You don't need to know about them already - you can poke around and offer your impressions.

FamilyFarmed. What will motivate users to participate in the online community? Do they have a sense that community around them wants this type of tool or are they just following the latest fad in development? How do they plan to manage that community....online communities take work from staff--as you well know.

haney, how would you define "social impact"? for me, just about everything we do has social impact - some questions for discussion might be:

• impact for whom?

• how many people are impacted?
• why is it important to impact this group of people?
• to what degree are the people impacted actively involved in the process?

• what kind of impact?

• what is the net impact on people?
• what is the net impact on the environment?

... just thinking out loud. anyway, lucky you haney: they all look like great groups!

Thanks - these are very useful questions.

I think the "Social Impact" term is useful as a way to separate the feedback in this session from "Economic Sustainability" and "Technological Development" issues covered in other sessions.

Hm, so what exactly separates the "social impact" basket from the others, and what do these examples share in common?

These four groups may have been picked randomly. I think all 21 projects get feedback in all three aspects.

Here is some more information:

"Each project will be placed in a 'fishbowl' at three different tracks, focusing respectively on sustainability, technology use and social impact. There will be 5 consecutive panel sessions within each track. Each session will focus on 4-5 projects and involve three expert reviewers. The reviewer's job is to carefully examine each project's materials before NetSquared and then, at the session, subject the 4-5 projects to 3 minutes of 'tough love' -- which we define as meaningful questions and comments that do not shirk from talking about weaknesses (of course, if the reviewer doesn't see any weaknesses, s/he doesn't have to make them up in order to be 'tough'!)

Well... the brief's are very limited. However, I did review and peruse the Taking It Global information and their website.

Since they need to ramp up their techonolgy platform, marketing and media strategies and generate revenues to sustain their core staff my question to them would be how open are they to collaborating and creating joint ventures with other platforms?

They already offer their services to others in a consulting way and outsource their platform to other organizations. Have they looked at receiving consulting and using platforms that others are working on?

And, what type of support would be needed to bring together such a collaborative?

I looked through Family Farmed, Grassroots and now Maps 2.0.

For Maps 2.0, this resource came to mind: http://hisz.rsoe.hu/alertmap/ind ex.php which has a map and a dynamic corresponding list of disasters being reported.

I think it is great to get a community of practice going around mapping. I would prefer them take on a task for that community--such as a map of humanitarian efforts. We need to see who is doing water where for example, and be able to connect if we are working in proximity and be able to see gaps where they exist.

Even without that, this type of work can enable that to emerge, so I am very pleased with this project.

I hear how they are keeping costs low, but I don't see how they will be able to take care of themselves without more funding? There might be an argument for that as a volunteer community emerges and the tools are available, but they are not stating that case. It might help in getting funding to be clear that this only needs an initial boost to get started. If it needs more than that, how will it keep going?

I don't have any comment on grassroots.org yet.

For me "social impact" is measured by how many people involved actually change their behaviour from how they are doing things now. This is the big issue in my view - having people act differently, to change current habits in favour of the offerings these organisations have.

So the question becomes, "how are these organisations going to convince people to change their current ways, and sustainably?"

So another question becomes, What capacity needs to be in place to support and engage on-line users in off-line activities?

If a network of partners came together to support on-line users in off-line activities who would you like to see at the table?

John Allen wrote:

For me "social impact" is measured by how many people involved actually change their behaviour from how they are doing things now. This is the big issue in my view - having people act differently, to change current habits in favour of the offerings these organisations have.

I like that. Thanks! Perhaps its a two-way arrow in some cases: one group changes their behavior to enable another group to do more of some things they are already doing, or trying to do?

Julie Caldwell said:

Well... the brief's are very limited. However, I did review and peruse the Taking It Global information and their website.

Since they need to ramp up their techonolgy platform, marketing and media strategies and generate revenues to sustain their core staff my question to them would be how open are they to collaborating and creating joint ventures with other platforms?

They already offer their services to others in a consulting way and outsource their platform to other organizations. Have they looked at receiving consulting and using platforms that others are working on?

And, what type of support would be needed to bring together such a collaborative?

great questions

Thanks so much for your contribution! Please add any additional ideas you can think of.

I'll be offline until Monday afternoon....

I have been using TIG taking it Global for a while know and i think it is a good platform for us youth to use. the issue is promoting it Locally to get people involved.

I cant wait to hear how TIG is going to evolve to.

In each of these "missions," there is a real disconnect between intermediary and ultimate outcomes necessary to help us understand the "social impact" better from their "theory of change." For each group we could easily ask, "So what," or "What if?" If they reach their mission as they've defined it, how will the world be a different, better place? I've taken a stab at intuiting some outcomes based on the missions as excerpted from above.

FamilyFarmed - Re-establish consumer "connections with their food, community, and the land."

• Encourage healthier food purchasing habits
• Change consumer behavior (movement away from starchy, fatty, sugary snack foods...?)
• Enhance the local multiplier effect

Grassroots - Empower nonprofit organizations.

• Enable groups to grow their member base
• Enable groups to raise money online
• Develop technical capacity of NPOs
• Etc etc

Maps 2.0 - Enable nonprofit and humanitarian organizations to share best practices in geographic information systems (GIS) and digital mapping tools.

• More later

Taking IT Global - Inspire youth to create a better world.

• More later

I'm posting some thoughts over in my personal news - please join in.

edited to add "Thank you all for helping me think this through!"

On social impact...the comments have focused on + changes: What will be improved, increased, etc.

Something else to keep in mind is the net social impact based on potential negative impacts. For every plus, is there a minus? What if helping one group hurts another? It is sometimes uncomfortable to think about, but every social entrepreneur should take an honest look at this question of potential negative impacts and address it.

It's also important to find a common denominator when evaluating social impact, which is of course very hard! Which impacts do you measure? How do you measure them? Can the social impact be translated into quantitative amounts that can be compared across organizations? This is not to say everything can be quantified, but it should be attempted especially if comparisons, investments or awards are being made based on social impact.

Finally, how do you separate what would have happened anyway without the intervention of the organization? How do you know that the social impact is yours - ie, a direct result of your work?

(Note: Learned some of these things from doing social impact analysis when we participated in the Social and Environmental Technology Challenge and won Best Social Return on Investment Analysis; SVT Consulting was the main competition sponsor and founder Sara Olsen was very helpful and knowledgeable.)

yeah, great point. there is a certain glossy-eyed optimism that pervades many of the discussions here - challenges tend to come more along the lines of technological barriers (ie how will you deal with security?) rather than a larger ontology of relationships within which any enterprise thrives (or dies). Its the idea of direct and indirect impacts, and sorting them out into some kind of theory of change (intermediate and ultimate outcomes) seems like a critical facet of the discussion here that is a little under-explored.