Collaboration in action
Welcome! Join Daniel Harris and Tammy Lea Meyer as we continue to clarify the proposal being developed with a group of collaborators for the Global Challenges Foundation. The purpose of the prize, ‘A New Shape: Remodelling Global Cooperation’ is to ‘design a governance model able to effectively address the most pressing threats and risks to humanity.’
We see that there are many, many people out there that are working hard to create solutions for the challenges we face, and we would like to help to connect them, technologically, and in practice. Our proposal is to do two things: create a user-centric dashboard app that interfaces multiple services simultaneously, and support real-time collaboration through documenting collaborators co-designing how they cooperate and leverage their projects.
Building an app that connects into multiple services via their APIs means that we have an opportunity to connect the work we are doing in practice.
One of the spaces we feel would really benefit and support global governance practices would be in connecting democracy services like Avaaz, Change.org, LeadNow, 350.org, and OpenMedia. Imagine: as a user, you would have an app that signs you into any of the democracy projects you are participating with, and with a click of a button register your opinion to all these services simultaneously.
You can also find out what people are thinking about the issues you care about by asking the app questions about the results that it has aggregated from your collection of subscribed democracy services. In other words, you would be able to visualize the data generated by these organizations in order to get a broader sense of people’s opinions on issues you care about. This would be an incredible tool for journalists and politicians to understand their subjects.
If you see the value in supporting collaboration directly, we invite you to join us and sign on to to our proposal. Feel free to drop a line in the comments here or to Daniel Harris so we can provide access to the documents we’re working on. Thanks for reading and watching!
On a personal note, we think supporting cooperation and collaboration is one of the most important things that we can do with each other right now. A ‘new shape’, for us, means working together, and leveraging our work in ways that benefit all of us. Of course it’s ironic that this proposal is a competition; and the new shape we are supporting is the antithesis of that. It’s our hope that through demonstrating the power of cooperation, we can support the transition to a more fair, equitable, transparent, accountable commons.
The style of this article is open source: if stolen, built upon, and further developed, awesome. Let your creativity run wild, and have fun with it!
