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Mobile co-creation for social change

Page history last edited by weaverluke 14 years, 10 months ago

Betavine director Steve Wolak gives an intro to Betavine and Social Exchange

 

Betavine.net—"the open community for mobile app developers"

 

  • Vodafone R&D project, but completely open (ie, not tied to Vodafone technologies or initiatives)
  • Currently supports mobile app developers 

 

Betavine Social Exchange

 

  • Co-creation space for meeting challenges in developing world with mobile solutions
  • Pilot is focused on South Africa, in partnership with Vodacom

 

Discussion:

 

  • Oxfam's Katrina: it's a great idea, because getting solutions actually *delivered* is always the challenge
  • Payment mechanisms are important: eg, OpCos could give contributors free airtime
  • Prestige is also a great motivating factor
  • Q: Will remote developers contribute their time when a local entrepreneur may make money out of the solution
  • A: Recognition is an important part of incentivising contributions: case studies, their name on the app etc
  • Q. How do we make these things interesting for developers?
  • Q. Is there the necessity for bringing attention of people with problems to fact that there could be a solution; A. Yes, says the room.
  • Showing the story throughout the project - transparency of progress - is really important
  • Kiva does this story telling really well
  • Unltd World—similar kind of idea that is worth looking at. http://unltdworld.com/
  • Q. How do problem owners find out about the service?
  • Q. Who decides which challenges are valid?
  • Conservatism around using new technologies is a challenge - case studies, told in an approachable way, could be key?
  • Organisation stakeholders often want to see a "known name" before they get involved
  • Q. How hard and fast are distinctions between roles? Eg, Oneworld has some dev resource but would love to find more, etc
  • Q. Do we need to categorise problems by theme etc? A. Hopefully can be addressed with best practice approaches to search and discovery
  • Incorporating Twitter-like/Twitter-based status updates, retweets etc
  • One-line summary would be a great social object that could enable people to easily understand what projects are about and also to tweet and re-tweet summary to their networks, with urls pointing back to the project page on Social Exchange
  • Living Labs is an existing intiative in South Africa that's in a related space
  • "PHP is the tool of choice" in Africa. Finding Java devs in Africa is tough. So big part of potential value of service could be in sourcing resources
  • Project scoping, in terms of target technologies, is a very important part of the process
  • Pitching process: 3 teams wanting to work on one project competing to win brief
  • Phased approach to development—wireframing, design iteration etc—is important
  • Q. Is the project truly open, or is it tied to Vodafone/Vodacom in some way? A. It's open!
  • Reference site: http://www.nabuur.com/ —"the Kiva of knowledge sharing"
  • Reference site: http://tipjoy.com/ —a way to donate small amounts to projects via Twitter, which latter also raises awareness for the project
  • Reference sites: http://elance.com, http://rentacoder.com
  • Funding sources

 

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