located close to an urban area. Using the newest "green building" techniques, this development will stand as the vanguard to a new movement in both commercial building practices and urban planning and development.

Provide a medium for students, in good standing, who attend public universities in Mexico to borrow money from people in developed countries in order to finance their education.

We are planning to send low-cost, efficient water filters to small communities in Africa (and hope to go international in the future). Our goal is that the whole community will eventually have clean water. This would lower the large amount of deaths caused by water-borne diseases and deaths of HIV/AIDS victims who need clean water for their weak immune systems.

Winner from in-class presentations

We will take waste material (oil and grease) from the kitchens of the dining halls, restaurants and cafes around campus for a lower price than the current vendors and on top of that convert the "waste" into BioDiesel for use in the dining facilities diesel powered fleet thus eliminating needless costs to the university. Together these will effectively save money and allow the purchase of more expensive and healthier foods in the dining facilities as well as tackling several environmental challenges.

Page name: UCSC's CMPS80J Technology Targeted at Social Issues
Last editor: Haney Armstrong (CCAL30) (1784)
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2007 13:17:03 PDT
Tags:  comment proposal ucsc
Feedback score: 21

edit   revisions   backlinks   top top  
top back to top of page