Caravan Studios: How Did We Get Here

CARAVAN STUDIOS

John Cleese said, and I’m paraphrasing:

Creativity happens when you’ve been resting your

mind against a problem for a long time.

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/12/john-cleese-on-creativity-1991/

Which is another way of saying:

First, some background.

1.

There are issues.

http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html

And there are problems.

http://philanthropy.blogspot.com/2011/09/problems-and-solutions-difficulties-and.html

We can’t confuse the two.

Technology can illuminate issues.

http://ilovemountains.org/

Technology can identify problems.

http://seeclickfix.com/kansas_city

Technology can prompt needed actions.

http://www.technologyreview.com/communications/35097/?p1=A1

2.

Caterina Fake in How Augmented Reality Might Really Work

We have a lot of tools that help with the expansive bit.

And that forced us to get good at this bit.

https://delicious.com/ext337

Now, we need to get good at making the web smaller.

At making the web local.

At making the web configurable.

At making the web fit in our pocket.

3.

And that means we need to stop thinking about the web.

So, where does that leave us?

We’ve gotten good at a combination of big and precise.

We need to get better at the platform.

At letting people use the platform.

And we need to get better

at making the web smaller.

Now we’re getting to Caravan Studios.

We want to make the web smaller.

We want you to forget about the web.

How?

By providing solutions for communities.

The Public Good App House.

How can we create an environment in which NGOs can inform the development of apps?

And benefit from them?

We are going to define a repeatable methodology to organize input from the sector.

We will use that information to get apps from three main places.1. Technology activists.

2. Community-identified and funded development.

3. Corporate donations.

1. Technology activists.

• Partner with Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America, Campus Party and other event organizers.

• Hold our own hackathons • In partnership with a corporation• In partnership with an NGO

• Use challenges to incent development in certain categories.

2. Community-identified and funded development.

3. Corporate donations

• License apps that have been created for social good.• Development of community-identified products.• Provide input from the field to CSR efforts.

There are two big areas to tackle with regard to scale.• Broad-based NGO input.• Engineering oversight and quality control.

We also need to closely monitor sustainability.• Distribution in the TechSoup Global marketplace.• Cost of maintaining and enhancing a variety of code.• Cost of managing community donations and input.• Define adoption as more than a download.

Which is another way of saying:

Everything in this deck is already wrong.

Caravan Studios is a division of TechSoup Global, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization.

We hope you will connect with us at:

@caravanstudios http://caravanstudios.tumblr.com

and

@techsouphttp://www.techsoupglobal.org